this new product (or is it a technology?) called lytro claims to make still images dynamic, for example allowing the user to switch the focus at a later date… sounds interesting as an idea but the examples they show look a bit dodgy… and do we need something like this? not sure…
(thanks to ‘thijs’ for the tip)
photographer ‘jeroen hofman’ contacted me about his forthcoming book based on this series ‘playground’ which has already won several major awards in the past year, the images depict the oddly surreal locations where military, police and emergency services go to practice disaster scenarios… keep your eyes open for the book later this year
nice ‘life in pictures’ slideshow on the life of enigmatic painter (one of my all-time favourites): the recently deceased lucian freud, i especially like the lower image here by ‘david dawson’; shot with an analogue camera but even on closer inspection it still looks like an oil painting in itself…
…these images might still have visual information within the image, or other clues, that could enable a system — either completely automated or using automated and human processes together — to make a guess about where the image was taken. The best case for intelligence analysts would be a fully automated system. This way they could suck in images from a terrorist website, download them off of captured cameras or cell phones, or scan them from hard copy, and feed all this through the system and get locations of where the images were taken. With more and more images being created in our world every day this automated approach is going to be crucial…
really interesting article from ‘wired’ on what military intelligence is doing with the help of google and all of that other data we all put online everyday, privacy issues? forget it…