The Limits of ‘Computational Photography’
My name is Will Yager, and I’m a software engineer. I was recently discussing laser etching with an engineer/font-designer friend of mine, and I wanted to show him a picture of some really good laser etching on a particular piece of optical equipment.
No problem, I figured – I would just snap a quick picture on my phone and send him a text. Unfortunately, I ran into an unexpected problem; my phone simply could not manage to take a picture of the text. This article is a bit of a rant spurred by this annoyance, so please forgive any hand-waving and epistemic sloppiness I’m engaging in so that I can pound this out before I stop being annoyed.
Every time I tried to take a picture of the engraved text, the picture on my phone looked terrible! It looked like someone had sloppily drawn the text with a paint marker. What was going on? Was my vision somehow faulty, failing to see the rough edges and sloppy linework that my iPhone seemed to be picking up?
No, in fact – when I took the same picture using a “real” camera, it looked exactly as I expected! Read More…
