Posts Tagged: tech
June 28th, 2008
Julius von Bismarck, a student from Berlin, has come up with a clever hack of his old Minolta SLR so that instead of capturing an image, it projects one. Dubbed the Image Fulgurator, it’s not just any old projector. It’s controlled by a sensor which syncs the projection with flashes from nearby cameras, making the projection all but invisible to the naked eye and visible only on the image of the flash photographer.
This post on Wired details Bismarck’s invention and some of its potential uses (and misuses). Of relevance to the travel photography site that you are currently reading, imagine you’re visiting a famous landmark and you want to take a few shots. Maybe it’s a little dark and you want to lighten things up with your flash, but when you look at your photos, all is not as it should be. Maybe there is an ad where a wall should be. That seems like the most likely scenario to me - that advertisers will try to get a hold of an Image Fulgurator and project their brands into your holiday snaps. Forgive me cynicism, but remember, if there is a vacant area available, it will eventually get an ad placed on it one way or the other.
Ads and pranks are the obvious uses for this invention, but a more productive use might be to use it for some special effects in photography. Depending on the kind of quality you can achieve, maybe you could use something like this in the studio to create backgrounds out of nothing. Maybe that’s a little ambitious for this early incarnation of the device, but the potential may be there.
Let’s just hope this never falls into the wrong hands!
June 11th, 2008
Between addressing mysteriously non-functional contact forms on this site and pulling my hair out because of a massive amount of corrupt image files, I’ve managed to upload a group of galleries of photos from Vilnius Lithuania. There is plenty more where that came from and sometime tomorrow (depending on where in the world you are), there should be a complete set of my photos from that beautiful city.
For those of you who are curious, those corrupt files of mine are, in fact, my Baltics photos. All the RAW files that I had sorted seem now to have corrupt headers and Photoshop won’t open them at all. All these RAW files are saved elsewhere, but they are unsorted and unprocessed, so this glitch is more than a little bit irritating. What’s strange about it though: All the files still open in Lightroom. I guess I’ll be learning that app pretty quickly! So, the data is all there - it’s just some messed up header or something that’s preventing the files from opening.
The files seem to have gotten corrupted when I (and apparently, this was a foolish mistake) renamed my folder from “Baltics” to “Baltics sorted.” After that, every RAW file in there got sick.
I don’t know if this is related to the problems people are experiencing with OS 10.5.3 and Photoshop CS3, but it seems like it might be the case (even though I wasn’t saving remotely). Either way, for all you users out there who have this combination of OS and software: back up now! Now!
To top it all off, since the forms on my site aren’t working, (cross your fingers for a good reply from my host!), even if someone goes to my contact page and mails me a miracle fix, I won’t get the message! Best to leave it in the comments. Any happy thoughts are welcome too.
Update: Why didn’t anyone tell me to update my Camera RAW plugin? That fixed it all up. No corrupt files, just a messed up plugin. Too bad I panicked when I saw my files wouldn’t open and immediately assumed they were corrupted. Rookie mistake.
Oh well. All’s well that end’s well!
December 14th, 2006
The National Association of Photoshop Professionals has a good, first look at some of the new features that will be in Photoshop CS3. Among the highlights are the improved functionality of Camera RAW and a big upgrade to the Bridge application.
There appears to be a lot of other potentially-useful functionality appearing in CS3, so hurry up and have a look!
December 13th, 2006
AppleInsider is reporting that Adobe will be releasing a public beta of PhotoShop CS3 this Friday:
“The Photoshop CS3 beta, which will be posted to the Adobe Labs website on friday, will include Adobe Bridge and Device Central components, and be available simultaneously for both the Mac and Windows operating systems.”
In addition to the feature additions that will be available, this release should get a lot of people excited for the fact that it will be a Universal Binary release meaning that it will be natively supported on Apple’s Intel-based computers. Unfortunately, for owners of those machines, they will have to wait a little longer to try out the UB PhotoShop CS3:
“People familiar with the Macintosh version of the editor confirm it to be a Universal Binary which ’simply screams’ on Apple Computer’s new Intel-based hardware. However, they tell AppleInsider that this week’s beta will include only the standard version of Photoshop CS3.”
For this Friday’s release, it’s only PhotoShop CS3 that will make its debut. Other Creative Suite applications will stay under wraps a little longer:
“…the San Jose, Calif.-based software developer does not plan to release or discuss details of other Creative Suite 3.0 applications, such as Illustrator, Dreamweaver and InDesign.”
Head to AppleInsider for more details.
August 20th, 2006
Google has publically launched Writely, a free online word processing application. It writes PDFs, will publish directly to your blog, has collaboration tools including subscribing to an RSS feed of a document), automatic off-site backups and more.
It is, of course, an impressive application, but I’m not sure if it will usurp Word as the de facto word processor. It seems everyone already has a copy of Microsoft’s offering. Writely may not take off, but perhaps it will have the positive effect of inspiring some improvements in the software we already have. I mean, it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t like to update their products. This may just mean that there are actually some relevant additions to the next release.
Though I did, in fact, use Writely to create this post and it worked fairly well. It didn’t include the title of the document, but it warms you that this feature may not be supported. It also used breaks instead of the paragraph tag for the html, so that was a bit unusual. Since I typically use paragraphs, I edited the post’s HTML after the fact, but I suspect most people won’t notice or care. Not to mention this just came out - a few improvements are probably already on the way.
I didn’t expect to be switching over to a new method of posting to this site, but it was worth a test. Now that I have made that test, I know for certain that I will be sticking to my trusty Wordpress administration panel.
June 28th, 2006
Creativebits has a brief look at PhotoShop 1.0 that will undoubtedly spawn some sighs of relief that the product has come so far from its early days. Though, one screenshot does reveal that even in 1990, PhotoShop had support for 32-bit colour!
If you’re a Mac user and Software update hasn’t told you so yet, OS X version 10.4.7 is available.
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of iView media whose Media Pro software is an invaluable tool for photographers seeking to organize large collections of images. The iView line will continue develop under Microsoft and will likely serve as part of a larger Microsoft foray into digital imaging.
Lastly, DIY Photography, in this article, shares some musings on the art of photography.
June 22nd, 2006
In an effort to deter photography of sensitive subjects and copyrighted material, researchers at Georgia tech have begun the development of a device that will cripple the use of digital video and still cameras. The system works by scanning the area using infrared beams for the reflection produced by digital camera sensors then beaming light into the camera to blind it. The light is out of the visible spectrum and also said to be harmless to human beings.
Notably, however, this system is incapable of disabling DSLR cameras. The mirror on DSLRs blocks the scan from seeing the sensor, so the more professional cameras are safe from this device.
In addition to its limitations with DLSRs, the system seems as though it would be easy to circumvent. A one-way mirror, an infrared filter or perhaps even a polarizing filter would conceivably block the sensor from being detected.
One of the main purposes of the camera blocker is to help prevent movie piracy by disabling video cameras in movie theatres. It has a host of other potential applications such as defending high-security areas and keeping trades secrets safe at trade shows.
My hope is that this does not become an over-used or abused technology. Would the world have ever known about Abu Ghraib had such devices been installed there? And if it had been mounted to the police car of the officers who beat Rodney King?
If this technology comes to fruition, I can only hope its use is strictly regulated.
June 20th, 2006
Though consumers can’t expect to see this kind of resolution in their cameras anytime soon, the new 111 megapixel sensor developed by DALSA Semiconductor lets the imagination run wild for photo enthusiasts. It’s the first digital photo sensor to break the 100 million pixel barrier and will ultimately be used for mapping the motions and locations of celestial objects.
The sensor is approximately four inches by four inches, so no amount of cramming will get it into today’s DSLRs. Besides, the power of the computer you would need to process the images is well beyond most people’s means. I think my powerbook might choke to death if I tried to manipulate a 10,560 x 10,560 pixel image in PhotoShop.
June 15th, 2006
Six photographers in California are poised to set two new world records: the world’s largest photograph and the world’s largest camera. Constructed using an air hangar, this gargantuan pinhole camera will be used to produce a panoramic image of the landscape on the outside of the hangar.
The photographers are using a nearly 31-by-111 foot piece of white fabric covered in 20 gallons of light-sensitive emulsion as the “negative.”
I’m genuinely curious to see how the photo will look when completed. It will take ten days for the exposure to be completed, so the results will surely be unique for more than just their size.
June 15th, 2006
To follow up on the previous post, computers.net has one of the many early reviews of Google’s Picasa Web Albums that are bound to pop up in the coming days. Check out their review complete with screenshots here.
And because I forgot to mention it before, Mac users have a little less to get excited about with Google’s recent news - the Picasa application is still only available for Windows. Google has stated that a Mac release is an option in the future, but they have not given any firm release dates.
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