While browsing the photo and print collection at the Library of Congress, I found this really cool photo of a telescope set up in New York City. I wish they had a higher resolution version: it’s very cool.
You can find all sorts of cool stuff in the Library of Congress print collection, much of it public domain.
Dan has put up a nice photo of a butterfly that he took while zipping around China Grove Camp. Now that my weekend chore is completed (painting my garage) maybe I’ll try to go out for an evening walk and do the same, maybe with my new video camera.
Well, after I crossed the finish line of the Bay To Breakers yesterday, I snapped the picture on the right. It seems that exercise can cause hideous genetic mutations.
Well, no. Actually, it shows that my camera phone is a line transfer rather than a frame transfer ccd device: it scans the image out as it is taking it, rather than taking it all at once and then clocking the stored frame out line by line. This means that camera motion can cause bizarre distortions of the resulting image, resulting in the kind of cool picture on the right.
I think I’ll use it in my sidebar, and link it back to this posting just for fun.
I had dinner tonight with fellow SIGGRAPH sketch jury member Kevin Bjorke, whom I found out is the brains behind PhotoPermit.Org, a website that tries to shine the light of justice onto inappropriate police actions taken against photographers. Many police officers seem to be unaware of the rights of individuals to photograph public spaces. From their site:
Have you been hassled while trying to make what you thought was an innocuous photograph or video? Have you been threatened? Have security guards demanded that you hand over your film, memory cards, and/or camera? Perhaps snatched them from you? Then PhotoPermit.Org is intended for you.
Have you been successful in convincing irate parents, confused rent-a-cops, and troublesome self-appointed “authorities” to let you go on with your own perfectly legal work in peace? Then this site is especially intended for you, to share your methods and success in making the world a more free one. No one has ever demonstrated that an ignorant society is a safer one.
Have you been one of millions of honest, non-threatening photographers who are anxious about visiting the streets of their own cities, national parks, or public landmarks for fear they will be targeted by overzealous authorities? Then PhotoPermit is here to help you be you sure and comfortable in your rights and responsibilities.
Awesome. I’ve bitched about this issue before, it’s good to see someone has provided this useful resource to help inform and protect the legal actions of people against abuses of authority.
Courtesy of the the Make magazine blog, here is the instructions for Dirkon – The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz], a pinhole camera design first published a Czech magazine in the 1970s.
There is a nice interview on dpreview.com with David Coffin, author of dcraw.c, a nice little Linux program that decodes most RAW formats from digital cameras. Very cool and useful stuff. From the interview:
3. Are you ever concerned about the legal implications of reverse-engineering proprietary file formats?
If anyone sued me, I’d be the biggest free software hero since Jon Johanson. It’s better for the camera makers to ignore me and hope I lose interest.
Heh. Rock on, Dave.
Eric’s exploration of digital infrared photography over on flutterby has urged me to try to take some more infrared photographs. Toward that end, I’ve created Experiments in Infrared Digital Photography in my brainwagon photo gallery. So far, there are only three images, all derived from a single shot of some plants that I did yesterday. I was experimenting with changing the result using gimp. Let me know what you think.
Dan Lyke Eric over at flutterby scored an Olympus 2020 and is using it to do Infrared Photography. Cool stuff, I did a bit of it myself with my Nikon 4500. Check out this or this for some better, slightly image processed examples. Click on the thumbnail or this link to see another processed example, or this link to see the original before image processing.
I’ve been interested in alternative photographic techniques for quite some time, so it was cool to see blueprintphotography mentioned on the Make blog. Very cool images, with a complete howto.
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here is Mike Golembewski’s page on Scanner Cameras. You can get more details on building a similar camera from Jason Yang’s thesis, A Light Field Camera for Image Based Rendering or Wang and Heidrich’s Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System. Good stuff.
I was reading this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which says that last December’s tsunami create a wave 90 feet high. They said that the wave would have reached the clock of the San Francisco Ferry Building (not the top, which is 248 feet, but the lower edge of the clock face). Here is a picture of the building from 1898. I reckon that entire scaffolding would have been underwater.
Ouch.
I must admit to a certain fascination with ancient Egypt, so it was kind of cool to note that the Library of Congress has a number of nice photographs in their collection for download, including stereo pictures like this one. A dab of the Gimp, and you can repair some of the minor tears and clean up the background so it looks nice on your webpage. Fun stuff. The Gimp is worth learning.
While testing the low light performance of my new cellular phone, I noticed that even in medium indoor lighting, the camera had significant amounts of noise (and blur). Still, there is a cool program called Neat Image which I’ve mentioned before. It can remove a lot of the noise from images and yielded the following cleaned up image.
If you do a lot of photography in low light, try giving Neat Image a try. Highly recommended.
The autochrome images of World War I subjects reminded me of the excellent Prokudin-Gorskii collection that you can see at the Library of Congress website. They also have a rather large archive of the three-color separation images that you can search and use, most of which are fairly mundane landscapses, but some of which include excellent pictures like the one on the right. The picture of the Tajik man on the right was taken in 1911.
This glimpse into the past is just too cool.
