Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Automated facial recognition

As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.

London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.

To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.

Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.

Little chess photo project

I walked around my building and neighbourhood, recreating the classic 1851 chess game played between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London.

The game reminds me a bit of the Orson Scott Card novel Ender’s Game. The book features a battle where one side seems to be defeated but manages to satisfy the formal conditions of victory. This game seems like a nice reminder that the real objective is checkmate, not gaining or protecting material. Anderssen tosses away rooks and even his queen, all while setting up checkmate with two knights and bishop.

I may try photographing some other classic games in interesting venues, though it is hard to do in a way that makes the pieces completely clear. On this chess set, the bishops look too much like pawns. I am going to add some red dots to them – marking them like queen bees.

One year with the 5D Mk II

A year ago today, I got the Canon 5D Mark II digital single lens reflex (dSLR) camera.

I have been very happy with it. The image quality is great, especially in low light, and it is a lot more robust than the Rebel XS I had before. Everything about the camera is what you would expect from a machine intended for serious and intense use.

I feel like I have done a lot with the camera already, and that it has a lot of life and potential in it yet.

Photos and asides

Sorry for the thin content here lately. I have been intensely busy with other things.

For instance, last night I took photos at a Young Canadians in Finance sponsored fundraiser for the United Way. The keynote speaker was Wayne Wouters – Clerk of the Privy Council and Canada’s top bureaucrat. The United Way has a press release up about the event, which includes one of my photos.

P.S. If you are planning to mail anything in Canada – or have anything mailed to you – it may be wise to do it soon.

P.P.S. You can solve chess endgames for free online, using the Nalimov Endgame Tablebases. Once you are down to six or fewer pieces (including kings), the number of possible chess positions falls off sharply. In fact, they can all be stored in just over 7 gigabytes of space.

Photojournalistic style

These are some of the nicest things about having a quasi-journalistic photographic style:

  1. Most of your gear is light enough to carry around
  2. You don’t need to spend endless hours in Photoshop applying otherworldly effects
  3. The gear is versatile, and useful for almost every kind of photography
  4. It could help to secure permission for projects like my hospital idea

It would be awfully restrictive to only be able to work in a studio, and it would be tiresome to spend an eternity with a mouse in hand, coaxing exotic images from RAW files.

Digital Photo Professional, Photoshop, Flickr Uploader

I have finally processed some photos that had been too-long ignored:

Now I can go get some new images – maybe some indoor portraiture, or still life stuff. Or some more ‘spring emerging from the Ottawa freezer’ shots.

[Update: 1 May 2011] Bonus: Enriched Bread Artists – Open House 2011

Sex and understanding nature

Walking around the other day, observing the slow emergence of spring, it occurred to me that there is another whole set of reasons to provide children with early and accurate sexual education, aside from their important right to understand their own bodies.

Briefly, it is impossible to understand nature, history, or biology well without knowing about sex. Why do plants have flowers? Why do birds and insects fly between them? Why do animals form pairs? Why do some species of bird have males that look very different from females (displaying sexual dimorphism)? Why is there such a variety of life forms on Earth? Conversely, why are there so many similarities between life forms on Earth? What defines the human species?

None of these questions can be answered in a satisfactory answer without reference to sex. Plants have flowers because sexual selection helps produce diversity, which improves survival odds. Plants bribe more mobile creatures into carrying around their sex cells (pollen), paying the bribe in the form of nectar. Animals often form pairs to ease the burden of parenting. Sexual dimorphism is reflective of differing investment costs in reproduction between sexes, as well as the way in which sexual selection can drive evolutionary development. Sexual reproduction has contributed to biological diversity, and yet the fact that many organisms need to perform the same basic tasks explains some of their similarity. Humans are the set of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring with one another.

Any understanding of nature that excludes sex is sure to be terribly impoverished. As such, it seems foolish to delay telling children about it until they themselves are starting to reach sexual maturity. It seems much better for it to be a fact of life they have learned accurate things about all along.