Building Artificial Faces

Don't like your face online? There's software that can automatically swap out features from a library of other people's mugs. It looks like a variation on morphing, only the software is taking eyebrows, eyes, mouth, nose, and so forth, from one face and blending them into another's. It could be used to protect privacy -- but it also increases that unease over the nature of reality when that world meets a digital realm. Don't like your face on Match.com? Change it. I understand the desire for privacy, and yet I also appreciate how quickly we are slipping through the looking glass into a place where nothing is as it seems, literally.

Photographing an Eclipse

I've done a lot of night photography, and been known to shoot the moon, literally, but was taken with the idea, in an article, of photographing a solar eclipse. Personally, were I readying myself to head to Siberia or the North Pole (where the viewing is supposed to be particularly good), I'd probably set up both digital and film cameras to get all the advantage I could. As the author says, the only way to really get a good image, and not just glare behind a black disk, is to use mathematical modeling, which is similar to what the human vision does in registering differences in illumination and then turning that, via the brain, into an image.

The article's author is an academic who has done a lot of research and whose web site has some astoundingly good eclipse photos.

Photojournalism Pros Fade Out

Many editorial outlets look to microstock photography and sites like Flickr these days to pick up cheap (or free) images for their use. That means less work for professional photographers - a lot less. Here's an interesting article asking the question of what will become photojournalism in an age of amateurs.

SanDisk Introduces Non-Erasable SD Cards

SanDisk has come out with a write-once, read-many (WORM) SD memory card for cameras. Given the format, I think it's clearly taking aim at the prosumer and professional markets. Why would you want a card that would only record and never let you erase or modify an image? A couple of reasons come to mind. One, mentioned by the Engadget post, is in situations - law enforcement, legal uses - where you want to "prove" that the contents could not have changed. But there's another: when you are shooting something critical and you want to ensure that you've minimized the chances of losing data. Grant you, that would be seldom, as immediately dumping the contents onto one of those standalone back-up drives is generally enough, but when you want both the best and suspenders for peace of mind, it's nice to be able to get them both.

Afghan Art Price Competition Includes Photographers

A person who helped create a national art price in Afghanistan had a piece in the Financial Times describing it. Two photographers are involved, and if you scroll down the piece, you can see a shot from one of them: two soccer players looking playfully out of place in the mountainous landscape. It's a photo with humor, cultural relevance, and pleasing composition. It's one of the rare times I've seen a "rule of thirds" composition look so natural and unplanned, with leading lines helping to focus the eye. A very nice image.

Inkless Photo Printers Coming Sunday

This Sunday, Polaroid will introduce its new inkless printer that uses technology from Zink Imaging, according to the VentureBeat blog:

Zink, whose name means “zero ink,” has talked about its innovative technology for some time. It basically embeds chemical dyes inside paper. It passes the paper through a heater, which melts the dyes in the right places to create images on a piece of paper.

The advantages seem clear. Printers could be smaller, because you wouldn't need to have an ink delivery system in the machine. You also wouldn't run out of ink.

However, the cons also seem obvious. The paper will be more expensive and, for the time being, you won't have a choice of supplier. That is likely to reduce the flexibility you can have in interpreting images by using the paper whose characteristics seem closest to what you envisioned.

Old Camera Gallery

The site that Andreas Wolkerstorfer set up doesn't feature pictures of old cameras. It features pictures from old cameras. I think of it as more of a curiosity than anything else. However, if you've been thinking of using a pinhole camera, or maybe loading a Holga with some film to give it a spin, you can get a sense of how things might come out.

Citizens Keep Watch on Photographers

Via the Nobody's Business blog by colleague Rogier van Bakel, Colorado has been busy:

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as "Terrorism Liaison Officers" in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for "suspicious activity" — and are reporting their findings into secret government databases.

The term for the people is "terrorism liason officer." One type of suspicious activity? Taking photos "of no apparent aesthetic value." Is part of their training a crash course in deconstruction and art theory?

Future terrorism "is going to be noticed earliest at the most local level," said Robert Riegle, director of state and local programs for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington.

So when those terrorists try to corrupt our moral fiber with badly-taken photos, we'll be ready. The problem, of course, is that now so much can get classified as "suspicious." There are some famous photographers who took pictures of ordinary places and items who could technically get into hot water these days.