An industrious programmer managed to reverse-engineer the original Lytro light field camera firmware and opened it up to allow live streaming, full remote camera control, and custom code execution.
Want to set up a remote DSLR for shooting a time-lapse? The Intervalometerator (AKA 'intvlm8r') is an open-source intervalometer that can help you do so at minimal hardware cost (as long as you're comfortable tinkering with hardware and software).
This past month, a student showed me an Instagram post with floating scrabble letters and asked me how it was done. After a few moments of reflection, I decided there was a number of ways to photograph floating letters and it would be a great idea for a student lab. To explore different techniques would be a great lab. The students evaluated the techniques to see which was best for creating floating letters.
I recently needed a way to trigger a flash from an Electron app, but there wasn't anything out there that suited my needs... so I built my own.
The times they are a-changin' at Instagram, or at least they're about to be. Hiding inside the recently refreshed photo sharing app's code are four unreleased features that a keen-eyed engineer has discovered.
A new website, IsItNude.com, has set out on a mission to help identify whether or not photographs contain nudity. California-based algorithm company, Algorithmia, designed the custom code for a client, but you can use the above link to test it out for yourself. If interested, you can even pay to use the system within your own application or website.
Update: It looks like it's already been fixed. Kudos to Getty for the quick response.
Getty's embed tool has been live for less than 24 hours and ALREADY somebody has figured out how it can be taken advantage of. It turns out that all it takes is some extremely simple code to remove attribution entirely.
One of the big gripes people have with the idea of taking pictures with Google Glass camera glasses is that the device requires you to say "ok, glass, take a picture" in order to snap a shot. While this is great for situations when you need hands-free photography and don't mind saying a voice command, it would be highly inconvenient in situations in which you would rather not (or can't) talk.
It looks like Google has been one step ahead of us the whole time: it appears that the company has built "wink to snap" functionality into Google Glass' camera.
Steganography is the art of passing secret messages in a way that most observers wouldn't detect even though the message is in plain view. Unlike cryptography, which attempts to transmit messages as nonsense, steganography uses security through obscurity, relying on the fact that most people aren't looking for secret messages in ordinary things. Passing notes in invisible ink would be one example.
Owen-Campbell Moore, a computer science researcher over at Oxford University, has been developing a method for passing secret messages through Facebook photo sharing.
Newer Leica lenses have a special lens code on the mount flange of each lens that informs the camera of what's mounted on it, and allows lens-related EXIF data to be embedded inside photographs. If you have an older Leica lens or a third-party lens on your hands, you might not have this special code, but did you know that you can apply the code manually to a code-less lens using black and white paint?
La Vida Leica! has published a tutorial showing how simple the process is: it only takes around $15 and 15 minutes to do.