Photo News from
November/December 2008 Issue
by Jerry O'Neil

Google will analyze “one trillion” online images

We’re seeing . . . a hundred billion images being captured and made available online every year,” is the amazing statement made by R.J. Pittman, Google’s Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties. “There are over 750 million camera-phone-equipped mobile phones . . . sold every year, and over 100 million digital cameras . . . sold every year . . . and these numbers continue to accelerate. We envision, in the not too distant future, a corpus of over a trillion images online.” (To be facetious for a moment, that would make a stack of prints more than halfway to the moon in height, but it would probably fall over. And if we divvied up those trillion images equally, given the current world population of 6.8 billion plus, every man, woman, child, and infant on earth would get 147 photos.) “So for Google, we see a big opportunity to organize the world’s images. And frankly because there are so many of them, it’s a big challenge, and . . . could be a really big value to our users in the future.”

Pittman goes on to say that Google already searches the Internet for all available images and indexes them using several techniques. One uses the text that accompanies an image on its Web site, but of course that text may not describe the image very well. “So we have to use other techniques to improve the accuracy and improve the quality of really deciphering what that image is about. And the frontier that’s most interesting and exciting to us in that arena is image processing, computer vision, and visual search . . . that is, actually understanding something about the pixels in the picture, and being able to make closer approximations and estimations of actually what’s in the picture, to help us provide a better search experience when people are looking for something very specific. . . . some of the examples . . . include things like facial recognition, being able to label a picture with you and all of your friends, and then use that as your training picture, to then tell the image search engine to go and find all of the pictures that have yourself and your . . . friends . . . so that it can automatically group your pictures according to who’s in them. This is a hugely powerful feature . . . to be able to actually identify who’s in [the pictures] makes it really easy to sort and find and share images.”

Beyond facial recognition, already built into many digital cameras, Google’s researchers would like to be able to do scene analysis. That is, in addition to recognizing people and faces, they’d like to be able to identify the objects in a picture—say, the Eiffel Tower, Mount Everest, your grandmother’s front porch, or whatever. For locations that aren’t as well-known as the Eiffel Tower and Mount Everest, it will be useful that many photos are already being geo-tagged with GPS location data, either in-camera or afterward.

ost photo contests are designed so nearly anyone can enter, but as a leading manufacturer of top-quality microscopes, back in 1974 Nikon decided to create a contest just for photomicrographers (yep, photographers-through-microscopes). The annual Nikon Small World photo contest is open to anyone over the age of 18 interested in digital or film photography through a microscope. (The usual exceptions apply; Nikon employees, their families, the contest judges, and individuals engaged in the manufacture or sale of microscopes or photographic equipment can’t enter.) For additional information on entering the 2009 contest and to see a gallery of past winners, go to www.nikonsmallworld.com.

Over the years, winners have included both professionals and hobbyists and have come from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. According to the rules, “The subject matter is ­ un­restricted and any type of light- microscopy technique is acceptable.”

All this would be pretty much ho-hum if the photos were simply routine images of blood vessels or the like, but these photomicrographers “create beautiful imagery while showing an understanding of advanced scientific disciplines,” as Nikon puts it. The images are gorgeous—some look like they’re taken through a kaleidoscope, some look completely abstract, and still others look tantalizingly “real” but are unidentifiable.

This year’s contest received a record number of entries. The winners won’t be announced until well after this issue has gone to press, so to whet your appetite, here are some of the 2007 winning photos that we especially liked —from the top 20, but not necessarily ranked at the very top.

Handy little USB drives grow up, get cheap, add frills
Photo magazines used to write about file boxes for storing your 35mm slides. Now, for storing your digital photos, we’ll mention some USB drives.

You probably use them, or have seen them, the little finger-sized digital memory gadgets that plug directly into a computer’s USB port and are used more and more for storing and transporting digital photos, videos, MP3 music, and many other kinds of digital data. They’re also called flash drives, thumb drives, and jump drives. (Wikipedia helpfully points out that this kind of jump drive is not the interstellar hy­perdrive beloved of science-fiction authors.)

USB drives used to be expensive. Just four years ago, at photokina 2004, Lexar was able to bring a lot of reporters to their booth by giving them a 64 MB drive containing the text and photo files for the Lexar press kit. In 2004, a free 64 MB “gimme” was a good incentive. Today you’d have to offer a lot more, since 1 GB USB drives are currently ­selling for less than $10.

Yes, like practically all consumer electronics, these drives have bulked up (to 64 GB or more) while simultaneously getting cheaper (today under $15 for some 4 GB models). And they’re dressing up, too. Many still have the “industrial design” look, but since even grade-school kids are using the drives these days, manufacturers such as Kingston Technology are talking about “making a fashion statement” with its petite DataTraveler Mini Slim USB flash drive, available in black, pink, or blue. (2GB around $11; 4GB around $19.) Or take the next step with Kingston’s DataTraveler Style, which you can personalize with decorative, interchangeable inserts or “skins.” It has a slide-out USB connector and costs about $22 for the 4 GB model, $25 for 8 GB.

Finally, at the elegant end of the flash-drive spectrum, we have Kingston’s limited-edition DataTraveler 4GB “Terra Cotta” USB flash drive, with gold-colored finish engraved with the image of one of China’s famous 2,200-year-old terra cotta warriors. About $32.

And don’t think we’re overlooking the drives from a zillion other companies, including SanDisk, Lexar, Kodak, PNY, and many others. I’m not trying to plug Kingston, but when their PR photos of the three kinds of flash drives landed on my desk at about the same time, I couldn’t resist Photoshopping them into a single picture—with the relative sizes shown accurately.

Searching for Serious Photographers
PHOTO Techniques (PT) is conducting a search among its readers for serious ­photographers whose technical ex­pertise, artistic vision, and philosophy demonstrate a commitment to photographic excellence. Selected photog­raphers will be featured in future PT promotional materials that let our ­advertisers know something about our readers. You will be doing us a voluntary unpaid favor that will be greatly appreciated.

Interested readers should visit www.phototechmag.com/serious to download a form for submission and to see a sample promotion. If you do not have access to the Web, please submit your entry with complete contact information including telephone number, email address, a biographical sketch, a short statement explaining your involvement in photography, the importance of high-quality equipment in your work, and how PT helps you perfect your craft. Please include several samples of your work. Send your entry to: Serious Photographer, PHOTO Techniques, 6600 W. Touhy Avenue, Niles, IL 60714-4516.

SHORT TAKES

Top 11 things you WON’T see at photokina 2008
11. New Super 8 home movie equipment.
10. New models of disc film cameras.
 9. Polaroid filling an entire exhibit hall.
 8. Agfa filling an entire exhibit hall.
 7. Photojournalists lined up at the Kodak exhibit to get free rolls of film.
 6. Big exhibits of darkroom sinks and temperature mixing valves.
 5. New T-mount lenses, where the same lens can be used on nearly all SLRs.
 4. New slide projector models.
 3. Voluptuous models in skimpy outfits trying to get people to look at the products in their booths—no, wait, maybe you WILL see some of that.
 2. A new, super-push developer that pushes Tri-X to ISO 12,000 without any grain!
and the TOP thing you WON’T see at photokina 2008—
 1. Old-timers shaking their heads and saying, “Boy, I’m glad I’ll be retired before this digital photography stuff gets here”!

U.S. consumers think DVDs are the safest storage method for their digital images— According to the 2008 U.S. Digital Imaging Survey published by the Photo ­Marketing Association (PMA), in 2007 more digital photos in U.S. households were stored using writable CDs and DVDs than by any other storage method. Households with digital cameras stored an average of 953 digital images on CDs/DVDs. On average, 844 images were stored on the computer’s hard drive and 701 images on external hard drives. On average, consumers stored 277 digital images online. About 33% of consumers feel DVD storage is “Very Safe,” with an additional 45% rating it as “Somewhat Safe.”

Faked photo was a paper tiger — Fake photos have existed since the earliest years of photography, but their numbers have exploded with digital imaging. Today many photos are faked subtly and expertly using the latest Photoshop tools. But some are faked more simply and more crudely. Take the photo by Zhou Zhenglong, an ordinary 54-year-old farmer and hunter living in Shaanxi province in north-central China. He heard you could win more than 1 million yuan (about $146,000) for finding a South China tiger in the wild. (This very endangered tiger species hadn’t been seen in its habitat in more than 20 years, according to official reports.) So he went into the forests of Shaanxi, and last October showed officials and the press dozens of digital photos he had taken of the rare tiger. Provincial officials were delighted and awarded Zhou 20,000 yuan (about $2,920). Shaanxi Forestry Administration Bureau Deputy Director Zhu Julong was quoted in the China Daily newspaper as saying. “After the careful examination, experts confirmed the authenticity of the photos. That means the tiger has been found again after more than 20 years.” Despite this official “verification” of the photos, China’s online community was suspicious and showed it was literally a paper tiger—Zhou’s photos really showed an old tiger poster “propped up among the trees”—and the online folks accused officials of supporting the fake to boost tourism in this remote and relatively poor province. Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Fudan University, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview, “In my opinion, this is the struggle between the truth and government interest. Zhou’s just a normal farmer who was inspired by money. The big boss behind this is, of course, the officials of Shaanxi province.” When the photos were finally proven to be faked, more than a dozen officials were punished by the government. The local Communist Party secretary, county government head, police chief, and another official were fired from their jobs.