Laura Horn
Again, not exactly news, but a particularly family-photograph-oriented light discussion of recent trends in photo manipulation in today’s NYTimes.
“If you can’t have the perfect family, at least you can Photoshop it.”
Eye as camera, indeed,with these handy, photography-ban-defying camera glasses.
Photoshop Express (currently in Beta version) is online and free and full of snazzy interface. A limited implementation of the full software package, but still… is this Adobe reaching out to the masses? Or trying to addict us?
Cautionary Tale 1: Yikes. Read the fine print:
8 Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
Cautionary Tale 2: Photoshop Disasters.
Sony Alpha A300
A new camera from Sony: A Camera that Frees your Face, as per David Pogue reviewing for the NYTimes. The new Sony is an SLR that functions much as a compact camera in that it it also held at arm’s length from the body - no one eye/lens association needed, thanks to a 2nd sensor that feeds the LCD panel directly. I wrote much of my thesis about this eye/body/camera association, and how our understanding of sight itself is informed by & leads to technological shifts such as this.
…when it works properly, Live View can contribute mightily to your photographic success — especially when the entire screen tilts up or down, as it does on the A300.
For example, you can now shoot a parade over the heads of the crowd in front of you. You can shoot pets and babies at their eye level without having to squat or kneel. And you get infinitely better photos of young or camera-shy subjects when you’re smiling and making eye contact than when you’re hiding your face behind a piece of Darth Vader equipment.
Hmmm. And, photographic ethics invoked:
(Last weekend, my adorable but camera-shy 3-year-old proved this point emphatically. About the only decent photos I got of him were the ones in which I held the camera at waist level with the screen tilted up.)
Worried about your digital photographs being used by someone else? Canon has apparently just filed for an iris registration patent, whereby your images would be watermarked based on your very own photographic eye.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an imaging apparatus that makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer for the purpose of personal authentication and writing this photographer information to the image of a subject without affecting processing, and in a manner transparent to operation, at the time of photography.
Some comments here about some of the obvious concerns and issues.
I’m almost tempted to create a whole category for future relevant entries.
From Japan Trend Shop:
Ever wonder what your dog does while you’re away? Wonder what life looks like at his level?
Wonder no more. The Wonderful Shot pet camera from Takara Tomy allows you to send your pet off to take photos of its day with a tiny and light 0.35 megapixel camera connected to its collar. You can take the photos manually anytime with the mini remote, or set the timer to take pictures at certain intervals.
Of course, Wonderful Shot is great for cats or any pet with a collar that has daytime adventures that you want to know about.
Pictures, pictures everywhere. We have been talking in class about Alec Wilkinson’s New Yorker article: Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, and Gordon Bell’s insane noble ambitious attempt to digitize, photographically and otherwise, his life experiences. All of them, that is. It is appropriate, then, that everywhere I turn today I am confronted with rumors of new gadgets and software embracing and pushing variations on this theme of pixel mania.
The Triops camera, a prototype finalist in the Braun Prize 2007, is “designed to take photos at moments you might not expect.” (Hmmm… personally, I often take photos at moments I might not expect.) Its 3 fisheye lenses react to motion or sound, capturing a 360 degree p
anorama when stimuli triggered (or manually).
Want to wear your own SenseCam of sorts, but worried about discretion? Check out the world’s tiniest camera yet produced.
And, moving from the gadget realm into potential software futures, I appear to be a few months behind (or living under a rock, apparently) to have missed the mad jump on the Photosynth bandwagon (eye-popping demo here). It took me approximately 30 seconds, post-demo, to call IT department to reserve a PC laptop (what?! Microsoft doesn’t support Apple products? Shocking.). Image categorization, multiples, appropriation, data visualization, 3-D tourism… how many of my favorite subjects can it simultaneously address? I haven’t been so anxious to get my hands on a Microsoft platform in… ever.
How can you not love Siggraph?
Thanks, Dylan, for this link. Energy functions of a photograph! Adding “negative weights to the energy of an image” (an unexpected phrase if I have ever heard one) to allow erasure of certain elements within the frame. Never mind the measurements of eye movement, entropy, saliency, histograms… all to be used in the name of resizing photographs dynamically. Of course, none of this is too far off of what can be done with a little Photoshop time, but the algorithmic approach to determining the worth of elements within a frame? Fascinating.
Real photograph, or computer graphic simulation? Can you recognize the difference?