PHOTO News
The photographer’s eye must be sharp— not necessarily the photos
Most news photographs are needle- sharp, but sometimes a blurred image tells the story better. Look at the recently announced World Press Photo of the Year 2007, for instance, U.K. photographer Tim Hetherington’s not-quite-sharp picture of a U.S. soldier taking a moment’s break while serving in the Korengal Valley in the Eastern province of Afghanistan, site of some of the most intense fighting in the country. The photograph is part of a picture story that also won Hetherington Second Prize in General News Stories. He was in Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair.
Gary Knight, photographer for the VII Photo Agency and chairman of the World Press Photo selection jury, said, “This image shows the exhaustion of a man—and the exhaustion of a nation. We’re all connected to this. It’s a picture of a man at the end of a line.” And juror MaryAnne Golon, director of photography for Time magazine, commented, “There’s a human quality to this picture. It says that conflict is the basis of this man’s life.”
Even fuzzier is the photo that won first prize in both Spot News Singles and Spot News Stories, made by John Moore, photographing for Getty Images. In the midst of the gunfire and explosion when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Moore caught an impressionistic image of Bhutto’s supporters fleeing the fire and smoke. Thousands of them had gathered for a political rally.
On the other hand, Roberto Schmidt’s crisply focused photo of an angry supporter of defeated presidential candidate Raila Odinga clearly conveys the anger and unrest that swept through Kenya after incumbent Mwai Kibaki squeaked through to a narrow victory in a widely questioned election. The picture won Second Prize in Spot News Stories for Schmidt, of Colombia and Germany, who photographs for Agence France-Presse.
Equally sharp is Chris Detrick’s discomfiting photograph of what looks like terrible violence in a college basketball game—Pepperdine University’s Jason Walberg gouging the eyes of Brigham Young University’s Jonathan Tavernari. No foul was called on Walberg, and Tavernari was not injured—in fact, later in the game he scored back-to-back three-pointers, helping his team win 86–67. The picture won third prize in Sports Action Stories for Detrick, who shoots for the Salt Lake Tribune.
In all, this year’s World Press Photo contest gave prizes in 10 categories to 59 photographers of 23 nationalities. The contest drew 80,536 entries from 5,019 photographers in 125 countries, an increase of 12.5% compared with the previous year. Fully 80% of entries to the contest were made via online uploading.
Technology gives digicams science-fiction-like capabilities
Your wife and teenage daughter are going out to shop, and your wife turns to give you a nice smile, so you grab your digicam to take a photo of them. But as soon as daughter sees the camera her expression turns into a sort of pout, and there’s no point clicking the shutter. In fact, you couldn’t have taken the photo anyway if your camera were equipped with the new “SmileCheck” feature from FotoNation—it won’t actually snap a photo until all the faces in the picture have a smile. And this isn’t something from Star Wars; it’s real. SmileCheck is a third-generation product—first came face recognition, then face tracking, and now SmileCheck, which analyzes the faces in the preview image to see whether the expression for each one is a smile or not.
So you say “Please?” to daughter and she flashes a smile—maybe a little forced, but that’s a nuance still beyond SmileCheck—and the camera takes the photo.
FotoNation says that in addition to ensuring happy-looking family snaps, “Markets for this new technology include high-volume portrait studios, school and event photographers, and identity photography, such as passports and badge ID cards.”
Another innovation from FotoNation is what it calls “FaceTime.” The company explains it this way: “After the photographer puts the camera in FaceTime mode and presses the shutter button, the camera waits to fire the shutter until it recognizes the addition of the face of the photographer to the scene. Once detected, a count-down timer is initiated giving photographers time to relax and compose themselves in the scene.”
Pretty clever stuff, eh? That’s why FotoNation is “a world-leading independent provider of embedded [built-in] imaging solutions for the digital camera and mobile phone industry,” providing products and technology to improve both image quality and the user’s experience. The company’s patented innovations include in-camera corrections for red-eye, dust spot removal, chromatic aberration correction, face tracking, smile detection, and other face-based technologies. FotoNation’s clients include Canon, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Microsoft, Minton, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung, Sanyo, and Sony, and embedded technology from FotoNation is found in “at least two of every three digital cameras sold today.”
But how do you test the software while it’s being developed?—co-workers get tired of posing after a while, not to mention they’ve got their own work to deal with. So FotoNation went to a Hollywood special-effects expert and had him create lifelike manikin heads to use in face-related testing.
The company is headquartered in California, but FotoNation uses engineering expertise from around the world. Some of their research is done in Romania, development in Ireland, and the company’s vice president of business development is in India. Worldwide, the total number of employees is 70 to 80.
Three clever gadgets
The new Celestron LCD Digital Microscope with built-in digicam finally eliminates the awkwardness of peering into an eyepiece, straining to align your eye accurately enough to get a clear view. Instead, this $300 device is equipped with a 3.5-inch LCD viewing screen, so seeing microscopic subjects is no harder than looking at a TV or computer screen. As the New York Times put it, “A microscope for the lab, minus the squinting.”
The LCD Digital Microscope is equipped with an objective lens that provides 4¥, 10¥, and 40¥ magnification, which Celestron says makes it “capable of capturing images and short videos of specimens at magnification levels up to 1600 times their original size.” A 2MP digital camera is built in, with 128MB of internal memory plus a slot for SD cards. There’s also a six-position color filter wheel, and both top and bottom LED illumination. For more details and a list of dealer locations, check out www.celestron.com.
If you want to photograph regular-sized objects but need to use infrared and/or ultraviolet illumination as well as visible light, Coastal Optical Systems offers the new CoastalOpt 60mm UV-VIS-IR 1:4 Apo Macro lens, which they say is “a first in optical design . . . [it] provides full apochromatic correction over an extraordinarily broad waveband ranging from the onset of atmospheric ultraviolet transparency at 315nm to the limit of CCD/CMOS sensitivity at 1100nm in the infrared.”
The lens achieves this unprecedented correction by combining fluorite and quartz with elements made from carefully selected high-transmission glasses, and an advanced floating element optical formula. A brochure with complete lens performance data is available for download from www.coastalopt.com.
And last but not least, the Philips AJL308 Clock Radio can wake you up to a display of your photo slideshows and video, or to relaxing sounds like birds, waterfalls, and church bells. You can upload photos to the clock radio, then choose whether you want it to display a favorite photo all the time, or to give you a slide show of all the pictures you’ve loaded. It will also play MP3 music files and MPEG-4 video clips, from USB thumb drives and SD memory cards. List price is $129.95 but amazon.com currently offers it for $79.97, with free shipping.
SHORT TAKES
Small color LCD displays get cheap—and provide new ways to display your digital photos. A miniature version of a digital photo frame fits on a keychain and shows pictures on a 1.5-inch color LCD screen. Different brands hold anywhere from 30 to 70 photos and cost $20–30. And digital photo Christmas tree balls have a similar display. Both gadgets can show a single photo or show ‘em all in slideshow mode. And who knows— the digiphoto Christmas tree ornaments may be on sale!
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