An abandoned airplane hangar. A huge piece of light-sensitive cloth. A pinhole, a quarter-inch or more in diameter. An exposure that could last from 5 to 12 days. Producing an image, 25 feet by 100 feet.
Such is the largest camera obscura ever conceived - and it’s an ambitious project by six photographers, collaborating to set a new world record.
Photographers who register their work with the U.S. Copyright Office should prepare to fork over a few extra bucks beginning July 1.
The copyright office is raising the fees for registering single works and groups of photographs from $30 to $45. The cost of basic registration last went up in 1999.
The copyright office initially proposed raising the fee for groups of photos to $75, saying it costs more to process groups of photographs than other works. But after photographers protested, the office decided to keep the fee at the same price as the basic copyright registration fee.
The fee for having the copyright office staff conduct a records search is also going up - doubling from $75 to $150 per hour. And the office will begin charging $100 to provide an estimated search fee.
The fee for preregistration – a new type of registration that protects a creative work before it is completed – remains $100.
Creative works are automatically protected by copyright, but registering with the copyright office provides greater assurance of legal protection in case of infringement. Photo associations recommend that photographers register their most recent work with the copyright office on a regular basis.
The copyright office says it needs to raise fees to keep up with rising costs. More fee changes are expected next year when the copyright office makes it possible to register works online.
The complete list of fee changes is available at www.copyright.gov/reports/fees2006.html.
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.
Another fantastic photographer joins the talent-pool at Obsidian Stock: Welcome Tom Merrow!
![[]](http://www.obsidianstock.com/gallery/gallery/landscapes/cascades/tm001_00007.jpg)
Tom grew up in an Air Force family and while he got to travel around the world, didn’t set down roots until he came to Oregon in 1978 for a job in high tech - and knew that he had finally found home.
These days, Tom focuses his lens mostly on landscape and nature photography. He is an avid hiker and climber, and many of his images are taken high in the Oregon Cascades and offer unusual perspectives on our beautiful region of volcanic peaks, alpine lakes, dense forests, waterfalls, and lava fields. He also makes an annual pilgrimage to Utah’s red rock country and brings back breathtaking images every time.
Tom is active in the local photography community and is widely recognized for his image processing prowess, which he generously shares with anyone who has an interest. He acknowledges spending entirely too much time in front of his computer.
Don’t leave this site without taking a glimpse at some of Tom’s beautiful images!
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.
Most people (photographers and their clients alike) seem at times a little fuzzy on what copyright really means, and how to deal with it.
Obsidian Stock welcomes Bend photographer Scott Schechtel to our ever-growing roster of talented contributors.
![[]](http://www.obsidianstock.com/gallery/gallery/landscapes/cascades/ss001_00069.jpg)
Scott was born and raised in the Chicago area, but got immediately obsessed with Oregon at the age of 10 after seeing a picture of Mt. Hood in a travel book. Following his first visit to the state at 14, he was determined to attend Oregon State University to pursue a degree in Forestry - and eventually fulfill his dream of living in Oregon.
He has since worked for the US Forest Service, performing timber stand exams and surveys, and fought wildfires throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Today, his photographic file from many years and miles of backpacking across the Western states accompanies articles he wrote for magazines such as Camping Life, Mountain Living, Cascades East, Backpacker and Hooked on the Outdoors.
Scott continues to seek the road less travelled, and plans to publish field guides detailing his discoveries. Now a full-time freelancer, he also designs websites and writes on topics ranging from fire fighting to building a home.
You can see more of his photographic work right here.
Microsoft has announced a new image format called Windows Media Photo (with a WDP file extension). According to their white paper, this new format offers compression ratios close to JPEG-2000 but with the computational requirements of JPEG (smaller files with the same image quality). The use of new algorithms are also claimed to reduce the visibility of ‘objectionable spatial artifacts’ (those mosquito JPEG artifacts). Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of image formats including both fixed and floating point numerical representations (think wide dynamic range), various color spaces, metadata (including EXIF) and even transparency. This new format will be supported in Windows Vista when it arrives and will be made available for Windows XP. There has been no word yet of support for the format in any hardware devices.
