photography

The Gigapixel Camera

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Scientists at Duke University have built an experimental camera that allows the user—after a photo is taken—to zoom in on portions of the image… The Wall Street Journal has the scoop on this billion pixel camera:

The Duke device, called Aware-2, is a long way from being a product. The current version needs lots of space to house and cool its electronic boards; it weighs 100 pounds and is about the size of two stacked microwave ovens. It also takes about 18 seconds to shoot a frame and record the data on a disk.

The $25 million project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense. The military is interested in high-resolution cameras as tools for aerial or land-based surveillance.

How does the camera work?

The secret of the Duke device is a spherical lens, a design first proposed in the late 19th century. Although very effective spherical lenses exist naturally—the human eye, for example—researchers have long found it tricky to accurately focus images using lab-made versions. The Duke group overcame the challenge by installing nearly 100 microcameras, each with a 14-megapixel sensor, on the outside of a small sphere about the size of a football. The setup yields nearly 100 separate—but accurately focused—images. A computer connected to the sphere then stitches them together to create a composite whole.

The current limitation? Besides it weight, it only shoots in black and white.

Personally, I think this isn’t the future of photography. Technically, this project is interesting and will have implications for photographers who do wide-scale panoramic shots. But for the average photographer, this is a step in the wrong direction: changing the image after the fact is counter intuitive to how photographers should work, namely framing the image in camera.

I’ve argued that the lytro is a gimmick, and I think this gigapixel camera might follow in the same direction.

Chimping: A Film about Modern-Day Photojournalists

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[vimeo https://vimeo.com/37180514 w=600 h=500]

“Chimping” is a 23-minute film by Dan Perez de la Garza, who documents nine modern photojournalists including Pulitzer Prize winners Preston Gannaway and Rick Loomis, Emmy Award winner Paula Lerner. Other photographers featured in the film include Todd Maisel, Chris Usher, Angela Rowlings, Edward Greenberg, Stan Wolfson, and Rita Reed. The film is an intimate portrayal of daily struggles of modern-day photojournalists. But it also serves as a poignant reminder that we need these people to do what they do, day in and day out.

The title of the film refers to photographers’ tendency to check their photos on their LCDs immediately after they’ve captured their photo(s).

My Favorite Photo of 2011

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I spent some time this weekend looking over the photos I captured in 2011. While I didn’t travel as much as I have in previous years, one experience stood out: witnessing a space shuttle launch for the first time in my life. I saw the last launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, mission STS-134. I actually ended up going to Florida on two separate occasions, as the first scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour was scrubbed.

But on the morning of May 16, 2011 everything was going according to plan. I woke up early, set up my tripod to get a coveted viewing spot, and waited. You can read my lengthy post of how the day unfolded on my photoblog, but the incredible moment we were all waiting for occurred shortly before 9AM that morning. And so, I captured this glorious scene as Endeavour lifted off:

Space Shuttle Endeavour Lifting off from Kennedy Space Center

Here is what I wrote about the experience the day of launch:

People were cheering so loudly. Now, for the first few seconds of lift-off, we relied on our visual senses to stimulate us: sound had not yet arrived. We were located three miles away from the launch site, and the first boom of the engines and the solid rocket boosters cracked about five seconds into the launch sequence. And what a phenomenal sound it was! There were these crackles, going off and on, like fireworks were exploding about five feet away from you. The sound literally made the hair on your arm and legs stand up. It was absolutely incredible!

Truly, a day I’ll never forget.

Here is my entire NASA-themed gallery for those of you curious to see what other photos I captured while at Kennedy Space Center. What’s your favorite photo memory from 2011?

Ansel Adams and Group f/64

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On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.

The name f/64 derives from the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time, and it signaled the group’s belief that photographs should celebrate, rather than disguise, the medium’s capacity to present the world “as it is.” As Edward Weston phrased it, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

The group’s effort to present the camera’s “vision” as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to achieve the greatest depth of field possible, thus allowing for the entire scene photographed to be sharp and in focus (by comparison, modern day lenses for SLR cameras usually taper off at f/22 or f/32 aperture).

Following is the manifesto of Group f/64:

The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group.

The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.

Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group.

Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

As far as the how the group acquired its name, the story isn’t 100% clear. Per Wikipedia:

There is some difference of opinion about how the group was named. Van Dyke recalled that he first suggested the name “US 256”, which was then the commonly-used Uniform System designation for a very small aperture stop on a camera lens. According to Van Dyke, Adams thought the name would be confusing to the public, and Adams suggested “f/64”, which was a corresponding aperture setting for the focal system that was gaining popularity. However, in an interview in 1975 Holder recalled that he and Van Dyke thought up the name during a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco.

The history of the group is fascinating. And while we may agree that Ansel Adam’s photograph has withstood the test of time as some of the best landscape photography the world has ever seen, the group’s definition of pure photography as defined by “possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form” would face opposition from many modern-day photographers. That’s because the process of choosing aperture, composition, ISO, and so on may considered an artistic process. If I choose to shoot a long exposure of a waterfall in the daytime, have I misrepresented reality? If your eyes can’t envision a blurring of water but the camera can, am I deceiver the viewer? While there are technical points that one must understand as a photographer, the actual application of the technical process process is unique.

Errol Morris on Photography

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In this video, writer and Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art, and propaganda in photography. He draws examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean war, cited in his book Believing is Seeing. One of the points he makes in this brief video: how does a photograph connect to the physical world? My favorite part comes at around the 3:00 mark, where Morris discusses whether a photograph can be true or false.

Official School Portraits as Mug Shots

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It seems to me that this type of article has been published before, but I am not surprised that many parents are starting to feel that official school portraits resemble “mug shots.”

So why don’t schools innovate and hire photographers who would be willing to spice things up and do something fun/unique with the school portraits? The Wall Street Journal reports:

It can be difficult for small companies to compete for business against bigger, established players that dominate school photos, in large part because public school systems often ask the portrait companies they commission to give them a percentage of the parents’ spending on photo packages. Sometimes, schools bill “Picture Day” as a fund-raiser, alerting parents that they will benefit from money paid to the photography companies.

Companies like Lifetouch National School Studios, which photographs about 20 million students around the country each year, gives schools anywhere from 10% to 25% of parent payments. Each arrangement is individually negotiated. “There may be a commission that a school is requiring or sometimes a school calls it a fundraiser,” says Kelvin Miller, corporate vice president of Lifetouch Inc., Lifetouch National School Studio’s parent company.

Seems like this business is ripe for disruption. What say you?

Wedding Lawsuit of the Decade

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This one takes the cake, folks. Todd J. Remis of Manhattan married in 2003, but he didn’t like the services of his photography studio. He claimed that H & H Photographers, a 65-year-old studio “known fondly among thousands of former and current Bronx residents,” missed photographing the last dance and the bouquet toss.

Forget that the wedding took place more than seven years ago. And that Mr. Remis has demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography and and additional $48,000 (!) to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer. So what’s the kicker? He is now divorced from his wife, and he doesn’t even know where she lives (supposedly she is back in her native Latvia).

What a totally wild story.

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And a personal call to action: if you hire me to shoot your wedding, I promise to be there from beginning to end. I don’t charge by the hour. 

Italo Calvino on Photography

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I always find it fascinating when authors incorporate their academic thoughts into works of fiction.

I came across this this story by Italo Calvino titled “The Adventures of a Photographer,” found in his novel Difficult Loves. In it, we follow Antonino Paraggi, who is described as a non-photographer. Feeling isolated, he picks up the camera and begins to shoot. The story is short, and perhaps unrealistic (what of finding love through a model shoot?), but I wanted to highlight a couple of noteworthy passages.

Is it possible to use an extracurricular endeavor, such as photography, to discover ones faults, misgivings, and dissatisfactions in life? Calvino makes the case that it is so:

It must be said that his examination of photography to discover the causes of a private dissatisfaction—as of someone who feels excluded from something—was to a certain extent a trick Antonino played on himself, to avoid having to consider another, more evident, process that was separating him from his friends. What was happening was this: his acquaintances, of his age, were all getting married, one after another, and starting families, while Antonino remained a bachelor.

Have you encountered parents who become obsessed with photography because they think that if there’s a moment of their child’s life that they don’t capture, it will be lost forever?

Given the speed of growth, it becomes necessary to photograph the child often, because nothing is more fleeting and unmemorable than a six-month-old infant, soon deleted and replaced by one of eight months, and then one of a year; and all the perfection that, to the eyes of parents, a child of three may have reached cannot prevent its being destroyed by that of the four-year-old. The photograph album remains the only place where all these fleeting perfections are saved and juxtaposed, each aspiring to an incomparable absoluteness of its own.

Antonino’s argument here is interesting, but flawed:

For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes, the only coherent way to act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the instant he opens his eyes in the morning to when he goes to sleep. This is the only way that the rolls of exposed film will represent a faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I’d see this thing through, even if it meant losing my mind. But the rest of you still insist on making a choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic sense, apologetic, consolatory, at peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn’t only photographic; it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion. So you think you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into hebetude.

I find it hard to believe that there is a person who wants to capture “everything” — that is impossible. Secondly, one would not use a still camera in this instance, but would shoot a film. On this topic, I highly suggest reading “While the Women Are Sleeping,” which I previously discussed here. The central obsession of shooting continuously in the two stories is very, perhaps eerily, similar.

And this is probably the best passage in the story. Can the photographed reality be better (i.e., more visually appealing, more engrossing, more ethereal, more subjective, etc.) than reality itself? I’ve previously noted, with my photography, that it’s often the case (because I sometimes envision a scene as I would like it to look, and complete my mental image in post-processing).

Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative quality, even if the picture was taken the day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself. To believe that the snapshot is more true than the posed portrait is a prejudice…

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Hat tip to @escapeintolife for posting a link to this story on Twitter.

Readings: Apple’s iPad, Photography, Superstar Effect, Unpaid Internships

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Here’s what I have been reading over the weekend:

(1) “Apple IPad’s Debut-Weekend Sales May Be Surpassing Estimates” [Business Week] – the numbers are in, and it looks like Apple had a spectacular weekend in terms of iPad sales.

The iPad’s initial sales may have reached 700,000 units, Piper Jaffray & Co.’s Gene Munster said in an interview today. The Minneapolis-based analyst previously predicted sales of 200,000 to 300,000, while Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.’s Toni Sacconaghi projected 300,000 to 400,000.

With the cheapest iPad selling for $499 and the top of the line model selling for $829, one can make an early estimate from retail sales of the iPad in just one weekend. If you assume that the average iPad sold for $600 (taking account three things: taxes, that Apple sold a significant number of 32GB and 64GB iPad models as well the 3G iPad models, and that shoppers probably bought accessories and other items from Apple in addition to the iPad), and the number is astonishing: at least $400 million of revenue this weekend.

(2) “Is Photography Over?” [San Francisco Museum of Fine Art] – a spectrum of answers from critics and photographers on the state of photography.

(3) “Tiger Woods and the Superstar Effect” [Wall Street Journal] – an excellent piece by Jonah Lehrer on this interesting effect observed in sports, schools, and businesses. This is an interesting discovery:

The same phenomenon seems to also affect students taking the SAT. In a paper released last year, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Haifa compared average SAT scores with the average number of students in test-taking venues in all 50 states, and found that students who took the SAT in larger groups did worse. They concluded that the mere knowledge of their competitors—the sight of all of those other students scratching in their answers in the same room—decreased motivation.

(4) “Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say” [New York Times] – a timely article about students trying to find jobs and sometimes choosing to work for free. I was surprised by this quote from an N.Y.U. student:

It would have been nice to be paid, but at this point, it’s so expected of me to do this for free…If you want to be in the music industry that’s the way it works. If you want to get your foot in the door somehow, this is the easiest way to do it. You suck it up.

It seems like such a resigned attitude. Can that possibly be true of the music industry?

Readings: Compressed Sensing, Future of Money, Google’s Search Algorithm

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I finished reading, from cover to cover, the March 2010 edition of Wired magazine last week. Today’s links of the day are all from Wired.

(1) “Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets into High-Res Samples” [Wired] – a fascinating look into the Compressed Sensing algorithm. This article explores how the algorithm, discovered accidentally by Emmanuel Candès, has applications in medical imaging, satellite imaging, and photography. On the origins of the algorithm:

Candès, with the assistance of postdoc Justin Romberg, came up with what he considered to be a sketchy and incomplete theory for what he saw on his computer. He then presented it on a blackboard to a colleague at UCLA named Terry Tao. Candès came away from the conversation thinking that Tao was skeptical — the improvement in image clarity was close to impossible, after all. But the next evening, Tao sent a set of notes to Candès about the blackboard session. It was the basis of their first paper together. And over the next two years, they would write several more.

If you’ve never heard of Terence Tao, you should find out more about him. He’s one of the most brilliant mathematicians alive today (when he was 24, Tao was promoted to full professor at UCLA, the youngest person to achieve full professorship at UCLA; Tao also won the Fields Medal in 2006, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics). Tao maintains a very popular blog (among mathematics and those who really enjoy math, as the majority of the topics are quite esoteric for the general audience) here.

So how does compressed sensing work?

Compressed sensing works something like this: You’ve got a picture — of a kidney, of the president, doesn’t matter. The picture is made of 1 million pixels. In traditional imaging, that’s a million measurements you have to make. In compressed sensing, you measure only a small fraction — say, 100,000 pixels randomly selected from various parts of the image. From that starting point there is a gigantic, effectively infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could be filled in.

So is this a revolutionary technique? The implication, of course, is that you can create something out of nothing. I remain unconvinced whether this technology will be used in digital photography in the future, but I do anticipate that for gathering large data sets, such as in satellite imagery, this technique will become very popular…

(2) “The Future of Money” [Wired] – an excellent, comprehensive piece explaining how the role of paying for things online has evolved since the days of PayPal. This is a must-read if you’re unfamiliar with the history of PayPal, don’t know how credit card transactions are made, and if you haven’t heard of recent developments of TwitPay and/or Square.

(3) “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” [Wired] – most likely, you use Google every single day. This article explores the fascinating story behind the Google search algorithm (beginning with PageRank to the rollout of real-time search in December 2009), its adapation and evolution over the years. This article is a must-read.