Shirley Cards

In the last 5 years, an obscure Chinese company called Transsion, selling brands like Tecno, Infinix and Itel, has quietly become the largest mobile phone maker in Africa. Why? Because their phone cameras are tuned out of the box to work well with dark skin.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;africa&#x2F;1633699&#x2F;transsions-tecno-infinix-camera-phones-made-for-dark-skin-tones&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;africa&#x2F;1633699&#x2F;transsions-tecno-infinix-camer...</a>

Color films used to come in two varieties, more or less. Films designed to represent caucasian skin tones in a desirable way, and films designed to make colors that pop. Fuji had 160C and 160S, while Kodak had Portra 160NC and 160VC. I think they tweaked something in the sensitivity curves of the “suitable for skin tones” product lines which reduced contrast in the relevant parts of the curve. My sense is that this would keep it looking peach-colored without going into the more brilliant reds or magentas. The sensitivity curves for “makes colors that pop” were tweaked to increase the contrast in certain places. This was great for nature photos, product photos, or photos of food, but but if you put caucasian skin in the picture, it might come out looking somewhat reddish or magenta, and skin blemishes stand out more. Worst case you get crab people.<p>This is just my perspective on the film itself, based on my experiences shooting and printing color film (in a wet lab). I was printing slowly, trying to get the best out of each print. I spent a lot of time looking at prints and sussing out variations in color, stuff that you could fix at the touch of a button in Photoshop, if it were digital.

This is a really neat little article.<p>To make something &quot;just work&quot;, you have to make technical decisions for the user. To make those decisions you need assumptions. It&#x27;s a lot of work to make assumptions that work for <i>every</i> user, so a lot of times people focus on making them work for the &quot;target market&quot;: those who we feel will most effectively sustain the product, who tend to be those we&#x27;re most familiar with, or those with the most social privilege or economic clout. But we shouldn&#x27;t stop there.<p>All of this was true 100 years ago when Kodak was designing cameras, and it&#x27;s true today as we build machine learning models.

Interesting how the multi-racial Shirley card still uses a black woman whose skin isn’t all that black.<p>I suspect media representations of black Americans still prioritize those with lighter skin tones.

As a dark skinned photographer I always am annoyed by the take that “white people who designed cameras made them take better photos of white people.” No, that’s not what is happening. The fact is that you get a lot less light from a dark face, and the nature of light sensing technology means that it’s going to be harder to take a picture of a dark face holding all else constant. Of course you can use exposure compensation etc but the “white supremacy” hot take is very misinformed.

By the way, the audio version of the episode also has a bonus story about at the end about the Lenna image.

Reminds me of the <i>boost</i> button on Polaroid&#x27;s ID-2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kimon.hosting.nyu.edu&#x2F;physical-electrical-digital&#x2F;items&#x2F;show&#x2F;1017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kimon.hosting.nyu.edu&#x2F;physical-electrical-digital&#x2F;it...</a><p>&gt; One of the Polaroid ID-2’s most important design features was a “boost” button that when pressed would boost the flash exactly 42%. Polaroid advertised this spectial feature for general lighting pruposes. However, researchers and artists assert that the ID-2 camera was actually created for and catering specifically to South Africa’s policies of Apartheid., and boost button, The white minority South African government largely used this camera for dompas, or the passbooks, which helped to sustain the Apartheid regime via surveillance. This was partially because the device was portable, fast at taking and developing photos, and created difficult to forge images because of its powerful lamination. But the most compelling feature was that the boost button increased the flash’s intensity by the exact amount it took to account for the extra light absorbed by black skin: 42%.<p>&gt; Polaroid claimed only 20% of the film they sold in South Africa ended up being used for passports and according to Polaroid in 191, only 65 systems were sold before sales were stopped, and none of those systems were sold to government agencies. However, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement countered that sales were still going through indirect channels. Polaroid continued lying from 1971 to 1978, claiming that they had ceased supplying materials to the regime, when in fact there was an elaborate shell game which allowed them to sell through a third party (Caulfield 2015).

Google&#x27;s main marketing slogan for their new phones is that it is good at taking photos of different skin tones. Makes me wonder how diverse most people&#x27;s acquaintances really are, to make it a selling point.

If you tune up your camera to &quot;see what is there&quot; people complain that their blemishes are too visible.<p>So generally the processing chain is tuned up to be more flattering.<p>I took a photo of my son who had acne at the time and did the opposite and made it look like he&#x27;d smoked 10,000 cigarettes. He and I thought it was a good photo artistically but I wouldn&#x27;t show it to his grandmother.<p>What&#x27;s flattering is going to depend on your skin type. People with very light skin have bad problems in this respect.<p>Auto-exposure is also an issue. It assumes the scene is middle gray and if the objects in the scene are unusually light or dark it will get it wrong.<p>I took a photo of a friend who was wearing a black gothic dress and the +2 ... -2 exposure dial was not enough to get her face right and make the dress really black and I had to go to full manual.<p>Now that I think about it, I haven&#x27;t taken a lot of portraits of black people and I think I want to take some to learn how.

Kodak got into a lot of trouble over the color rendition of their films in that time period.<p>For one thing they refused to publish data about how the colors faded over time, and the truth was awful.<p>Wedding photographers were taking a good chunk of change to make a product that should last a lifetime and instead the prints faded quickly. Everything from the most ephemeral color snaps to art prints was affected, they didn’t make any product that would last unless you kept it in a dry freezer.

Physics is racist. Lighter objects reflect more light than darker objects.<p>Film and sensors can not capture the dynamic range between something very light and something very dark. Whether those subjects are humans or not. If you photograph a brown bear near a polar bear, you would have difficulties discerning details in both.<p>The maximum of dynamic range that can be capture by common cameras these days is 15Ev.<p>Even photographing light skinned people into sunset or dark skinned people at night is an issue, and you have to use additional light like flash or a reflector if you want details in both the persons face and the surroundings.