I love the jaunty look of these houses in Northampton Street, Cambridge. I can imagine Pixar making the one on the right into an animated cartoon character.
Category Archives: Photography
Photosynth
Now here is something genuinely original from Microsoft — Photosynth. (Well, some of it seems to rely on Seadragon, a technology developed by a company recently acquired by Microsoft, but still…)
It’s software that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
There’s a fascinating TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas which demonstrates the idea.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Later… Quentin points out that the online demonstrations will only work in IE. Well, what do you expect…?
Microsoft’s new coffee table
Nice video from the D:5 conference. The bit I really like is the way it interacts with the Canon IXUS.
Picture post
Hallelujah! My son Brian has finally started a Blog! Nice title too.
Feline revision
It’s exam revision time chez Naughtons and the cats are fed up with being ignored, so one of them (Tilly) has decided that if she can’t beat ’em she may as well join them.
Right angles
Front Court, Clare College with King’s College Chapel intruding.
Clunkiness is the new black
There’s been quite a lot of chat on photography sites about the Canon G7. Why? Because of its ‘clunky’ feel. It reminds people, apparently, of ‘real’ cameras. The top view, for example, is supposedly reminiscent of a Contax or even an M-Leica.
A guy in the Financial Times even claimed it was a ‘rangefinder camera’. Odd that this doesn’t appear in the technical specs.
Stand by for a new trend in ‘retro’ digital cameras.
Atrium
The atrium in my department. Note painting of seagull.
The end of professional photography?
Nice Guardian column by Andrew Brown…
Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites…
Later: Nick Carr has commented on Andrew’s piece. “It’s not that I have anything against amateur photographers (being one myself)”, he writes,
it’s that I think we’ll find – are finding already, in fact – that while amateur work may be an adequate economic substitute for professional work, there are things that pros can accomplish that amateurs cannot. We see in the decline of professional photojournalism how the Internet’s “abundance” can end up constricting our choices as well as expanding them.
Interesting uses for an Amazon.co.uk box, no. 357
It makes a perfectly serviceable residence (though tails have to remain outside in the cold).