Brad Ideas - Photography - Comments

Flickr update

Chad — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:58:57 -0800

I looked at Flickr's people feature, and it's not a fit for me. The people tags must be of Flickr members. Here's the relevant help text:
http://www.flickr.com/help/people/#1118792
Can I add someone who isn’t a Flickr member to a photo?
People in Photos is all about featuring our current members.
I suppose you could use the "note" feature instead, but that's free text, so it's burdensome, and you get all the associated problems (like spelling).

"Me too" - and thoughts on an option

Chad — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:31:19 -0800

I read this post with great interest because my need is nearly identical to yours - just substitute "kids' summer swim team" for "theatre company." I don't have the photo rotation problem, though, so I'm excited to look into Flickr's features.

My leading idea until finding this post was to create a new Google/Picasa account and share the credentials with my collaborators. I'd be in charge of uploading the photos, but I would ask my collaborators to log in and add face names. I like that I would be able to use the features of the Picasa application for additional organization, editing, etc. But my issue with this approach is keeping the team's photos separate (in Picasa) from my own; I already use Picasa for my personal photos and I think I can't use different Google accounts with one Picasa app; and even if I could I don't want to commingle my personal photos with the team's.

To avoid the town

brad — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:06:11 -0800

I understand the traffic is being kept out of the town. I just noticed many cases where the road would be in a tunnel where in other places it would be put along the side of a mountain, or done elevated. The tunnel obviously puts less blight than the visible road, but is hugely more expensive. The tunnel does not have to be plowed, which is a win, though I have to imagine a covered road is cheaper than a tunnel when it comes to that. There are also a lot of semi-tunnels which are open on one side which clearly exist to avoid having to close the roads for avalanches and snowdrifts. A must in some sections of the alps, but again quite costly. (This from living in a city that for decades has been unable to get a tunnel approved over a small stretch of highway 1 that is often closed due to mudslides and rockfalls, and which is quite slow in any event.

tunnels, costs

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:01:41 -0800

"The huge network of tunnels in the alpine countries continues to amaze me, considering the staggering cost. Sadly, some seem to simply bypass towns that are pretty."

The whole idea of a tunnel is to avoid cars driving through the middle of town! The town isn't there as a tourist attraction! (Reminds me of the old joke about an American in Europe: "Nice castle, but why did you build it so close to the airport?")

As to money, well, it's no secret where Switzerland gets a lot of its money from.

Some are, some are not

brad — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:30:06 -0800

But in many cases there was nowhere to put the Autobahn except in a tunnel, even though the drive was scenic.

I did note a number of places where they had surrounded the highway with plexiglass plates, to let the drivers see the view — or perhaps to not block the view of the homeowners in some cases.

The huge network of tunnels

Fred — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:03:58 -0800

The huge network of tunnels in the alpine countries continues to amaze me, considering the staggering cost. Sadly, some seem to simply bypass towns that are pretty.

Why do you think the towns are still pretty?

If you wait two years...

Shava Nerad — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:53:41 -0800

My company will be producing a similar display tech with AMOLED panels. We're just waiting for the cost of large format inkjet produced AMOLED stock to come down in price. It's really not very far out there.

Also, a halfway point is M$'s Project Natal for interface ideas.

Lens

Nalin Fernando — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:46:48 -0800

This is a great article I am going to buy the canon 5d mark 11 but still can't decide on two lenses
1. Canon 100-400mm F4.5 L is USM
2.Sigma 50-500mm F4.-6.5

I need the zoom as I do wild life photography so what do you recommend please

Thank you in advance

Nalin

Rotate and face recognition

brad — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:48:11 -0800

Cute idea, I presume there are some libraries to let me script the flickr api in perl or similar. I have seen that Polar Rose will do some face recognition on flickr sets, oddly using your facebook contact list (and insisting on publishing your actions to your facebook feed to spam your friends about it) so it might be possible to combine things.

However, at least right now, the facial recognition tools I have seen want you to rotate the photo first before they will find the faces in it.

I may end up doing the rotating by hand. Literally by hand, in that I will take the stack of photos and deal through them putting them all in the same orientations. (one pile for landscape, one for portrait.) By hand is faster than most of the interfaces I have seen.

Does the Flickr API let you

dave glasser — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:38:51 -0800

Does the Flickr API let you rotate photos? You could run a cronjob that looks for photos tagged rot90 (or whatever) and rotates them.

siggraph demo

drewp — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:24:54 -0800

Someone had a system like this at SIGGRAPH about 1-4 years ago. Their focus was actually on their ability to use a few graphics cards at once to render a scene in realtime, but to give them something to render, they were face-tracking people who came to the screen and adjusting their camera based on the position of your face. IIRC, they were moving the camera backwards (like you might do for a game, as opposed to a window?), and the guy there didn't seem to care. I think they were using OpenCV for the face tracking, which is a common free choice for that task. Here's my own OpenCV tester code, in fact: http://bigasterisk.com/darcs/?r=headtrack;a=headblob;f=/cap

Yup, that's it

brad — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:26:00 -0800

That’s the sort of thing that has been done in the lab. I’m interested in seeing it taken further, to working without special glasses or hat, and multiple monitors on a wall.

Remember the issue is that video walls have seams, and thus are imperfect, and today’s main market LCD panels have bezels too large to make a nice small-seam video wall. So the idea is to create the illusion of seamlessness by making the bezels and gaps part of the whole thing.

3d head tracking

Adam Drew — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:34:46 -0800

You mean... like this?

Awesome, thanks for sharing ;-)

marco trezzini — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:20:35 -0800

Dear Brad,
since long time I dream of attending the event, but never made it, since from Lugano Switzerland it's a far destination ...
therefore since years I'm seeing it through the lenses and panoramas, the first was Charles Evans, which I reviewed also in VRMAG, later Will Pearson, and very few others and now ... your excellent coverage. thank you for this beautiful documentary and artistic images. Thanks to twitter for telling me about.

Brads work

Alan Tower — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:03:08 -0800

Just stunning work Brad. Really captures it as if we were looking at it with our eyes but way wider than that even.
Really advanced stuff. Thanks for this wonderful contribution to one of the coolest events on the planet.