Two original sins when using a smartphone

Original link: https://blog.yitianshijie.net/2023/08/05/two-sins-of-smartphone-usage/

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One is to shoot videos with the mobile phone vertically, and the other is to use other tools to add filters to the photos after they are taken, and they do not hesitate to destroy the original photos. For example, because you like a certain filter effect of Instagram, you can take a screenshot and save it after adding the filter.

The second point reminds me of a story told by Glenn Gould’s producer Andrew Kazdin in “Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying” (1989). There are often repeated passages in Western classical piano music. For example, the beginning (presentation) of a sonata may be reproduced intact in the later reappearance… er…. If the pianist thinks that the performance of the two parts should be exactly the same, but he made a mistake during the recording, he can delete the “bad” part by cutting the tape, and copy and paste the good part. Note that we’re talking about the seventies before digital recording. Cutting is actually cutting the tape with scissors, and copying is really copying a new tape. This created a problem: the original master was multi-track (first generation), mixed and then recorded in two-channel stereo on another recorder (second generation). In order to complete the above work of stealing the day, it is necessary to copy the short “good” performance from the master tape, and then paste it to the “broken” place that was cut off. Theoretically, each copy of the tape could cause wear and tear or errors – one generation is not as good as the next. So the above process means that a small portion of the second generation is mixed into the first generation tape (master tape). To solve this problem, Kazdin did not do all the cutting work on the multi-track master tape, but just cut out the bad part and replaced it with a blank tape, and then copied out the two-channel stereo tape (second generation) , and then copy the correct section from the master tape (first generation) and paste it to the blank part of the second generation tape. In this way, the above-mentioned situation of “high-end goods mixed with impurities” will not occur-the entire tape is the second generation.

Kazdin also said that now with digital technology, you can copy as many generations as you want without loss. He passed away in 2011. He had never seen the prosperity of the mobile Internet. How could he know that relentlessly resourceful human beings would come up with a way to take screenshots after adding filters? “Perfection is the enemy of done” philosophy replaced?

(I know some filterists argue that there is no such thing as a “raw photo”. Photography is the art of light, not the same as manipulating light at the moment the shutter is pressed, and manipulating light after the fact is exactly how Gould works. But I think, whether the filter + screenshot is the result of Kazdin-style weighing and thinking, or following the popular new models of the season to choose the shortcut that is most convenient for you, can be described as a very important difference.)

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