Anti-Smartphone is still a thing

I found it difficult not to snigger at The Telegraph article about chefs wanting to ban smartphones and photography in their restaurants.

An example of a chef wanting to ban smartphones in his restaurant is Gilles Goujon (L’Auberge du Vieux Puits, 3 Michelin stars) because “If people take a photo and put it out on social media, it takes away the surprise”…”It takes away a little bit of my intellectual property too. Someone could copy me”… “Plus a photo taken on an average smartphone is rarely a great image. It doesn’t give the best impression of our work. It’s annoying.” So basically, it takes away the surprise, steals his intellectual property and doesn’t even do it to a level of quality to which he approves.

The first is maybe right, the second is wrong as he does not have intellectual property rights in his dishes to prevent photography, and the last bit was a bit whiny and reminded me of the strangest complaint “the food was awful and the portions too small”. But yes, I get it. His reputation is at stake and the amateurs are not helping by taking lousy pictures.

Simple Pleasures by Wrote. CC BY NC

Is it just me? Maybe I have been looking at technology for too long? but haven’t we heard all these arguments before? “Cell phones should be banned on trains, buses etc” seems so 1995. Cameraphones need to be controlled seems so 1998. “Hipsters taking pictures of food are ruining our lives” is so 2009. (Cannot resist mentioning the comic Pictures of Hipsters Taking Pictures of Food).

Against those who want to ban the technology we have those who claim it is all beneficial. The photographs are marketing and show appreciation. The buzz will bring in more business etc. This may be true or not. Proof is not really what it’s all about. What surprises me a decade of technology later is the places where technology use is not allowed or the knee-jerk outrage and attempts to limit technology, like those mentioned in the article.

Sure there are situations where it is called for. For security and safety I will not use my phone where it may cause harm. I even turn my phone off on planes – there is no harm but the security theater demands it and other passengers may feel safer for it. But there are places where I cannot understand the no phone rule. Most annoying? Waiting in the long line for US passport control after a long plane ride and not being able to text and tweet my arrival. Sitting in other American government waiting rooms there are prominent no phone signs. In Sweden banks seem to be anti-phones and carry signs against them.

The phone is not a right, and even if it were private spaces can create rules against them. But the way in which we are conditioned today taking away our phones only increases our stress. Why are so many spaces still anti-phone?

 

 

Who took that? Finding images online

Since browsing began I have been collecting images I have found online. Everything from humor to teaching material has ended up being stored and transferred between computers. Since hard disks keep getting bigger this has never been a problem. Unfortunately there is a problem when I want to use the images I have found – legally. In many situations the photographer is unknown. Sometimes, but very rarely, the image filename includes a clue to the photographers identity.

For photographers the problem is related but different. It is important for them to be able to find out where and who is using their photographs without permission.

One solution many of us have been waiting for is image search engines. The idea is that you upload an image that is then searched for on the whole web. It’s google images but using an image as a search term. The closest example of this today is the search engine Tineye but it needs to be developed. It now has a limited database of about 1.2 billion images (Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr alone combine for over 18 billion images).

But Plagiarism Today reports some good news in this area. Corrigon is a new version of this image search. You upload images to Corrigon these are added to their database while the service then crawls the Web, looking for matching images.

What makes Corrigon unusual is that it doesn’t store the images, but rather, fingerprints them and compares the fingerprint against other matches it finds on the Web. This is very similar to what C-registry.us is doing with its matching technology. However, where C-Registry is more geared toward preventing works from becoming orphans, Corrigon is more about image search (though C-Registry has added image search)

So there is some slow progress in this area. Maybe someone at google will come along and develop a simple, elegant and easily available service as a complement to the basic search.

A variation to this problem is the mass of images I take myself. Here the problem is not that I am unable to use my own pictures but rather that I cannot find the one image I know I am looking for. It’s there somewhere but with so many thousands of images it may as well be lost forever. Don’t know how this could be resolved without a massive identifying and tagging effort on my part.

Mental Popcorn

In my last post I wrote

Big numbers are of no practical use. They are mental popcorn, in the end unfulfilling.

Unfortunately I kind of like popcorn, especially when it comes in big packages. So naturally when I read Nicholas Carr’s blog about the amount of images on Facebook I realised that this mental popcorn was too good not to share. So dig in.

Facebook has announced that it now stores 10 billion photographs uploaded by its members (as noted by Data Center Knowledge). Moreover, since it stores each photo in four different sizes, it actually has 40 billion image files in its system. More than 15 billion photos are viewed at the site everyday, and at times of peak demand 300,000 images are viewed every second.

That is a seriously big bucket of popcorn…

My camera history

The first camera I remember was my grandfather’s Ikoflex 1A 854/16

This is a very cool camera which I never really mastered. I now have this as a memory of my grandfather but after reading Ivor Matanle’s article on the history and use of the Ikoflex TLRs Classics to Use (Amateur Photographer, 29 October 2005) I have been inspired to test the camera.

My first camera was nothing this complex. I was eventually given a Kodak Instamatic with a cubeflash. I used this to take my first pictures.

There was an especially long gap between the Instamatic and my next camera. With my first paycheck I bought a Nikon F-301, a really cool toy which I used to experiment with. I tried out different lenses and external flashes. The only drawback was that I did not develop my own photos so experiments were slow and expensive. So I really did not make much progress. Eventually I dropped photography.

My hobby came back when I bought a Canon EOS 30 which was a really cool camera but still had the main drawback in that I needed to develop the photographs before I could analyze the mistakes I had made. Actually I should have gone straight to a digital version but due to some misguided snobbery I chose not to go digital.

Finally, I made the move to digital and got a Canon EOS 400D. Now I am happily taking photos, attempting to understand the results and develop what I see and learn. In addition to this, thanks to my Flickr account I am able to easily upload and share my photographs.

So by going digital I was able to develop my hobby to the extent that it actually can be called a hobby.