Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Image Journal, Volume 1, Issue 4 published

Published on December 28, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

image_frontThe fourth issue of  The International Journal of the Image has now been published.

Volume 1, Issue 4 contains:

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27% of Photos and Videos Now Captured on Smartphones

Published on December 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Lauren Indvik at Mashable Tech…

More than a quarter of photos and videos shot by individuals in the U.S. are now being captured by smartphones, according to an online survey of 3,300 Internet users ages 13 and up. Sales data suggest smartphones are replacing consumers’ need for low-end point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders.

The percentage of photos taken with a smartphone went from 17% to 27%, a 44% increase from the year previous, according to a survey conducted by NPD Group. Meanwhile, sales of point-and-shoot cameras dropped 17% in volume and 18% in revenue in the first 11 months of 2011. Individual sales of pocket camcorders dropped 13%, with a 10% decrease in revenue.

Higher-end items performed better: Sales of cameras with detachable lenses (average price: $863) increased by 12%, and sales of point-and-shoot cameras with optical zooms of 10x or greater (average price: $247) grew by 16%. More…

Putting the ‘art’ in artificial intelligence

Published on December 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

(Credit: M. Scott Brauer)

 

From Helen Knight at MITNews…

Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games, but writing his own artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

Growing up on the island of Majorca, off the coast of Spain, Torralba spent his teenage years designing simple algorithms to recognize handwritten numbers, or to spot the verb and noun in a sentence. But he was perhaps most proud of a program that could show people how the night sky would look from a particular direction. “Or you could move to another planet, and it would tell you how the stars would look from there,” he says.

Today, Torralba is a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he develops AI systems that can interpret images to understand what scenes and objects they contain. More…

Trillion-frame-per-second video

Published on December 14, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From MITnews…

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says. More…

Sharing a Guarded Legacy

Published on December 9, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

(Credit: Couresty George and Betty Woodman)

 

From Ted Loos at The New York Times, Art & Design…

When a curator from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome contacted Betty and George Woodman a dozen years ago, he made what would be, for most parents, a welcome request. He wanted to borrow from the Woodmans’ cache of rare vintage prints by their daughter — the photographer Francesca Woodman, who died in 1981 — to mount a show of her work.

“We refused,” Mr. Woodman said recently, seated in the large Chelsea loft where he and his wife have lived and created their own art for 31 years. “He said, ‘We take very good care of work — we had several El Grecos here last year.’ And I told him, ‘Well, El Greco didn’t have his father looking out for him.’ ”

The Roman curator got lesser, more recently printed images for his show.

The Woodmans are choosy about sites for their daughter’s work, and they have been holding out for years for the ideal place to burnish her legacy. Recently they got what they had been hoping for. More…

Train of Thought: On the ‘Subway’ Photographs

Published on December 1, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Bruce Davidson at The New York Review of Books Blog…

In the spring of 1980, I began to photograph the New York subway system. Before beginning this project, I was devoting most of my time to commissioned assignments and to writing and producing a feature film based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, Enemies, A Love Story. When the final option expired on the film, I felt the need to return to my still photography—to my roots.

I began to photograph the traffic islands that line Broadway. These oases of grass, trees, and earth surrounded by heavy city traffic have always interested me. I found myself photographing the lonely widows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men who line the benches on these concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I traveled to other parts of the city, from Coney Island to the Bronx Zoo. I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before. The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. More…