This is such an incredible video! I had no idea that older photography isn't just nostalgic for people because it's it's old, but because it was designed to give a fantastical version of what life looks like. Keep up the great work, man!

I’ve worked in color engineering off and on for something like 20 years, and your approach is shocking to me in its simplicity and how it gets to the point I’m a way I never considered.

Great video. I think the key aspect of this premise that was left out is nostalgia. What I find interesting as an old millennial is that photographs from my childhood and teens that were on film look beautiful to me now because of the softness and saturation but I don’t recall them looking beautiful to me then. For instance, I have a motion blurred film photo of a roller coaster taken at dusk on film from around 1998. Now, I think it’s beautiful and looks like art. But back then it would have been considered a bad photo. This is evidenced by where I found it years later, in a paper pack of discards, while all of the clear, mundane, family photos were in a pack of “good photos”.  I had an artistic eye as a teen, just as I do now but my perception has shifted. Another example is that Gen Z now love digital cameras from the early 2000s. That’s what their childhood photos were taken on. It’s all part of the nostalgia cycle.

Generally speaking, humanity prefers the beautiful lies rather than the harsh truth, and it's interesting to see that ring true from a film perspective. Great video!

You've done very well on your research of the history of photographic colour rendition. I was a commercial photographer in the 1970s and preferred Agfa colour film precisely because they had a natural colour rendition where Kodak rendered colour according to what their research had established as the preference of a particular market.

But I think you go wrong when you say that this means we don't make "good pictures" anymore. I follow your logic as far as the standard rendering of most cameras go, but that ignores how easy it is these days to change that rendering to almost anything you like. Maybe most people don't do that, but unlike with film, that's not because they couldn't do it if they wanted to but because they don't know or can't be bothered.

A great example of automation making us less able - not because automation is bad per se but because it makes humans lazy.

As someone who loves art, science, philosophy and metaphysics, this video is a great resource for discussing “realness” with people

I'm gonna push back here, because I don't quite buy the premise that the way we remember colors is objective or universal. For example, the first photograph at 8:43 looks like how I remember things, while the next one (with color correction applied) looks like a 40-year-old memory that I couldn't have had because I wasn't born yet. It looks old, distant, unfamiliar. This makes me wonder if the ways we remember things is, at least partially, shaped by our technology in a sort of feedback loop - perhaps people queried for that study were also influenced by technology of the time.

You are quite correct about the difference between accurate and preferred colors, but you have overblown the current situation. Digital cameras have had built in preferred rendition for a long time now, even to the point of offering different picture "styles" preferred for different images such as portraits or landscapes. These are even in my ten year old Canon DSLR. In the past, a more limited range of choices was available by picking a brand of film.
The big step in making digital camera rendition more film like was the inclusion of an S-curve in the processing, to mimic slide film or the negative/print process, which is subjectively preferred. The earliest digital cameras had a TV camera "gamma" curve only, a tone reproduction which attempts to reproduce the scene tone, and was a major cause of the non-preferred reproduction you point out. Today, the gamma correction is just one aspect of the tone reproduction process, still needed to complement the display gamma, but it is modified at least by an S-curve to emulate the film tone transfer that is much preferred by viewers.

The renditions avaialble in a particular digital camera may not replicate any particular film type, but they are definitely chosen for preferred reproduction as determined by the maker, not for colorimetric reproduction. That said,  none of the renditions available may be what you as a particular photographer are looking for, and custom LUTs can be useful if you are looking for something that matches the colors in old films, however, I suspect we are not even looking for accurate replication of the reproduction in film, but for our memory of it.

Well - I think you just explained beautifully why I like looking at photos taken with Fujifilm cameras and why people I work for go crazy for stuff I shoot in Provia

What a magnificent video. Thank you so much.

Absolutely one of the most important photography related video on youtube. So much so I think will forward it to my students for that matter. Thanks for your work!

This video is so good! I’m a photographer and for the past year I’ve been building a colour darkroom because my city doesn’t have any. I work at a film lab and shoot on film, but I find I’m only satisfied with my work when it’s printed in the darkroom. The colours and richness and texture are just something else. It makes me feel like a crazy person sometimes because most other people I know are fine with the scans they get from the lab’s scanners. But even with those scanners I feel like there’s something wrong with the look. Because that’s still a digital interpretation of the images.

I print because I’d prefer to start from scratch and adjust the colours to suit my memory of the scene, which is often guided by emotion. And I feel like any other method of achieving colour just doesn’t do it the same. This video has influenced my perspective on the topic, thank you!

Most interesting video I've watched in a long time

These are great points.
I would add to this the major problems that have arisen with mobile phone photography (since 90%+ of family photos are now taken on phones)-
Most phones have extremely wide angle cameras.
<30mm default focal length on phone cameras is also going to ruin a whole generation's family photos.
Subjects are diminished, surroundings take precedent, edges are distorted.
Our intention is to capture intimate family moments, not film a fish-eyed skate video.
This is, of course, indicative of our current culture- setting is more important than subject.

Prior to digital, most off-the-shelf film cameras were sold with a 50mm lens.
This is why family photos from the 80s and 90s look so artsy despite our parents being amateur photographers- framing was tight and intimate.

On top of this is the insane AI processing and artifacting that phone cameras now use, so that manufacturers can use cheaper sensors.
Have you seen the Samsung moon photo conspiracy?
I'd wager at least 10% of pixels in a mobile photo have no basis in what the sensor saw, and this will only get worse with time and the proliferation of AI image processing.

So refreshing on many different levels...using clear, straight forward thought and language. Great stuff...❤

Thank you for creating this! I think that’s why people gravitate toward the cinematic or film look so much—phones and most cameras are too “clinical.” The scenes don’t look better than we remember; they look exactly like we experienced them, and that’s why the magic is gone from most modern photography and video. Excellent video—you’re gifted 🙏🏾

That's really well put! I didn't know about those studies, but they help explain a lot of my perception of modern photography equipment. It's obvious that a film photograph isn't more realistic than a digital picture, but it usually looks more pleasant, more comforting! And that's one of the reasons I restarted shooting film a year ago. Thank you!

Fantastic well written video, very useful.  On a broader, philosophical level, i think it is pretty clear that human survival requires NOT seeing a full, completely accurate picture of the world. Anyone who thinks they lack any denial... is in denial.

Excellent video!!  (I always appreciate "smarties"!!)  Nice, simple, basic video with lots of information and lots to process.  I appreciate the simplicity you used in this talking head video.  Keep up the great work, and I will check out your other videos as time permits!

Something important in the difference between the view as seen and as seen in a photograph that was not mentioned: (most) people see the real world with two eyes, the photo is as seen with one eye. The photo loses most of the 3D info.

Some situations where I have particularly noticed this:

- photo'ing a garden, especially if it is mostly green; simply taking a photo from the position I normally see the garden just produces a flat green-ness,

- photo'ing an object that is an glass case; the photo is spoilt by reflections off the glass; seen "live" with two eyes it is easier to simply ignore the reflections.