The Obsidian Stock Blog

Microsoft has been busy in the realm of photography recently.

Not only have they been actively promoting the scRGB color space and introducing a new photo file format, the software giant’s engineers have just unveiled something called Photosynth to the world.

Still at the “technology preview” stage (which means that you can’t download/buy it yet), Microsoft Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Go watch the slick promo video to get a better idea of what Photosynth actually does.

From the Alien Skin press release:

“Alien Skin Software today released Blow Up, an all-new plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Designed for both photographers and graphic artists, Blow Up offers the highest quality image enlargement available. Better than Photoshop bicubic and other third party solutions, Blow Up preserves the crisp lines and smooth colors in a source image. It can scale images up to 3600% — 6 times in each dimension — with no stairstep, halo, or fringe artifacts.

The software sells for $199 and is available for download on the Alien Skin website.”

Full Story here.

(Note: Obsidian Stock does not endorse any product or software it hasn’t thoroughly tested in-house beforehand. Any photographers who have tested a product though, are invited to send us their results and observations so we can share them with the rest of our readership.)

This is way cool:

FrameFree Technologies today announced the launch of FrameFree Studio, the first digital imaging software that allows for the creation of compelling movies from still photographs without a steep learning curve or compromising quality at any bandwidth.

Built on the world’s most advanced pixel-matching and interpolation engine, FrameFree Studio starts with two digital still images of any resolution, and through analysis, interpolation and morphing, automatically provides interactivity and smooth motion between them. The result is a completely new medium and style of visual expression.

A free 14-day Trial Version of FrameFree Express is available for immediate download from http://www.framefree.com.

Ladies and Gentlemen - the future has arrived:

DALSA develops 100+ megapixel CCD.

DALSA Semiconductor has today announced that it has developed the worlds first sensor with a total resolution of over 100 million pixels. To be more specific this single sensor, developed for astronomy, has 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, 111 million in total. The active area of the sensor measures approximately four by four inches and has a 9 µm pixel pitch. This sensor has been developed in conjunction with Semiconductor Technology Associates for the US Naval Observatory.

It’s going to be truly interesting to see just long it’s going to take for a sensor of this caliber to hit the pro photography market…

Incredible, somebody has found it necessary to develop a gadget that can neutralize and disable a digital camera.

From the Georgia Tech press release: Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have completed a prototype device that can block digital-camera function in a given area. Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras.

The prototype device uses off-the-shelf equipment – camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer—to scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras.

The small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings—for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken.

Full Story here.

OpenRaw.org, an organization dedicated to pushing camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats, has released its 2006 survey of photographers and imaging professionals.

Albeit long, it’s an interesting document that showcases the concerns of people in the industry about ever-changing, manufacturer-proprietary RAW formats and its potential pitfalls.

More than two-thirds of the 19,207 participants expressed concern that they won’t be able to open or edit raw files created by older digital cameras. The most telling statistic is the 90% of respondents who agreed: ‘Once a digital image is written to a file by a camera, data in all parts of the image file should belong to the photographer who captured the image. Camera makers should publish full and open descriptions of all parts of the raw image files their camera produce.’

What *is* the RAW problem, exactly?

From OpenRAW.org: In the short history of digital photography, manufacturers have released numerous cameras with constantly evolving RAW formats. This has lead to the existence of a vast number of RAW “dialects,” even within each major brand, that store image and camera setting data in a different manner.

In some cases, manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not, this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.

To date, this vast number of RAW formats has been hidden by the transparent support offered in RAW converter software, provided by both the camera manufacturer and various third parties. At the time of writing, the open source dcraw converter currently supports more than 200 formats. However, as manufacturers lose interest in their discontinued products and drop support for them, the true impact of all of these “dialects” will be felt.

Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.

The OpenRAW Solution: The goal of OpenRAW is to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images. To this end, we advocate open documentation of information about the how the raw data is stored and the camera settings selected by the photographer.

More info is here.

In my other blog, I’ve written today about a recent gig, photographing Pilates exercises for a friend of mine’s brandnew pilates studio in Bend.

Short of recreating the entire article, I thought I’d rather link to the page where I detail the technique I used to create the motion effects.
Try it for yourself!