When I think about frequent head-scratchers concerning the technicalities of photography, the first things that pop in my mind are:

The loss of quality I experience when I want to share the pic with others, usually driven by compression issues. The loss of quality when I zoom over a detail (and the more I zoom the worse it gets).

Compression: a huge problem

The first thing I can think about is when I want to use an old pic that I don’t have anywhere else, except on my Instagram or Facebook timeline. Besides the embarrassment of watching myself with “uhm… no, thank you” haircuts, I’m like “nope, that’s not how it used to look tho…”. What is clear is that the picture has been compressed, most likely over and over, and now I have no way to make my mama happy with my childhood smiley photos. What if a 10 years challenge starts now? My face would look like a Minecraft character…

Compressing (or “optimizing”) an image, aims at reducing its memory load. Today, it is crucial for many processes, mainly concerning online sharing. If you think about our digital routine, we share pictures online every day: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and many more. Every social platform involving digital content uses file compression. It would impossible to manage the uncountable amount of digital files people upload online daily without reducing their size. Heavy sizes are needed for immediate quality, while light sizes are imperative for sharing and storing. But the problem is that this is a one-way process: imagine when you buy some fresh meat. Obviously, if you don’t eat it straight away, you are probably going to freeze it, right? What if you can’t unfreeze it thereafter? One can say that I would eat less, but still…

Is it possible to increase image resolution?

The fact that when we zoom in a picture it looks awful sounds so obvious and inevitable that we don’t even try to deal with it… I mean, I don’t. We can imagine a picture like a chessboard where its elements, the pixels, are the colored units the picture is made of, and they become more and more visible as we keep zooming in. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to withdraw from the size-quality trade-off. Luckily there are some fairly good software solutions out there that provide a workaround on this, upscaling the image using computed estimates. Still, the results are quite nah… On top of that, when someone sends me something with Messenger, it is always compressed, and if you need to restore it you may be disappointed.

A new technology

Ronald Reagan once said that there are no great limits to growth because there are no limits to human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. I could not agree more. If people from all over the world can read my article from a smartphone or a laptop is because some before us believed they can break a limit and get over it, improving themselves’ and other people’s life.

When I think about my life and my personal experiences I find out it’s all based on going on improving myself in order to be better at something, to learn what I don’t know building myself step by step. This is what breaking a limit means to me.