By Patricia Daukantas

As a high-school graduation gift, I got my first “real” camera – a 35-mm single-lens reflex, rather than a fixed-focus Instamatic for snapshots – and began to learn the artistic joys and challenges of manipulating the depth of field. What, in a scene, did I want to focus on? Sometimes I wanted to keep both foreground and background objects sharp and clear, but I couldn’t, especially when the ambient light level forced me to use a large aperture.

Now, researchers based at the University of Toronto (Canada) say that they’ve developed a new type of video camera that will keep high-resolution near- and far-field images in focus simultaneously.

This “Omni-focus Video Camera” is actually an array of color video cameras that are each focused at a different distance. The images from each of these video cameras are fed into a component invented by OSA Fellow – and frequent OPN contributor – Keigo Iizuka. This component, the “Divcam” (for Divergence-ratio Axi-vision Camera), performs real-time mapping of the distances between the pixels and the objects in the scene. Software developed by another Canadian scientist, David Wilkes, selects individual pixels from all the available camera outputs on the basis of the distance information and puts together a single image that is “omni-focused.”

The researchers say that the camera could have many different applications that could use greater depth of field, ranging from TV studio cameras to laparoscopic medical procedures.

The new camera isn’t commercially available yet, but the university recently announced it to the media. According to Iizuka, who is the principal investigator of the project as well as a Toronto engineering professor, the team last week submitted a comprehensive article about the camera to a scientific journal.

In the meantime, here are a couple of illustrations of the technology (photo credits: University of Toronto).

Above: Comparison between the Omni-focus Video Camera (a) and a conventional video camera (b). Note that the fingerprints are recognizable in (a).

Above: The eye of one sewing needle is captured through the eye of a second needle – 1.17 m in front of it.

By Patricia Daukantas

We know Mars as the Red Planet, but what color is its sky? Early Viking lander photos from 1976 seemed to show a light blue sky, but a recalibration—and subsequent images from the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997—changed the atmosphere to a light pink and then to a butterscotch color.

Such calibration depends on having a handy color-reference target in the field of view of the lander camera. Viking used an American flag, a symbol of the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976 (remember that?) and a small color grid, all posted on the outside of the spacecraft. NASA’s Phoenix lander, which touched down successfully on May 25, uses two color-calibration targets specially designed for the mission by scientists at the University of Central Florida.

UCF physics and astronomy professor Dan Britt and two of his students made the color chips, which range from white to royal blue (but no red), to aid spectroscopists in figuring out the true colors and composition of the Martian soil. The targets have built-in magnets to help keep them free of dust buildup, which was a problem on earlier missions.

The UCF team collaborated with a University of Florida chemistry professor and a group from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For more information and a photo of the color-calibration target, check the UCF Web site.

By Patricia Daukantas

Polaroid lovers, you’re not alone.

Ever since the venerable Polaroid Corp. announced earlier this year that it will discontinue its remaining instant-film products, aficionados of the self-developing, one-of-a-kind prints have been banding together in cyberspace to celebrate the Polaroid as an artistic medium and share photos and tips.

A few days ago, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver (U.S.A.) paid tribute to Polaroids. Art writer Mary Voelz Chandler reminded readers of the many ways artists have used Polaroid film. In the same issue of that newspaper, a self-taught Polaroid photographer/artist ponders her technological future. The paper’s photography staff went out for one day with their old instant-film cameras and assembled the results into a video that includes a classic American television commercial for instant photography.

The New York-based blog Gothamist.com found a fellow Big Apple resident who has offered to send anybody, for a modest fee, an original Polaroid photo of something in New York City. Joe Howansky is also interested in trading his instant photos for Polaroids of exotic locales around the world.

The popular social-networking site LiveJournal has a community called the polaroids. More than 5,400 people have signed up to post their instant photos, old and new.

Another online community, Polanoid.net, was started by several Europeans who were, as they put it, “hungry for real analog, good smelling pictures in a digital world.” Users have uploaded more than 150,000 scanned, and sometimes manipulated, instant photos to that Web site.

Even CNN has gotten into the act. iReport.com—the cable news network’s beta site for “citizen journalism”—has a forum for sharing readers' favorite Polaroid snapshots. The photos that have already been uploaded include this poignant image of someone standing in front of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 40 years ago. A floral wreath on the upstairs balcony marks the spot.

Finally, in case you’re wondering how much longer Polaroid instant film will be around, the company has provided this list of projected availabilities of film types, plus the expiration dates of the last batches of products.