Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture):
Improbable or not, that's great! Two people taking the same photo with phones seems likely these days, but accidentally discovering a picture of yourself taking a picture of the photographer, published in the NYT, that's an awesome coincidence.
I love how completely and dramatically different those two photos of the same place and time are. The reporter was telling a story of somewhere remote and hard to get to and barely touched by humans. One single sturdy but old Siberian looking truck and a half dozen crazy scientists in front of vast stretches of nothing but snow. And yours is showing a bit more of the day in the life there for humans standing next to an airport. The real dot on the i, and extra minor coincidence is the jet taking off right next to the reporter's head. Both photos are true, and both photos, one could say, give misleading impressions taken only on their own.
I had the same thing happen with one of my photos of lightning in London. I actually thought my shot had been ripped off at first glance, then realised it was from a different angle.
Looks at first sight like much of a bigger coincidence, but given that you probably both used a long shutter speed (yours seems to have been 6s) and selected the nicest of a number of shots, it's not like there are crazy chances against getting two almost identical shots like this.
The bolt of lightning is clearly identical, but I'm having a difficult time correlating buildings between the two shots. My guess is they were taken a mile or two apart.
However, upon inspection I realized there were differences. It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.
>It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.
Depends on the spot. I'm sure that, on any given morning, there are probably shots taken in a place like Zabriskie Point that are effectively indistinguishable. (Of course, once there are moving objects in the frame, photos that look identical become much less likely.)
This is typical birthday paradox stuff right? The chance that these two photographers would ever snap the same thing at the same time is small, but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big (even if you factor in millisecond precision). With photographers being photographers and the internet being the internet, there's also a pretty decent change that they'd find out about it and write a blog post like this, no? :-)
> but the chance that any two photographers, anywhere, would do so is, I bet, pretty big
Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.
When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.
The birthday paradox arises because the probability that two candidates do not match is small compared to the number of candidates. In this case, the candidates are photos and a match in fact requires a match on multiple variables (e.g. angle, timing) that are effectively continuous. A match between 2 arbitrary photos must then have zero-ish probability and a non-match must have one-ish. So it still seems inestimably improbable that something like this would happen.
It's made more remarkable IMO that they were two _professional_ photographers though, and that it's not just two snaps that happen to have the same timestamp, they both chose that moment to feature from the burst they probably took around that moment, the hundreds of other moments in proximity, and the thousands (I suppose? I'm no photographer) they each took throughout the day.
I don't think the birthday paradox applies here. The birthday paradox requires a discrete set of pigeon holes, days of year, etc. If that set is infinite, then the countability [1] problem collapses.
While technically the world is discrete in space and time (planck length), for all intents and purposes it is infinite in practice.
[1] yes, there is countably infinite, but that doesn't work with the pigeon hole problem.
Sort of, but instead of 365 distinct birthdays you have many thousands of non-overlapping time buckets (the two different burst mode frame rate), and it also doesn't "wrap around" the way birthdays do.
Correct, but there are about eight orders of magnitude more milliseconds than days, and you need another two or so orders of magnitude because not everyone is a photographer who publishes their photos. Then again, the internet is a medium that reaches many more people, which is not true of the average birthday. So one would still expect this to happen only maybe every few years.
[I felt like I was playing "Find 8 differences between these pictures" on the comics page]
I looked at the large images. Gendon's appears to have been shot slightly earlier based on two differences. 1. The crest of the background wave at the left is horizontal in Gendon's photo and turning down from photo left to right in Risman's. 2. The trough in front of the breaking wave has reached the front of the light house in Gendon's photo exposing a sunlit rock at the lower left of the low circular structure.
A rock broke wave is most photogenic at the moment of maximum spray extent. The water is at lowest velocity and the gestalt shape is briefly frozen...then gravity dominates and the moment collapses. The shape of the spray is the second most stable element in the scene. While it is the defining photographic moment, it is not clock correlated down at the millisecond level.
Something I learned a few weeks ago (after many years of using USB) is that usually cables have the USB logo or marking on the "right side" up. So if you don't know which one is the right side up, the one with the logo should win.
i know it's a joke, but the usb logo on the plug is always on top, so you can just orient it 'up' according to the underlying board (up for laptops, and facing left for desktops)
As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo...
The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it....
Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!
I would love to see these in a stereoscopic viewer. If they really were taken that close together in time, and given the huge binocular separation, there should be a hell of a 3-D effect.
If you squint your eyes enough you can make them overlap and sure enough you get a perfect piece of 3D. The water at the front is a mess but the lighthouse and the spray have real depth.
It's possible to judgde the relative positions of the photographers by eye based on some of the waves directly under the lighthouse. In Eric's picture there are some distinct crests immediately below the lighthouse door. In Ron's picture the exact same crests are on a diagonal line from the door toward the lower left corner of the frame. Tracing this imaginary line "out of the picture" would lead us to Eric's position, which means that Eric is to the left of Ron.
Literally the same millisecond (according to timestamps), or ‘only’ the same tenth of a second or so (as demonstrated by the pictures being near identical)? Those would both be unlikely and remarkable events, but one is 100 times more unlikely than the other :)
Timestamps are not useful for this since the cameras clocks are likely off by more than a millisecond.
I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
The time frame in question doesn't seem that big. There were probably not that much large breakers and the they both chose the peak of one with the best conditions. So maybe a 1:100 to 1:10.000 chance. I'm more amazed, that they went down the whole photoshop route before comparing angles. If someone had that kind of skill in retouching, he wouldn't need to copy photos to make a living.
The foreground wave is definitely from a noticably different angle, but still the same scene, even the white caps in the far background look very different. You don't need a high res image for that, only, when cropped to the lighthouse only.
When I first joined my local photographer's club, one of the masters there told me that I need to accept that all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else.
Obviously not that realistic, but articles like this sure make it sound more plausible.
> all the photos I will take will have been probably already shot by someone else
> Obviously not that realistic
Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
Totally cool, but not unlikely. With the sheer volume of high-end cameras and photographers using burst mode, this will certainly happen time and time again. It’s likely that this happens several times most days.
Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds.
I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
The amazing thing here is not that they took a photo of the same thing at the same time, but that this fact was discovered.
With the vast data capture exercise that is the internet, coincidences and patterns can be identified in near real time. Making sense of it all, however, is not so quick :-)
Cool idea for a service like Flickr (or at least Flickr in its prime, which is not now) to exploit -- given EXIF data and a database of photos, one could find all the photos taken in the same location at the exact time. While almost no cameras embed GPS information, I bet there are ways to infer the location in many cases.
5d's image looks remarkably better in terms of colour depth and details.. wondering whether it's due to the sensor size (full frame vs aps-c) or some other factor?
Not really. The birthday paradox is a paradox because it describes a circumstance that seems unlikely but actually is not. In this case it both seems unlikely and IS unlikely. If it were not unlikely we would see it happen more often.
[+] [-] TehCorwiz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JepZ|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cozzyd|8 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/insider/freezing-temperat...
Not only did I find that I was (barely) in the picture, but I had a picture of the photographer either before or after he took that picture (not at the same time, obviously, since I was turned the other way at the time of his picture):
http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~cozzyd/coincidence.jpg
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
I love how completely and dramatically different those two photos of the same place and time are. The reporter was telling a story of somewhere remote and hard to get to and barely touched by humans. One single sturdy but old Siberian looking truck and a half dozen crazy scientists in front of vast stretches of nothing but snow. And yours is showing a bit more of the day in the life there for humans standing next to an airport. The real dot on the i, and extra minor coincidence is the jet taking off right next to the reporter's head. Both photos are true, and both photos, one could say, give misleading impressions taken only on their own.
[+] [-] marknadal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yangyang|8 years ago|reply
Mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/phot...
Alternative, from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515...
[+] [-] ger_in_no|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] excalibur|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patorjk|8 years ago|reply
My photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/35437050686/
Their photo: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fort+Armistead+Park/@39.20...
However, upon inspection I realized there were differences. It kind of blew my mind that someone had taken a picture of the same sunrise at the same time, from almost the same spot.
[+] [-] ghaff|8 years ago|reply
Depends on the spot. I'm sure that, on any given morning, there are probably shots taken in a place like Zabriskie Point that are effectively indistinguishable. (Of course, once there are moving objects in the frame, photos that look identical become much less likely.)
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RivieraKid|8 years ago|reply
Not necessarily, but the the chance of any crazy coincidence happening and reaching HN homepage is quite big. Next time it might be two people with same name writing the exact same tweet independently. Or perhaps one guy winning the World Series of Poker two times in a row with the same winning hand.
When there's a million "kinds" of crazy coincidences, the chance of any one of them happening is much higher than chance of a specific one happening. This is kind of a selection bias, we only hear about the coincidences that happened.
[+] [-] laneb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan_j_naughton|8 years ago|reply
While technically the world is discrete in space and time (planck length), for all intents and purposes it is infinite in practice.
[1] yes, there is countably infinite, but that doesn't work with the pigeon hole problem.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|8 years ago|reply
I looked at the large images. Gendon's appears to have been shot slightly earlier based on two differences. 1. The crest of the background wave at the left is horizontal in Gendon's photo and turning down from photo left to right in Risman's. 2. The trough in front of the breaking wave has reached the front of the light house in Gendon's photo exposing a sunlit rock at the lower left of the low circular structure.
A rock broke wave is most photogenic at the moment of maximum spray extent. The water is at lowest velocity and the gestalt shape is briefly frozen...then gravity dominates and the moment collapses. The shape of the spray is the second most stable element in the scene. While it is the defining photographic moment, it is not clock correlated down at the millisecond level.
[+] [-] jastanton|8 years ago|reply
Edit: upon further inspection it turns out it was USB-C. Nevermind, all is right with the world :)
[+] [-] alejohausner|8 years ago|reply
1. https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2388#comi...
[+] [-] diggan|8 years ago|reply
Might help some other lost souls here :)
[+] [-] LesZedCB|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jv22222|8 years ago|reply
https://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=B7329F0C-B3E6...
As usual I cut it in half straight down the middle. As usual I paid no attention to cutting it. I was just about to hand it to him when I noticed something strange, so I quickly took a photo...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8tjrwql37i7ujjn/muffin.jpg?dl=0
The chances of the cut aligning the way it did, the blueberries lining up the way they did, the cut cutting the blueberries exactly in half, the blueberries ending up in this exact formation, me buying this specific muffin, the rotation of the muffin when I cut it....
Well, it just seems impossibly unlikely for something like this to have happened, yet it did!
[+] [-] stctgion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sambeau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmnt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|8 years ago|reply
I think a millisecond is too strong of a claim, but it's almost certainly much less than 1/10th of a second. (a simple though experiment that you could turn into a real experiment if you have a camera: If you take a 1/10th second exposure of something like this the magnitude of the motion blur will be much greater than the differences between the wave shapes on the two cameras).
[+] [-] ralfd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxfh|8 years ago|reply
The foreground wave is definitely from a noticably different angle, but still the same scene, even the white caps in the far background look very different. You don't need a high res image for that, only, when cropped to the lighthouse only.
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbaleanu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prayerslayer|8 years ago|reply
> Obviously not that realistic
Depends on how literally you want to take it. Lighthouses have definitely been photographed before. Photos depicting the man vs wild nature archetype too.
[+] [-] arthurofbabylon|8 years ago|reply
Some simple math: one camera was taking a photo every 143 milliseconds (roughly) and the other every 196 milliseconds (roughly). If both sit in burst mode continuously, I would expect these cameras to share the same millisecond (meaning each photograph took place within 1 millisecond of the other) every 28,000 milliseconds (roughly) or every 28 seconds.
I’d also argue that the details of this ‘unplanned’ event increased the likelihood that two photographers would select the same photo out of a series of bursts - didn’t the author say only about 3 images came out nice? Well, I imagine the other photographer had the same experience.
[+] [-] raisedbyninjas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abdulhaq|8 years ago|reply
With the vast data capture exercise that is the internet, coincidences and patterns can be identified in near real time. Making sense of it all, however, is not so quick :-)
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] murukesh_s|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_again|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jetroid|8 years ago|reply
https://jetholt.com/connected-minds/
I love things like this.
[+] [-] cbsmith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spuz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlmr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyfirestorm|8 years ago|reply