I saw the renaissance of mobile phone portrait photography in Musk's mother's blockbuster

75 years old, with silver hair and staggered lines on his face, Meyer · Musk thinks that's better than any age experienced in the past.

This is a hardcore mother with a legendary life, became a national beauty pageant champion at the age of 21, entered the marriage hall at 22 but encountered cheating and domestic violence, experienced divorce and bankruptcy at the age of 31, became a single mother who raised three children alone, and traveled to different countries.

▲Meyer · Musk and her three children

As a result, Meyer has cultivated three billionaires who have achieved success in different fields, one of which is the well-known Elon Musk, who has publicly mentioned the changes Meyer has brought to his life many times:

My mother is my hero, and my success comes from her nurturing and influence.

However, Meyer did not devote his entire life to his children. She insisted on developing her career as a nutritionist and model, and also ushered in the peak of her career after graying hair, starred in Beyoncé's MV, appeared on the cover of Time and New York magazines, published an autobiography...

Living adventurously and discreetly, is Meyer · Musk's life credo is also a true portrayal of her.

Today, OPPO also released a set of Meyer · Musk portrait blockbuster. Unlike imagined, this set of photos does not "beautify" too much like many magazine blockbusters to create a perfect glorious female image, but chooses to naturally show the traces left by 75 years of life experience on Meyer.

Such photos made me more aware that age, wrinkles, and hair color were not a reason to prevent Meyer from taking risks in life. She is not only an admirable mother, but also an independent, brave, charming professional woman.

That's the beauty of photography, capturing a time that is disappearing and never going back. As legendary photographer Bresson advocated the "decisive moment", to pursue the real and natural moment.

When smartphones swept social media with increasingly pompous "beauty filters", the proliferation of single aesthetics was exhausting. The new generation of users is also beginning to have more voices that seek authenticity and individuality: I want to shoot well, but also to be unique to myself.

Behind portrait photography, the flow of aesthetic trends of the times

While mobile photography has become a way for everyone to record their lives on the fly, it's still surprising to make a portrait blockbuster that rivals a professional DSLR. We have seen many amazing people at the manufacturer's press conference, but most people can only sigh, why can others take so good pictures of the same mobile phone?

In fact, the history of mobile phone photography is not long, and the first mobile phone with built-in camera, the J-SH04, was only released in 2000, perhaps younger than those who are reading this article.

From the J-SH04 with only 110,000 pixels in the rear camera, to the more than 100 million pixels on today's smartphones, ultra-telephoto, ultra-wide angle, computational photography... It's only been 23 years.

In these 23 years, "beauty" has dominated the aesthetic trend for a long time. The arrival of the mobile Internet has allowed more people to achieve free expression, and has also spawned a large number of "beauty apps", everyone wants to show their "best" self on the Internet, casually open a QQ space, full of filters of the times.

The development of smartphone portrait photography is actually a mirror image of the aesthetic trend changes of the times.

The era of "prosperous beauty" begins

Representative models: Casio TR100, OPPO Ulike series

The Casio TR100 is not a smartphone, but it has become a popular selfie artifact with its unique design, opening the era of smartphone photography "beauty selfies".

Casio's TR100 launched in 2011, 12.1 million effective pixels, 4x digital zoom, 1/2.3-inch sensor, was not outstanding in digital cameras at that time, but the rotatable high-definition touch screen and rotating frame design made users feel the fun of selfies for the first time.

▲Casio EX-TR3

In addition to hardware quality, Casio also began to enhance the selfie effect in software, "Extreme Intelligence Mode" automatically tracks faces, countdown flash, and more "automatic whitening" applications, beauty filters began to become the mainstream aesthetic of young people.

Then in 2012, OPPO launched the Ulike U701, which was the first smartphone that truly focused on selfie beauty.

The Ulike series is equipped with the beauty+ beauty engine, and the ultimate beauty photo mode makes the face in the photo whiter, thinner and pinker on the facial features, and the well-known beauty functions such as acne removal, face slimming, and magnifying glasses are integrated into smartphones.

The beauty function that comes with Casio and OPPO Ulike makes many women have no resistance, and the selfie style of violent dermabrasion and whitening has become a trend, reflecting people's strong demand for "shooting more beautiful themselves", hoping to present themselves with an idol-like "flawless" face.

But at this time, no one will compare mobile phone photography with cameras, and the filters of "Shengshi Beauty" are circulating on Internet platforms, most of which will not be called "photographic works", shooting like Meyer · Portrait blockbusters like Musk are still the work of professional photographers, and the camera is irreplaceable.

Portrait mode: Mobile photography starts to move closer to the camera

Representative models: iPhone 7 Plus, OPPO R9S

In September 2016, Apple's iPhone 7 Plus was the biggest focus in the tech circle. Among them, the portrait mode introduced for the first time on this phone is of great significance.

Mobile phone portrait photography began to move closer to the camera, which opened people's imagination for smartphone shooting, and Xiaobai without photography experience may take good portrait photos.

Portrait mode uses the iPhone 7 Plus' dual camera system to build portrait photos with a shallow depth of field, and its software-calculated bokeh effect is already natural, which previously required the use of professional-grade DSLR cameras or lenses.

Coincidentally, the OPPO R9S, which was launched in the same year, was the first smartphone to achieve front-facing background blur.

Compared to the beauty filters of the past, R9S has achieved more nuanced adjustments through algorithms. The front camera can accurately identify the edges of the face, and provides 7 modes in the beauty function, which can adjust the texture of the skin according to your preferences and shooting scenes, especially the different preferences of boys and girls for beauty effects.

People's demand for mobile portrait photography has changed, and they have begun to pursue a more personalized way of beauty.

In this period, portrait photography of mobile phones will put the clarity of the face in the first place, such as "backlight is also clear" will become the core selling point of mobile phone manufacturers. But this treatment is also problematic, in order to shoot people clearly, mobile phones often have to sacrifice light and shadow logic, becoming a major bottleneck for mobile phones closer to the camera.

You may have seen such a photo, a person photo is very clear, not out of focus, but feel that something is wrong, usually a matter of light and shadow. For example, the photo of the little girl on the left below looks distorted when the face is much brighter than the background.

In portrait photography, it is difficult to take excellent portrait photos if you do not consider the people and background as a whole, and only consider the person or scene. The photo of the little girl on the right is obviously more three-dimensional, close to the effect seen by the human eye.

and Meyer · Musk's set of photos is the same, this is also a portrait photo taken by OPPO Find X6 Pro, they all present a more natural light and shadow effect

Light and shadow are the charm of photography, as renowned photographer John Rankin Waddell said:

Pay attention to the change of light at all times, photography is the art of light, whether it is sunlight, candlelight, or light produced by computer screens.

From cookie-cutter beauty filters to more realistic light and shadow, behind this is the change of aesthetic trends of the times.

People are still using their phones to record their lives and trying to make themselves look better in photos. But more people's understanding of beauty is no longer limited to dermabrasion, flawless removal, whitening, or using algorithms to violently pull brightness, increase saturation, sharpen, and even fictional details.

For the generation that flaunts personalization, restoring the relationship between light and shadow seen by the human eye and pursuing the texture of nature and reality will be more in line with the aesthetics and self-expression of this era.

Returning to natural light and shadow, "anti-filter" has become a new trend

The aesthetic of "prosperous beauty" began to become obsolete, and more and more users pursued authentic social networking.

Last year, TikTok became the most popular app in the United States was BeReal that focused on real social. It requires users to receive notifications from their friends, use the front and rear cameras to capture the moment, without filters or any editing, and directly share real moments of the day.

In the early years, the richness of filters could even become the core selling point of social media applications to attract users, and an important factor in the popularity of Instagram, TikTok and other apps was to meet the beautification needs of users in social networking through filters.

Nowadays, more and more people are paying attention to their inner beauty and pursuing distinctive personality traits.

Reflected in mobile phone photography, users' emphasis on skin texture and characteristics has gradually outweighed their reliance on dermabrasion and whitening. This naturally puts forward higher requirements for today's most popular shooting tool, the smartphone.

Restoring real light and shadow is one of the biggest problems in smartphone portrait photography, and the relationship between people, light and environment in the calculation photography of many mobile phones cannot be accurately calculated, often directly in the whole scene to pull up the highlights, and the details and textures of the character's skin are relatively rough.

Professional portrait photographers will have their own understanding of light, how to make the natural transition between light and shadow on the face of the character, and adjust the highlights, midtones, reflections, light and dark junctions, projection and other details according to the scene environment.

▲The work of Italian portrait photographer Alessio Alb, who uses natural light to show the details of people

In the field of mobile phone portrait shooting, traditional computational photography is still not ideal in processing the impact of tone mapping on the dynamics of the picture, and the presentation of light and shadow can feel a more obvious "algorithm flavor".

In the light and shadow restoration of portrait photography, OPPO's solution is worth learning. As we mentioned after experiencing the OPPO Find X6 Pro before, it retains the advantages of computational photography while weakening the sense of existence of the algorithm and obtaining a visual experience that returns to nature.

In fact, OPPO's technology accumulation in mobile phone portrait photography is already the first echelon of the industry.

As early as the OPPO Future Technology Conference in 2020, OPPO launched the FDF full-dimensional portrait video technology system, the core of which contains two engines, one is the perception portrait engine, and the other is the image quality enhancement engine, which can make the character's skin tone softer and the distortion correction more accurate.

By the Find X6 Pro's portrait mode, it is already the most complex and highest algorithm integration in the current portrait mode in the industry. Use the core algorithms of computational imagery, rather than filters and spot simulations, to reconstruct light and shadow and depth of field.

OPPO has set off a revolution in smartphone portrait photography, removing the "algorithm flavor" and restoring natural light and shadow.

Meyer with the Find X6 Pro Musk portrait, we can also glimpse how OPPO transforms the photographer's perceptual cognition from experience into algorithmic decision-making by machines.

As you can see, Meyer · The skin texture details of Musk's skin tone are very clear, and the light effects of the face, neck, and hands can clearly see the delicate changes in light and shadow, and the overall light perception is more reasonable.

At the same time, under the different scenes and action postures of full-body portraits, busts and close-up portraits, the relationship between light and shadow between the characters and the background, and the transition between light and shadow are relatively natural, which makes the overall character more vivid.

Three lenses with different focal lengths are calibrated one by one and then used algorithms to construct light and shadow and depth of field, which is more delicate than the texture processed by the filter, and can better reflect the three-dimensional sense of portrait photography.

Natural light and shadow effects cannot be achieved with traditional filters and cutouts, and the essence behind them is more advanced and complex calculations.

OPPO spent at least 10 times more computation to achieve such an effect. Among them, the ultra-light and shadow image engine is the key technology to restore natural light and shadow in portrait shooting, which not only simulates human visual perception and aesthetic standards, but also hides the traces of algorithms.

Unlike traditional computational photography, the ultra-light image engine does not allow the light and shadow information of the photo to be lost due to compression during the tone mapping conversion process. Instead, the average brightness will be calculated according to the current scene, and then a suitable brightness will be selected according to this average brightness to present the correct light and shadow relationship.

At the same time, thanks to the RAW domain computing architecture, the Find X6 series can record up to 12 million photon dot matrix information, more raw light and shadow information, with HDR algorithm optimization, which means that the system can more accurately calculate the relationship between the light and shadow of the subject and the environment, and also have a more immersive feeling on this ProXDR "diamond screen".

The art of photography is not only about beauty, but also about ideas and expressed through technology. The underlying technology such as the ultra-light image engine is actually OPPO's humanistic thinking about the service of portrait photography for expression.

Respect for the ontology of people, this is the renaissance of smartphone portrait photography

The concept advocated by the OPPO Find X6 series is driving smartphone portrait shooting to a new turning point - making reality and human ontology the core values of portrait shooting.

This creative philosophy dates back to the Renaissance. Artists of this period began to pay attention to the ontology of human beings, striving to depict real human figures. For example, works such as Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper and Michelangelo's David show a deep excavation of the characters' personalities and true emotions.

Interestingly, the OPPO Find X6 series' pursuit of natural light and shadow in portrait photography is very similar to the characteristics of pre-impressionist artists who sought to capture the real feeling of the moment, focusing on light and color.

Take Monet, the representative of Impressionism, for example, he pays special attention to light, as well as the changes of people, scenes, buildings and other objects under light, and is good at capturing the subtle relationship between light and color.

In "Sunrise Impressions", Monet used delicate light and shadow and bold color changes to depict the scenery of his hometown port of Le Havre. Earlier, we saw that the photos taken by Find X6 Pro restored the light and shadow details of the characters, presenting a character full of life atmosphere, which also brought a visual experience similar to that in Impressionist works.

In my opinion, the OPPO Find X6 series is bringing a renaissance to smartphone portrait photography, returning to nature and reality, respecting the ontology of man. The difference is that with the continuous advancement of technology and the improvement of aesthetic concepts, portrait shooting has begun to show a more diverse and personalized trend, and everyone should be able to easily record natural and textured portraits.

This is also a big step forward for the future of "everyone is a photographer".

As a tool for expression and recording, one of the great values of smartphones is to inspire people to observe, think and create. Everyone has a unique perspective and way of expression, and the lowering of the threshold of photography technology allows us to focus more on observing life and draw strength from the most familiar and felt things around us.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that each person shapes his or her own essence in his own experiences and actions. In portrait shooting, the existence and experience of characters can be truly recorded in order to show their essence and personality.