The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming

[StewartR]

I used to use a digital watermarking system called Digimarc. It withstands cropping, compression, image manipulation etc.

Fair point. I should have made myself clearer.

The original article mentioned enriching images with non-visual data from other sources, and some people here were talking about steganography in response to that. The thing is though, the amount of data you can encode within an image using tamper-resistant steganographic techniques is highly limited. Digimarc uses what, a couple of dozen or a few dozen bytes? That doesn't enrich the image very much, does it. That's what I meant when I said that steganography wasnt very useful.

I guess the answer to this is that the original author, if he knew what he was talking about at all (which I doubt), wasn't thinking of steganography. It's fundamentally unsound to expect to be able to "hide" much data in an image when the whole basis of JPEG type compression is to try to preserve the overall visual appearance of an image at the expense of the fine detail. If this "new photography" using rich data sources is ever going to take off, there will need to be new data formats which are designed to hold these multiple types of data on an equal footing. Is anyone working on that?

 

[Byker28i]

And then there's this guff about images being enriched with more dimensions of data. Accelerometer, GPS, thermometer, microphone, etc. It brings to my mind any number of dull multi media art installations whereby ones appreciation of imagery is supposedly enhanced by being simultaneously exposed to other sensations. Combine other sensory data into a 2D still or moving image and what you've done is called data visualisation, which isn't new. Combine other sensory data into something which isn't a 2D still or moving image and you've thrown away the ability of human beings to perceive it and appreciate it without specialised equipment, if at all.

I think it's an interesting point that with film cameras, the image is the data, yet with digital there is so much other data included in the metadata that possibly isn't considered by the majority of photographers at the time, it adds another level. How that data is used or interpreted could be interesting in a number of ways.

Some 2D images are already interpolated in the film world, shown at a number of frames per second to produce moving images. Information taken from these images are used to move parts into different plains to create 3D films.

We have google maps, streetview, creating useful applications from images taken with the metadata captured at the time, Sports photographers using apps to append match/player info into captions to be used by the picture editors. I've seen art instalations using just images taken from google earth.

We now have cameras that take multiple photos for one image that allows you to select the focus point you want or depth of field during the processing stage.
With the majority of images taken on camera phone, personal moments and the availability and acceptance of digital filters, instagram etc, theres a call to say what is seen as traditional photography is becoming diluted. I think it's a little strong to say it's being lost, there's always people devoted to the old ways in anything.

But why do some academics write articles in anything but plain english