Hello! A bold thread title I know but something gave me a sense of awe today and amongst all the doom and gloom I thought I’d share.
I’m currently in Athens (holibobs) and visited the national archaeological museum. Here’s a photo I took.
This is made out of bronze and is early first century BC, so over two thousand years old. In fact, just read the blurb from the museum:
It was so realistic it utterly blew me away. He was wrinkly! It’s one thing to make this out of stone but out of bronze? So presumably there was a mold made out of wax / clay / stone? Wow - how long must have that taken
Now here’s the bit which really boggled my mind. A little bit of backstory (soz): I have an iPhone XR (ooo look at me) which has a camera mode that can, via techno wizardly, replicate the blurry ‘bokeh’ (aka Raymond Lin) effect with a single camera lens. This is a really clever piece of modern tech but on this particular phone it will ONLY work if the phone can detect a face and in my experience it’s pretty picky (and sometimes refuses to pick up an actual human face). Everyone I have shown off this feature to has been impressed by it. It is very, very cool.
Low and behold, the bronze sculpture was so realistic that my space age modern invention phone was able to recognise it as a human face, permitting me to take the above ‘slightly blurry background’ photo. IMHO that is super, super cool - technologies from two millennia apart colliding
Hope I didn’t bore you
I’m currently in Athens (holibobs) and visited the national archaeological museum. Here’s a photo I took.
This is made out of bronze and is early first century BC, so over two thousand years old. In fact, just read the blurb from the museum:
It was so realistic it utterly blew me away. He was wrinkly! It’s one thing to make this out of stone but out of bronze? So presumably there was a mold made out of wax / clay / stone? Wow - how long must have that taken
Now here’s the bit which really boggled my mind. A little bit of backstory (soz): I have an iPhone XR (ooo look at me) which has a camera mode that can, via techno wizardly, replicate the blurry ‘bokeh’ (aka Raymond Lin) effect with a single camera lens. This is a really clever piece of modern tech but on this particular phone it will ONLY work if the phone can detect a face and in my experience it’s pretty picky (and sometimes refuses to pick up an actual human face). Everyone I have shown off this feature to has been impressed by it. It is very, very cool.
Low and behold, the bronze sculpture was so realistic that my space age modern invention phone was able to recognise it as a human face, permitting me to take the above ‘slightly blurry background’ photo. IMHO that is super, super cool - technologies from two millennia apart colliding
Hope I didn’t bore you
