goldengod

gressenhall 1 by Tim Caynes.

Holland Park School of London, England is set to embark on a trial of fingerprinting their students for attendance purposes.

UK Public services information network Kable is reporting that the school issued a statement today about the mildly controversial program. The system, costing £4,500, will be tested this coming week on all pupils who are late to school before having it rolled out to all 1,500 students.

It plans to build a database so that children can be identified and their time of arrival recorded in a ‘Live Register’ by pressing a finger on an electronic pad. If late arrivals fail to press a pad at the gates or in a classroom they will be recorded as absent.

The local school board has denied that this has anything to do with the UK government’s proposal to build a national registry of children under the age of 12. Whoever the British version of John Stewart is: I’ve already called dibs on the ‘convenient timing’ joke for this one. You can just sit back down and think up some other smug repartee.

Nothing to do with any childrens registry, no doubt just a lucky case of ‘convenient timing’.

No word on what will be done with students who actually value their personal privacy and refuse the process. They will presumably be considered ‘absent’.

This has got to be one of the most interesting DIY photo projects that I’ve seen in a long time, particularly since the visuals produced are honestly not all that interesting.

It’s a Wifi Camera, but not in the more common sense that you’re thinking of. This is not a camera that connects to your computer and downloads the photos by wifi using SD cards.

This is a camera that actually reads and records the electromagnetic radiation put out by standard consumer wifi networks. The name for this strange wifi mapping tool is the Wifi Camera Obscura. From their website:

Wifi Camera Obscura reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world. We will take realtime “photos” of wifi space.

Definitely a new method of alternative photography put together by three very interestingly-named Europeans; Usman Haque, Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer. Take a look, the photos show an interesting picture of the kind of radiation thrown around by our wireless networks all the time.

My sincerest apologies, but due to my extended illness over the past week there will be no Last Fridays event this month. Expect a piece of performance art from myself and the rest of the Last Fridays next month that will hopefully be interesting enough to make up for this.

Snakes on a Plane, arguably the biggest internet movie phenomenon in years opened on August 18th, 2006. My local theatre, The Rio, had recently been restored and reopened after spending time as an aging Bollywood theatre. To commemorate this occasion, I arranged to have our group of friends converge on the Rio Theatre for the sneak preview on August 17th.

Unable to resist the opportunity for insanity, Nick Eddy and I hatched the plan of bringing Monty to the show. Monty is Nick’s four-foot long python. I also brought my camera to cover to premiere. Theatre managers and owners down at the Rio were great, really enthusiastically getting in on the idea with us when I stopped by to present it to them.

The staff at the Rio already had plans of their own. Everywhere were rubber snakes and SoaP promotional materials, ushers were wearing uniforms with little SoaP wings on their lapels, and every customer received a ‘Pacific Air Flight 121′ boarding pass. Nick and Monty hung out near the door, talking with people and sometimes getting their pictures taken with fans. The movie was hilarious, with more people than I expected following the audience participation script.

I want to extend thanks to the staff at the Rio Theatre, they were all really helpful and friendly for the premiere. They made the event fun and interesting, and when I made things crazy by throwing my camera and a live snake into the mix they just ran with it. All in all, it was a great experience thanks to them.

Snakes on a Plane premiere photos are now located in the gallery.

A group of Japanese artists have put together an interesting new twist on light painting. The traditional way of doing it involves taking a single long exposure photograph and writing or drawing (backwards, of course) what you want the camera to see painted.

These guys took it one step forward and did a series of long exposure photographs, drawing what they wanted and then animating all the frames together. What I find most interesting is watching the animators move along, blurred out behind the brightness of their creations.

A number of examples can be seen on their site, located at PIKAPIKA.

Weblogs Inc’s offering to the image-obsessed world, The Digital Photography Weblog, has closed its doors. Posting on all topics related to digital photography, the site has been active since September 2004. In more recent days, the site rested on the shoulders of one blogger by the name of Andrew Barrow who found himself saddled with update requirements that were unreasonable to him. I can definitely say that my main reason for not becoming more interested or involved the site was the scarcity of updates and content beyond the ‘Digital Photo of the Day’. In a comment on the final post, Andrew writes:

“As the only writer on the blog I only found out about the closure a few days ago - things move quickly at Weblogs Inc. There have been numours(sic) calls for writers to the blog over the last few months to boost the supply of relevant news, reviews and tips. But as far as I am aware no one applied. Without heavier posting - more than my abilities could supply - the future of the blog was always in doubt.“

Weblogs Inc. directs former readers to their other offerings, namely Engadget and Download Squad. To the best I have been able to determine, Andrew Barrow is still on staff and continuing to write for other Weblogs projects, including Slashfood alongside Nicole Weston and Sarah Gim. There is no word on whether he will become involved in any other photography blog projects.

Jhayne pointed me in direction of a neat service called Flickr Leech that a creative gentleman put together using the Flickr API. Rather then spend your time paging through photos ten by ten on the explore pages forever and ever, you can just call up all 500 top Flickr interestingness photos for that day at once. Alternatively, for individual users or pools, you can pull up 250 photos all at once.

I’ve been playing around with it for a bit and it’s fun. I find it much easier to browse the latest interesting photos, but I haven’t discovered a particularly useful application for it on individual user accounts. Play around with a bit, let me know if you find anything particularly fun to do with it.

I was fiddling around on the Photoshop Blog when I found this interesting gem of a story.

“During the summer of 2006, a group of ambitious photographers travel to the pristine Icelandic landscape to capture its beauty. They apply their craft during 22 hour-long days bathed in horizontal light. Since each member of the team must work around the clock, the processing equipment of choice are laptops running Lightroom, Adobe’s new photo management software and the venerable Photoshop.”

If you ask me, it sounds like it was hella fun. Check out the full Lightroom Adventure blog over at O’Reilly’s Digital Media section. Or just click this link, whatever.

Gales
by Andrew Ferguson

The number one question people ask me when I mentioned that I’d recently gotten a new digital camera was ‘How many megapixels does it have?’, right after ‘Do I know you?’ and ‘Why won’t you stop talking to me?’.

Why do people ask this?

We’ve been trained to recognize megapixels as the most important thing to think of when shopping for a digital camera. It’s an easy number to keep track of. In order to push the latest camera of the month, advertising continually hammers it into us.”Of course the new model is better, it has a million more pixels!” A million sure sounds like a lot more.

Understanding Megapixels

The easiest way to understand megapixels is to think of it like square footage. If a picture is 3,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, then it’s 6,000,000 square pixels (3,000 times 2,000) or 6 Megapixels. That’s all there is to it. The trick is that any camera can seem many megapixels better by making only small increases in image quality.

Let’s stick with the same example, but change the numbers to 3,200 and 2,200. It seems like only a small difference. Multiply those two numbers together again and you’ll get 7,040,000 pixels. Seven megapixels sounds like a lot more than six, but it’s really just a small difference.

The Retail Side of Things

The salespeople at store use this ‘massive’ difference in megapixels to convince you to upgrade. The problem is that the sales associates aren’t lying, most of them just don’t know any better. They really believe that the 7MP camera has a large advantage over the 6MP one. The very manufacturers that play this numbers game have trained them to move as much product as they can.

Distracted Joy by Andrew Ferguson

Having attended many of these ‘training sessions’ when I worked in retail electronics, they’re worthless. An hour or two of “Our product is so fucking awesome! Here’s a bunch of semi- legitimate BS you can quote at customers.” The people who run these sessions are like conspiracy theorists hyped to the gills on speed and visions of profit.

Any questions you raise about the legitimacy of the tests they run to get these numbers will turn your coworkers against you. Your coworkers don’t care; they want the presentation to be over so they can get free stuff.

What You Can Do

The best thing you can do is educating yourself on the features and benefits of different digital cameras. Megapixels can matter, but not nearly as much as the manufacturers would have you believe. Image quality, colour, tone, and sharpening algorithms are all factors that need to be taken into account as well. The quality of the sensor and the quality of the lens will make a far bigger difference than megapixels will.

DPReview is one of the best places I found to educate yourself on camera information, if you don’t mind wading through oodles of data. Don’t say i didn’t warn you; this site is so far in depth that I’m convinced the writers live in houses made of cameras. You can also skip ahead to the summary page or run a comparison across the models you’re looking at buying if you’re a busy person.

Related Articles

• The Pros and Cons of Renting Digital Camera Equipment
• The Megapixel Myth at KenRockwell.com

Blush Advertising Bag
Originally uploaded by LiveU4.

Work has been not the speediest thing in the world this morning, so my boss and I have been trading back a couple interesting videos. This led me to discover the niftyness that is IT’S ART magazine. Focusing on digital art and animation, it’s a great little repository of interesting videos of the same, mostly short films and commercials.

• Black Box - The evil geniuses over at my personal favourite ad agency, Psyop, let their imaginations run wild in the inner workings of a Coke machine. Psyop’s trademark strange creatures along with a sense of macro vision, steampunk & analog-tech all combine in a logic defying (but seemingly fully developed) fantasy world to get some dude his Coke.
• Red Vs. Blue - A good old fashioned heist. The opening has some great gritty, grainy Japanese architecture to set the scene. The city sounds segue nicely into some bumping & scratching funk to get things going. The overproduced bloom lighting effects really work for maximum cinematic sexiness in this environment. At some points it looks like a really gritty anime come to three-dimensional life via a drunken bet. And god-damn do those stuffed bears look mean. Low-res link.
• Liquids on a Plane - Not originally all that entertaining a commercial, but since the recent ‘No Liquids’ rule has been instated on most UK, US, and Canadian flights, it has become infinitely funnier to me. Maybe the UK Transportation Authority was just thirsty.
  
• Grand Theft Cola - Produced in HD over 15 weeks, this one just began airing before movies in American theatres on the 11th. A snappy little Grand Theft Auto-ish rampage goes into an all out, unexpected musical extravaganza. If you click no other links from me, click this one.