Quotulatiousness

September 9, 2012

You know who are really sick of the Euro crisis? Press photographers

Filed under: Europe, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:43

The unsung heroes who provide you with those ?memorable? images of Euro coins being eaten by toy sharks to illustrate stories about the Euro crisis:

Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won’t end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas.

His colleagues have resorted to using children’s toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it’s eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.

Photographers call such images illustrations, they use them to help visualize abstract events. Most crises don’t hold the public’s attention for more than a few weeks or months, but it has been different with the ongoing euro-zone debt debacle. Stratenschulte has had enough of it.

“It is difficult to keep finding a new approach,” he says. “I’m glad the euro coins have different designs in each country. That makes it possible to vary things at least a bit.”

H/T to Tim Harford for the link:

https://twitter.com/TimHarford/statuses/244699544028315648

August 17, 2012

The police war on photographers and videographers: the Canadian front

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Karen Selick in the National Post confirming that Canadian police are also under the impression that their work cannot legally be photographed:

What have cops got against cameras these days? Increasingly, people are getting arrested, charged or even assaulted by police officers, merely for attempting to take photos or videos of officers at work. Often, police simply command people to stop photographing. Scared into thinking they must be breaking some law, citizens comply.

When Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, police seized the now famous video made by witness Paul Pritchard, who had to hire a lawyer and threaten court proceedings to get it back.

[. . .]

There is no law in Canada that prohibits people from openly photographing police. Section 129 of the Criminal Code prohibits “wilfully obstructing” police in the execution of their duty, but it is hard to imagine how standing by peacefully and videotaping as police searched the premises and piled up items for seizure could be considered obstructing. After all, the police themselves were videotaping on Ms. Jones’ premises — but selectively. They probably didn’t capture themselves ordering her friend to refrain from taking the pictures she was legally entitled to take.

That same day, three other search warrants were executed at the homes of other individuals the CFIA suspects of conspiring with Ms. Jones to save her healthy sheep. At Michael Schmidt’s residence, all cell phones were immediately confiscated. When a visitor from outside arrived with his cell phone, Schmidt’s wife borrowed it and took photos of police inside her home. Officers seized the phone even though it was clearly outside the scope of the warrant. They returned it three hours later, with the photos erased. When the victim of this apparently illegal seizure objected, police responded, “We can do whatever we want.” But of course, that arrogant response was not permitted to be recorded.

[. . .]

Police must be made to understand that being on duty or executing a search warrant does not transform an officer into a petty dictator with carte blanche to issue arbitrary orders to everyone in sight. Police cannot do “whatever they want.” Citizens have the right to hold them accountable for their actions. Personal cameras are important tools in implementing that right. Bullying people out of using them must cease.

April 30, 2012

New frontiers in border control bureaucracy

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:

Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.

Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.

The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.

April 11, 2012

“Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

An interesting analysis of the Instagram takeover by Facebook:

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.

[. . .]

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

April 7, 2012

Xander’s latest photos

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:45

I’m feeling remarkably lazy today, so when I got a couple of photos from Clive, I decided they’d be useful blogfodder for today. He was trying out a brand new (and very expensive) lens on his DSLR at our place last weekend:


He’d picked up the lens that morning, on his way over to our house. I didn’t want to deny him the joy of trying it out (even though we had business to get down to), so Xander was kind enough to be a model for a couple of shots.

I don’t remember the specifications of the lens, but it looks like the kind of thing that needs to be transported on its own railway car and pointed in the general direction of Paris.

March 19, 2012

Illinois railfan photographer threatened with being added to terror watch list

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

Photography within 550 feet of a railway line is illegal in Illinois, according to a police deputy who likes to make up his own laws:

A man who was taking pictures near a train track in Illinois was confronted by a sheriff’s deputy who informed him that he was breaking the law, so therefore he had no choice but to report the photographer to Homeland Security.

The photographer, who describes himself as a disabled war veteran and former state worker, was left wondering if the deputy had any legal basis for adding him to a terrorist watch list.

[. . .]

RustyBug, who never states which sheriff’s department harassed him, said the deputy told him it was against the law to shoot within 550 feet from train tracks, which is complete hogwash.

RustyBug said he really wasn’t buying it, but he wasn’t sure either, which shows us the importance of knowing the law when it comes to photography because too many cops don’t know the law.

March 4, 2012

Tilt-shift and time lapse turns Rio’s Carnaval into a complex animated model

Filed under: Americas, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Tilt shift of the Carnaval party in Rio de Janeiro 2011
Made by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit
Both Jarbas Agnelli & Keith Loutit were finalists at YouTube play, a Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim.

February 23, 2012

Timelapse footage using tilt-shift makes everything look like a model

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:15

A time lapse of action in and outside the Port of Napier filmed mostly from the Bluff Hill lookout. Edited in Sony Vegas11 with Magic Bullet Looks 2 using the Swing Tilt pre-set that makes the machinery and ships take on a model toy appearance.

H/T to Nelson Kennedy for the link.

Wikipedia says:

“Tilt-shift photography” refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the shallow depth of field is simulated with digital post processing; the name may derive from the tilt-shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically.

“Tilt-shift” encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to adjust the position of the subject in the image area without moving the camera back; this is often helpful in avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.

December 25, 2011

The top 100 images from ESA/Hubble

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06


Click for full-size image

Some breathtaking images from everyone’s favourite vantage point in space.

H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold for the link.

October 13, 2011

The war on photography continues: Glasgow shopping mall front

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Nick Thorne recounts the over-reaction of mall security (and the local police) to an alleged incident of photography at the Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow:

It took a high-profile internet campaign to get a shopping-centre chain to reconsider its irrational photography policy. After security guards at Glasgow’s Braehead Shopping Centre stopped Chris White from taking a picture of his own four-year-old daughter, White set up a Facebook page called ‘Boycott Braehead’. In just three days it was ‘liked’ by over 20,000 people. Capital Shopping Centres has now announced that 11 of its malls will from now on allow family and friends to take pictures of each other.

So, parents can now take snaps of their kids eating ice cream, like White did, without worrying about security guards telling them they’re committing an offence, as White was told, or being taken away for questioning by cops who threaten to use anti-terror powers to take snappers’ cameras away, like an officer warned White. That’s splendid.

White’s Facebook campaign went viral and Braehead Shopping Centre was forced to apologise for its overreaction. Common sense won the day. But why was the photography policy implemented in the first place? And why was an innocent, everyday occurrence interpreted as a potentially dodgy, abusive incident?

A statement from the shopping centre explained that staff had become suspicious ‘after they saw a male shopper taking photographs of a child sitting at their counter’. The security guard who went over to investigate said that he had at no point been informed that the girl was White’s daughter. The automatic assumption, it seems, was that a man taking a picture of a child must be some sleazy scumbag.

August 27, 2011

More photos from Japan’s abandoned “Battleship Island”

Filed under: Asia, History, Japan — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:42

I blogged about this last year, including a few photos of the island’s skyline. This post at How to be a Retronaut includes lots of interior photos:

August 9, 2011

To every action, there’s a reaction

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

The rioters in Toronto and Vancouver were frequently caught on camera, and the photos were posted on the various photoblogging sites. Many people were identified this way, and some of them were charged as a result. Londoners are responding in the same way, with sites like http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/ where photos are being posted from the last few nights’ mayhem.

  

Every action does have a reaction, though, as rioters and even “innocent bystanders” are becoming more likely to attack anyone with a camera. This means a much greater risk for would-be citizen journalists (and professional journalists), as the police generally try to surround and contain mobs (when they don’t just evacuate altogether, of course). If someone in the mob decides that you’re “the enemy”, you won’t have much support — don’t risk your life just to get a “good shot”.

Update: Speaking of police unwillingness to protect civilians, there’s this account:

Cypran Asota, who has run the Boots opticians for 25 years, told the London Evening Standard how he watched as the shop was destroyed.

He said police stood by yards away, adding: ‘White boys ripped off the shutters, then a group of around eight or nine children went in and stole the day’s takings.

‘I ran back over the road to plead with them, this is my livelihood and I have to protect it, but they kept coming back in. They must have got away with £15,000 worth of frames. My insurance doesn’t cover acts of terrorism.

‘All the time the police were about 15 yards away, just watching. They didn’t do anything to stop it. They looked more scared of those kids than I was.’

Shopkeeper Shiva Kadih, 39, told the Standard he had ‘nothing left’ as witnesses said they prevented an attempt to burn down the shop as police watched nearby.

June 25, 2011

Reason.TV reporter arrested for “disorderly conduct” and “trespassing”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

June 16, 2011

Apple’s lovely little pre-censorship patent

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

Oh, I know it’s supposedly intended to prevent iPhone users from filming at concerts and thereby depriving the promoters and performers of theoretical income, but I’m sure the technology will be used — in addition to, or instead — as a way of preventing certain kinds of citizen journalism.

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

These sensors would then contact the iPhone and automatically disable its camera function.

I mentioned my concern to Jon, who sent me the initial link saying, “That sounds like a straight-from-Steve-Jobs kind of ‘how can we make money from censorship’ brain fart. Want to bet that the next thing it’ll allow is governments to automatically prevent iPhone users from filming police ‘doing their job’?

“Literally ‘nothing to see here’, if the technology works as they imply in the article.”

His response: “My bet is that the government application is the first we’ll see of this technology, not the next.”

Update: Oh, good, it’s not just me seeing the cloud instead of the silver lining — here’s Tim O’Reilly with the same concerns:

Doubtless in response to pleas from the entertainment industry, Apple has patented new technology to disable cellphone video based on external signals from public venues. Now imagine if that same technology were deployed by repressive regimes. Goodbye to one of the greatest tools we’ve yet seen for advancing democracy.

Think for a moment about the pro-democracy impact of cellphone video combined with online services like YouTube [. . .] I hope Apple has the guts and good sense never to deploy this technology, and instead uses the patent to prevent it being implemented by others. Yeah, right! If it were Google, that might be more than a vain hope.

Update, the second: Cory Doctorow chimes in:

An Apple patent describes a system for allowing venue owners to override compliant cameras. The patent describes using an infrared signal that compliant cameras would detect; in the presence of this signal, the device would not allow its owner to activate its record function. It is intended for use at live events and galleries and museums, and it will be a tremendous boon to policemen who shoot unarmed subway riders, despotic armies putting down revolutions as well as anyone else who is breaking the law or exercising coercive power.

June 14, 2011

Random links

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

A few links which don’t lend themselves to becoming full blog posts:

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