Dual Photography


Some bright folk, mainly from Stanford University (one from Cornell), have demonstrated a technique to produce photographic images without the use of a camera. The technique exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to allow an image to be recreated from the point of view of the projector that’s lighting the scene, even though there’s no camera at that location. Additionally, it allows the scene to be relit arbitrarily (now that sounds like something I could use!) Quite deep (man) but very interesting. There’s a movie file too, which I haven’t finished downloading yet and a large PDF of the complete paper.

[Update: make sure you see the movie – it’s worth it. BitTorrent download link]

Nikon being idiotic, Adobe being hilarious

PhotoshopNews.com has a story about Nikon’s frankly stupid idea to encrypt (yes, *encrypt*) the white balance data in their NEF file format. No comment, really. What I find *really* funny is that Adobe is worried about breaking the DMCA to reverse-engineer the format. Send ’em all to gaol (that’s “jail”, for the non-English readers) for an unspecified, unwarranted amount of time, I say ;)

Canon Technology Library

If you want to get right down to the nitty gritty (as a great man once said) regarding digital camera technology, you *really* need to check out Canon’s Technology Library. This microsite (although I hesitate to use the term “micro”) has a whole stack of information on everything Canon from DIGIC, to CMOS versus CCD, to EOS evolution (including comparisons between film and digital), you name it. Most of this information, while being obviously Canon-specific, is of general relevance to digital photography.