An article on Deathfall discusses the work of Joseph Francis, a great photographer that composes his scenes entirely in software and renders them with Maxwell Renderer.
In 2006 the new Maxwell Renderer caught my eye, and I started testing it. I loved how realistic it looked, and I thought I could use it to create elaborate backgrounds without building elaborate sets. I spent a fair amount of time looking at user-created Maxwell materials, which are available to share on the company’s web site, and imagining possibilities. I really wanted to use CG in an invisible way as much as possible, rather than make obviously CG things like living mermaids or aliens. I feel as if I’m doing it right when someone writes to me assuming the set is real and asking where I shot an image.
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey has a early article about the Lytro camera, based on some early photographs made by Eric Cheng. He agrees that the camera itself is fascinating, but believes that it’s more damaging to photography that beneficial.
Speaking from the perspective of a tech writer and someone interested in cameras, optics, and this sort of thing in general, I have to say the technology is absolutely amazing. But from the perspective of a photographer, I’m troubled. To start with, a large portion of the photography process has been removed — and not simply a technical part, but a creative part. There’s a reason focus is called focus and not something like “optical optimum” or “sharpness.” Focus is about making a decision as a photographer about what you’re taking a picture of. It’s clear that Ng is not of the same opinion: he describes focusing as “a chore,” and believes removing it simplifies the process. In a way, it does — the way hot dogs simplify meat. Without focus, it’s just the record of a bunch of photons. And saying it’s a revolution in photography is like saying dioramas are a revolution in sculpture.
I disagree with him. Of course this first version won’t offer much to professional photographers, but just as early digital cameras were nothing but toys but eventually became the mainstay of photography, so will computational cameras like the Lytro. The first offering is too limited and resolution-shy to be of much use to professionals, but as the resolution climbs and people come up with more fascinating feature that can be done with the plenoptic photographs, I’m sure they’ll eventually become the new mainstay of photography.
A nice piece of work comes from Halta Definizione who has compiled the world’s highest resolution photograph. Notice it’s not the world’s largest photograph, as it only clocks in at 16 gigapixels, but that 16 billion pixels is focused entirely on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.
So what is this picture portraying? Well, it wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper“. The depth of the image is just mind boggling. You can zoom down to the smallest grain of paint and still not lose the clarity or the crispness of the image itself. It’s really amazing to zoom and pan around in search of those infamous details that we all know of since the movie “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown.
Photographers are always in search of that magic time they call “Twilight” or “Magic Hour”. Not the fancy glittery vampire kind, but rather that magic time where the Sun and Moon align to give some truly spectacular lighting opportunities for photographs. Now you can predict your own Twilight times with a great Google Maps mashup online.
Simply select your location on the map, and pick a Month and year. Click Submit and then be presented with a slew of information on sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset, and much more. A great tool for any photographer.
Another entry into the Extreme Panoram space comes from the ‘Sevilla 111″ project that has an impressive 111-Gigapixel image up in their interactive viewer. Combining an impressive 9,750 images, it contains some amazing details. You can zoom in to see individual people on the street, planes in the sky, and even individual leaves on trees.
This blows the earlier 70-Gigapixel Budapest out of the water, and makes the 45-Gigapixel Dubai a laughable endeavor. What city do you think is worthy of being the first Terapixel Panoram? I would have to cast my vote for the lights of New York City or Tokyo.
In an attempt to stem the many photoshopped images that wind up on the front pages of major newspapers, Canon has integrated a special crytographic security measure that allows someone to determine if the image is an original or has been altered.
In brief, modern DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) cameras produced by Canon feature Original Data Security system which is meant to securely validate the authenticity of image data and prove image genuineness. Accordingly, one can use OSK-E3 (Canon Original Data Security Kit) which comprises smart card and special software to verify a digitally signed image.
Unfortunately, ElcomSoft today revealed a vulnerability in their algorithm that allows anyone to cryptographically sign any image so that it appears authentic.
ElcomSoft discovered the vulnerability which allows producing images that will be positively validated by Canon’s own Original Data Security Kit (OSK-E3) regardless of whether or not the images are, in fact, genuine.
See some humorous images on their site, as well as the PDF detailing the vulnerability.
Similar to Strata’s Foto3D CX2 project, Autodesk has a new beta-project code-named ‘Project Photofly‘ that allows you to upload a collection of photos to their cloud, and then download a resulting DWG of the model.
The Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly is a small application that you download and install on your Windows computer. This application allows you to submit your photographs to the Project Photofly servers and view the Photo Scenes returned by the Project Photofly servers. You can save a Photo Scene in its native format, RZI (Autodesk ImageModeler 2009 format), or export the scene to the DWG file format.
It looks pretty impressive, and another example of doing work ‘in the cloud’, and frankly one of the more impressive ones I’ve seen. Project Photofly is currently operational, and they aim to keep it in production until August 1st, 2011. They’ve got a few tutorial and customer testimonials online already. See one below, then go try it out yourself (if you use a Windows machine, that is).
I just received a press release from a company called ‘Human Monitoring Ltd” for a new still image compression technology similar to Google’s new WebP format, however this is not based on their WebM standard but rather based on the existing H.264 standard. This means it can re-use existing H264 encoding hardware already in place in millions of cameras and chipsets worldwide.
Unlike Microsoft’s JPEG-XR and the recently announced Google WebP format, hipix™ is designed to answer the market needs from cameras to web applications and mobile phones. hipix™is unlimited in resolution, supports higher quality 422 color format than WebP, and allows importing and exporting of EXIF data and even audio! HM preferred implementing hipix™using H.264 due to its superior tools, although the patent pending technology covers any inter-intra coding scheme including VP8 and VC1.
They already have tools available for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Android mobile platforms that will allow you to view hipix images and convert existing imagse to the Hipix format. The benefits are somewhere in the 15% to 50% of JPEG, meaning you could (potentially) convert a 1Meg JPEG to a 150k hipix image. In fact, it also maintains EXIF data and can store audio ( more advantages from re-using h264 standards).
Human Monitoring’s hipix™ patent pending technology utilises the existing h.264 video Codec to achieve two to seven times more effective still image compression compared to JPEG images. The utilization of the deployed hardware support of H.264 is what differentiate hipix™from any new compression scheme like JPEG-XR and WebP.By using existing and popular codecs there is no need for new hardware. hipix™ images can be converted back to JPEG and be used as a highly efficient “Photo Zip” format.
All the tools are, for a “limited time only” (I always cringe when I see that), freely available for download from their site. Read the full release after the break.
Putting high-resolution images of famous paintings online is nothing new, although it’s a hotly debated topic amongst museum curators as to whether or not it hurts admissions. But even the highest end cameras can’t compare with what’s coming out of Italy’s ‘Haltadefinizione’ or HAL9000 project which puts up massive images equaling 1,500ppi.
Their more recent image of Botticelli’s La Primivera consists of 28 billion pixels, about 3,000 times the resolution of a consumer digital camera. The pixel density (pixels per inch, or ppi) has also increased, from 580 to 1,500ppi (magazine and book printing are typically 300ppi).
In contrast to the “gallery view” afforded by the online Monet exhibit (in which you can see individual brushstrokes wonderfully), these images are more like a “conservator’s view”, allowing you to zoom in to a level as if observed under a magnifying lens.
The interactive visualization tools are a bit sluggish to get started, afterall that’s some massive data to page in. After that tho, the detail you can see is simply amazing.
One of my favorite websites to visit, FlowingData, has posted a piece on Kristian Cvecek tracking firefly trails in the forest.
Physicist Kristian Cvecek hangs out in the forest sometimes to take these beautiful pictures of firefly trails, using slow shutter speeds on his camera. Even better than the long exposure shot of a Roomba.
An article on Deathfall discusses the work of Joseph Francis, a great photographer that composes his scenes entirely in software and renders them with Maxwell Renderer.
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey has a early article about the Lytro camera, based on some early photographs made by Eric Cheng. He agrees that the camera itself is fascinating, but believes that it’s more damaging to photography that beneficial.
A nice piece of work comes from Halta Definizione who has compiled the world’s highest resolution photograph. Notice it’s not the world’s largest photograph, as it only clocks in at 16 gigapixels, but that 16 billion pixels is focused entirely on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.
Photographers are always in search of that magic time they call “Twilight” or “Magic Hour”. Not the fancy glittery vampire kind, but rather that magic time where the Sun and Moon align to give some truly spectacular lighting opportunities for photographs. Now you can predict your own Twilight times with a great Google Maps mashup online.
Another entry into the Extreme Panoram space comes from the ‘Sevilla 111″ project that has an impressive 111-Gigapixel image up in their interactive viewer. Combining an impressive 9,750 images, it contains some amazing details. You can zoom in to see individual people on the street, planes in the sky, and even individual leaves on trees.
In an attempt to stem the many photoshopped images that wind up on the front pages of major newspapers, Canon has integrated a special crytographic security measure that allows someone to determine if the image is an original or has been altered.
VizWorld.com 
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