Photofying

It has been four years since I last posted here, and that’s pretty much how long a break I’ve taken from photography in general. The cameras gather dust on the shelves, the freezer is still full of film and the chemicals are going bad in their bottles. I’ve been busy elsewhere.

The last week or so I’ve been playing the recently released video game Cyberpunk 2077. The game has a photo mode which allows the player to take stills of the scene and do some very rudimentary photo editing. So while I played the game, I also played photographer again. It’s pretty good looking, but still, on an older PC such as mine, it will look like an older game. The results are not outstanding, having a better graphics card than my GeForce 1060 would probably help a bit on the image quality front. But if we lean back from the screen a bit to let the pixels blend together, we see a future of digital photography where we don’t even have to leave our homes to do street photography.

I would say that the images below are spoiler free for those who would consider playing the game themselves. All manipulation was done inside the game’s own photo editor.

The camera controls aren’t very fast and easy to use, composition has some strange and sometimes infuriating limitations (like that it’s impossible to tilt the camera into portrait mode). The bokeh isn’t very nice at all, and the whole concept of depth of field looks good enough when you play the game, but when you stop to look more closely it falls apart. Scroll back to the picture of the burning car above and you’ll see what I mean.

For now I’ll let the game sit for some time, I’ll wait for the modding community to release some tweaks to make the rendering of the scenes more life like, and maybe there’s a modder out there somewhere who’ll tweak the in game camera a bit to make playing “Photographer in the year 2077” more rewarding.