Worst Photo Ever

It's a big claim, but I think this one is a pretty good contender. 

It's boring to look at - oh look! a bush! and water! - it's has far too much shadow and is black in places it should not be dark in. The sky isn't quite blown out, but neither is quite convincing. How much did the X-E4 and lens cost? Getting value for money then.

I should have taken the shot with my iPhone, which would have given me this.

 

It's not from the phone, but it is as close as I can get with Photos to that eerie iPhone sky and foreground clarity. Shadows is maxed out and Brilliance tweaked down a touch. It's a much better-looking shot, and probably bears a strong resemblance to what I actually saw, which was something like this...

The sky is slightly fuzzy, but that is what midday glare does to our eyes. The shadows under the bush are more realistic, but overdone in the trees in the background.

I would never have taken that photo with the OM10 and Kodak ISO 200, or if I had, I would have focused on the bush and water, and tried to keep the sky out of the frame. Keeping the dynamic range low was something else we did by instinct back in the day even though we didn't know it was called that.

But with a super-clever digital camera, for some reason, I expect to be able to point the lens at whatever mess is in front of it and have the camera sort it out. Wrong. The old rules still apply. When shooting JPEG. (1)

And if I do follow the old-school rules, any big-brand camera will produce a really nice JPEG.

My candidate for Worst Photo Ever is not such a one. Not only is it technically poor, and shot with no care at all, it's not very interesting to look at. Green, right?

There's a reason why hip street photographers don't take photographs of what's left of Epping Forest - in this case a little corner of Highams Park Lake. Trees have lots of shadows created by the leaves. All those leaves are the same colour, but some reflect the light and others bounce it around, depending on where the sun is. Trees do not have neat geometrical shapes, and make a poor background for someone in a red coat striding purposefully from the shadows on the left to the light on the right. As opposed to a staircase in the Barbican, say. Or a street scene with a nice even light and some not-too-deep shadows.

Anyway, the weather looks highly un-photogenic for the next few weeks, so I won't be taking the X-E4 anywhere soon. And I will not be taking another photograph of anything green or plant-like when I do.



(1) Why? Digital cameras can create RAW files and JPEGs. RAW files are a copy of the data from the sensor, and need to be processed to be at all pleasing, so processing the messy bits out is all one with processing the nice bits in. RAW requires a monthly subscription to Lightroom or Capture One, and either putting in a heap of time developing one's own presets to turn the dull RAW file into something worth looking at, or putting in a heap of time experimenting with other people's presets. 

JPEGs are the camera's attempt at doing all that processing for the user, using the photo-relevant camera settings and algorithms the camera engineers have devised. Here's the thing: Apple has way more engineers working on that sensor data-to-JPEG / HEIC conversion than Fuji, Sony, Panasonic, or any other mere camera maker will ever be able to afford, and the iPhone has a chip way more capable than a camera chip will ever be, so the resulting computational photography will produce far superior conversions of RAW-to-JPEG / HEIC than the camera makers ever will. (Given a reasonable amount of taste on behalf of the engineers and product manager.) The camera companies are still comparing their gear to top-end film cameras, and may be missing the part where we-the-customer will be comparing it with what the top-end phones do.