Are Apple Live Photos the future of photography? Discuss

[steveash]

Cos I didn't think food moved much.

Joking aside, I can imagine in a few months time an iPhone owner complaining to their wedding photographer that their pictures don't even move and are therefore rubbish... Are some areas of photography (where the screen is the final method of display) going to adopt Apple's new file format, with the feature added to high-end cameras, or is it a cheap trick that will soon disappear (I'm looking at you cinemagraph)?

 

[Designer Dale]

Nope. Requires an iPhone 6s or other device with 3D Touch built in for viewing. I believe this is basically an animated GIF generated in the device from a 1.5 second sequence of photos. Probable exists as the original pic plus an animated GIF activated by extended touch. Cook said the space used was minimal so that's all I can think of. Might be able to make it clickable, but it's in Apple's "Walled Garden" at the moment. Cool feature for mobil devices, though, and will be a selling point for the new generations of devices. Until the Samsung Shiver is introduced...

Dale

 

[Edge100]

This is the future of photography:

Well, my photography, anyway.

Cos I didn't think food moved much.

Joking aside, I can imagine in a few months time an iPhone owner complaining to their wedding photographer that their pictures don't even move and are therefore rubbish... Are some areas of photography (where the screen is the final method of display) going to adopt Apple's new file format, with the feature added to high-end cameras, or is it a cheap trick that will soon disappear (I'm looking at you cinemagraph)?

 

[JDDavis]

There's something magical about a really good still image. It lets your imagination run wild. Just a little bit of motion and all of a sudden you are pulled back in to reality. 30 seconds of the same leaves blowing in the wind and you are bored out of your brain. I think there is a space for images that have a tiny bit of movement. Just a second or two though. It seems a very fine line between what is a still with movement and what is video.

I don't think Live Photos will disrupt anything any time soon. I think what would shake it all up is a truly high quality, inexpensive, digital frame that does not need a cord or power brick. But only for digital art. I'm not sure anything can every replace a really large, high quality, extremely well printed on beautiful paper black and white still image.

 

[robgendreau]

Basically animated GIFs, as noted. I guess since they missed out on Vine. I already dread getting those, where the motion is mostly due to the hands of the photographer, not the subject. Kinda like how Lyttros were gonna be the Next Big Thing. There's a reason we want non-interactive stills.

 

[kilcher]

I don't think Live Photos will disrupt anything any time soon. I think what would shake it all up is a truly high quality, inexpensive, digital frame that does not need a cord or power brick. But only for digital art. I'm not sure anything can every replace a really large, high quality, extremely well printed on beautiful paper black and white still image.

Frame

I know I'd buy it.

 

[rstark18]

What would make it a truly useful tool is to be able to select (change) any moment within the 3 seconds as your capture moment. This obviously wouldn't work with flash but for other time it would be great.

 

[0970373]

Cos I didn't think food moved much.

Joking aside, I can imagine in a few months time an iPhone owner complaining to their wedding photographer that their pictures don't even move and are therefore rubbish... Are some areas of photography (where the screen is the final method of display) going to adopt Apple's new file format, with the feature added to high-end cameras, or is it a cheap trick that will soon disappear (I'm looking at you cinemagraph)?

I think very creative people will find something awesome to do with it. I also think it'll become something adapted and refined over time. But it really is basically a .gif. Higher quality and cooler but still a little video loop. It's the next step. Not sure if anyone on here watches the show Extant but they have thing called "photo cubes" which are basically the future's photo albums and the "photos" are holograms of moving images or...live photos. Someone mentioned in another thread that it's Harry Potter-esque. The photos in the newspapers moved. Kind of cool to think that these are things we're moving towards. Also thinking of the News app and how media outlets might use live photos integrated into their feeds.

So do I think it's the future of photography? In a way, yes. It totally could be. People guffawed at digital cameras and cameras *in* phones when they first came out and look where we're at now.

But first we're going to have to live through the age of live selfies and other awful things at the hands of idiots abusing it to its lowest potential.

 

[jms969]

Live photo is nice but it certainly is not a disruptive technology...

Now if they had imbedded light field technology in to the imaging system, that would have been a disruptive technology.

 

[robgendreau]

Live photo is nice but it certainly is not a disruptive technology...

Now if they had imbedded light field technology in to the imaging system, that would have been a disruptive technology.

I don't think existing light field photography has disrupted anything. In fact, it shows that needing viewers just draws unflattering comparison with video. Post processing of photo stacks in HDR, focusing, movement (the Apple GIFs), is well underway, and that is in fact disrupting light field photography itself, http://reframe.gizmodo.com/lytros-light-field-tech-is-amazing-but-is-it-already-o-1566058802. The computational power of phones is increasing, so although the hardware quality is low, in some ways they can compete with the big boy SLRs in terms of what they do after the image is captured. I'd like to think that if developers had access to iPhone RAW they could do even more, but we'll see.

I still (heh) think people see images as static or dynamic, short videos/GIF/Vine/live photo is pretty much the same, a variation on that theme. And sheesh, we already have those irritating moving pictures a la Harry Potter in about half the websites I visit; HATE 'em. Do we really want more of that?

 

[netslacker]

Cos I didn't think food moved much.

Joking aside, I can imagine in a few months time an iPhone owner complaining to their wedding photographer that their pictures don't even move and are therefore rubbish... Are some areas of photography (where the screen is the final method of display) going to adopt Apple's new file format, with the feature added to high-end cameras, or is it a cheap trick that will soon disappear (I'm looking at you cinemagraph)?

It won't happen for one simple reason: patents. Apple has very likely patented the hell out of live photos and will make sure that no other manufacturers can implement them. So unless your pro wedding photographers ditch their mega-dollar dSLRs for iPhones Live Photos will be nothing more than an iPhone gimmick.

 

[0007776]

It won't happen for one simple reason: patents. Apple has very likely patented the hell out of live photos and will make sure that no other manufacturers can implement them. So unless your pro wedding photographers ditch their mega-dollar dSLRs for iPhones Live Photos will be nothing more than an iPhone gimmick.

There have been enough similar things before that I'm sure someone could work around Apple's patents. The question is will apple make it popular enough for it to be worth it to other developers to figure out those ways of doing it.

 

[Cayden]

I think still photographs still have a better feel to them. If done correctly it can show more emotion than a video can. Something about stills will always capture the human mind