By Patricia Daukantas
A smorgasbord of recent developments in U.S. energy policy, astrophysics and the deep sea:
-
The barren desert that once hosted hundreds of nuclear fission explosions will become a testing ground for collecting energy from that ultimate source of fusion power, the Sun. The U.S. Department of Energy has announced it is creating a solar energy demonstration zone at the Nevada Test Site. U.S. Energy Secretary (and OSA Honorary Member) Steven Chu recently signed an agreement with his counterpart at the Interior Department, which owns the land. The 25 square miles of desert, which is away from the regions of the test site that actually saw nuclear explosions, will host demonstrations of concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies.
-
The Hubble Space Telescope’s master repairman has gotten himself a second ground-based gig. John Grunsfeld, who has made three space trips to fix and upgrade the 20-year-old orbiting instrument, will be a research professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., U.S.A. Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist by training, now serves as deputy director of the nearby Space Telescope Science Institute.
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.
Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor
With 92 years of history under our belt, the Optical Society has accumulated scores of photos. Although we’ve captured many moments, we haven’t always captured the who, what and where information that must have seemed so obvious at the time the photo was snapped. Help us breathe new life into our images by providing your own imaginative captions to one of the images below. It could be a cartoon-style quote or a creative description of what you see. We’ll share your best captions in a future issue of OPN.
Send your captions to opn@osa.org or post them on our blog at www.osa-opn.org. (Remember to specify which image you are captioning…or don’t; it might be more fun that way.)
1. ????
2. ????
3. ????
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.
By Patricia Daukantas
My first camera was a Polaroid—back when the “colorpack” film had the peel-off chemical paper. I think it was a Model 320; it had bellows. The camera was the best Christmas present I got when I was 12 years old, and I immediately started taking pictures of my parents and grandmother. Letting the print-negative sandwich dangle from my fingers for exactly 60 seconds, then peeling the thing apart and setting the print to dry without getting chemicals on my skin, became a test of my ability to handle grown-up technology.
Of course, a year or two later, Polaroid Corp. came out with the first SX-70, and people didn’t have to fiddle with timers and smelly trash anymore. But those cameras were expensive, so I labored with my older Polaroid for a few more years until I got a hand-me-down Kodak camera from my father. Finally, I took up 35-mm photography in college.
Now comes word that Polaroid—or what’s left of the company after a bankruptcy several years ago—is discontinuing its remaining instant-film products. The company is willing to license its technology to other companies who might want to supply the ever-shrinking niche market for the instant-developing film. However, if no firms come forward, the remaining Polaroid devotees will be out of luck.
As the New York Times recounts, the self-developing Polaroid prints seemed like a wonder back in the days of film photography. And instant photography has a major connection to OSA history: As noted in the February 2007 issue of OPN, Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land chose the 1947 OSA annual meeting to demonstrate the technology for the first time. He was the hit of the OSA banquet, which took place the same month that his JOSA article was published explaining the process.
Legend has it that Land was inspired to develop instant photography when his daughter asked him why she couldn’t see the pictures he took immediately. Today’s children, surrounded by digital cameras, will never think to ask that question.
Polaroid Land Camera 360