Well, yeah, phones and cameras are an odd mix aren't they? They feed our need for instant gratification. Pick a cellular phone company and you can bet that at least a few camera-phones (hereafter to be called “campho”) on the smorgasbord. As a photographer, it's tempting to see what they are capable of doing. But given their small file sizes and the limited amount of space on the LCD's of these phones, the gratification is well, limited to our eyesight and attention span for all things small.

Steve Outing, Senior Editor at the Poynter Institute is all for camphos. His posts about how they can revolutionize reporting by the common citizen is refreshing, but the practice comes at a cost. Imagine Jane Doe walking along the streets of Timbuktu and coming upon an accident where true to the sense of what's news (if it bleeds, it leads) a man is on the ground with no paramedics in sight. Jane Doe is no photographer but she whips out her Nokia 6000 (or whatever model) and starts clicking away. She doesn't help the poor chap out, but is busy documenting the scene. Question is why and for whom? Would the phone not be better served to call the police and the paramedics? Even as a photojournalist, my first impulse is to get the man some help and then start working on what I do best. But leaving these choices to someone not in the business, and unaware of protocol, is troubling. It's one thing to send cute pictures of grandma on her birthday blowing out 80 candles and quite another to make images that are socially relevant. In my mind, the ethical choices compound.

Add to this, in the last few weeks, I have heard stories that camphos are being misused and are a threat to privacy. Despite the bans in several well known sports facilities (where the phones were being used to photograph people working out), Alan A. Reiter defends their use.

“The ability to take photos might not be a “right” per se , but the more restrictive a society, the greater the chance of banning photographs.”

He is talking about Saudi Arabia and Cuba who have apparently crimped the plans of many a campho toting tourist to snap willy-nilly at whatever comes their way. I am all for press freedom, but I sure wouldn't want to be photographed in a private setting and in an uncompromising situation. The image of me lifting weights ain't pretty follks!

I am sure you have heard of the term moblogging, or mobile blogging. It's the ability to quickly scribble a note on one's PDA/campho or, I guess, photograph, and post it to one's blog site. I haven't tried doing that yet, but that's because I don't have a PDA that's wi-fi enabled or a campho. If you want to learn more about this phenomena (fad?) check Picturephoning.com out.

A Reuters story augurs the hope that people will use camphos with some restraint, if only due to their technical limitations. But megapixel camphos are on their way. It's going to get very interesting.

In America no matter how much is written or photographed of the Kennedy clan, they are still an enigma. Charming, famous, mysterious and political to the core, no other family (sans the Buckingham big wigs) receives as much attention while they are living or even after they are dead.

“If the cancer hadn't killed Jacques, the loss of the negatives would have.”

Fred A. Bernstein writes in the NY Times today that the negatives of the late photographer Jacques Lowe, which were destroyed in the horrific September 11, 2003 WTC terrorist attack, have been resurrected thanks to scanning technology and Adobe PhotoShop.

Six weeks of tweaking and cajoling old decrepit contact sheets resulted in a book, Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys, which is now out in bookstores.

Via Andrew J. Ensor

Carnegie Mellon creates smart system to automatically enhance underexposed photos

PITTSBURGH–Carnegie Mellon University robotics researcher Vladimir Brajovic has developed a tool that automatically improves the appearance of darkened or underexposed photographs by digitally adding light to dark areas. The Shadow Illuminator, funded through a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was developed originally to help robots see better. Using principles based on the physics of how optical images are formed, Shadow Illuminator imitates the vision processes that take place in the human eye. It examines the content of a photograph, estimates the illumination conditions and then brightens shadows. It also enhances details within the shadow. “Shadow Illuminator is intelligent and works consistently for all pictures,” said Brajovic, director of the Computational Sensor Laboratory in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.

“It provides the same results quickly and eliminates the hassle of manually adjusting photographs.” According to Brajovic, traditional image-enhancement tools manipulate the color and intensity of the pixels of an image regardless of its content, relying on human judgment to determine what parts of an image need adjustment. Applying this process to each image can become tedious and time consuming. “While there are other programs that enable users to manually produce similar results, you have to figure out what works for each individual picture,” Brajovic said. The Shadow Illuminator, which has a patent pending on its technology, is being commercialized by Intrigue Technologies, Inc., a company formed by Brajovic that specializes in software and hardware for electronic imaging under difficult lighting conditions. Visitors to Shadow Illuminator, a free site can upload pictures and apply Shadow Illuminator to achieve brighter, clearer results. For visitors who sign up for a free account, the site also creates a personalized album to hold their uploaded photos.

Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times about the army's camera crew that shot Saddam Hussein's capture and subsequent medical examination. We have all seen it now, thanks to the networks looping it ad nauseam (like they do with just about anything else).

As a photo editor I know all too well that photography is about editing – cropping out, leaving behind something larger to focus on something specific; whether it is done in camera, while the action before us is enfolding or it is done after the event. Editing, no doubt, has its merits, especially when we want to convey something as succinctly as possible. But editing can also coerce us into not seeing the whole picture. It's a double-edge sword and has to be handled responsibly.

So the questions are: What is the US Army NOT showing us? What has been left out of the loop? And, why are we watching the same tape again and again and again? What purpose does that serve? And, whom does it serve? Will we ever see the whole take?

While I and the rest of the world is grateful that Hussein is now in custody (let's leave the politics behind that aside for a bit), there are just too many questions about this video that bug me. For starters, it is much too brief. The raid must have lasted at least 30 minutes. Yet, we see about 30 seconds of it. Is that just the public's threshold or was that all was “released” by the censors?

Also, unless army was hauling rented HMI's, I wonder how the “spider hole,” generally considered to be a dark place, was lit. The photographs appearing in the world's papers have a color cast to them that is missing in the video. Again, were they corrected and “sanitized” for public consumption, after the video was shot?

There is some debate now in the US on media monopoly.The Left says there is one. The Right says the Left is smoking crack. The title of Heffernan's article is “Camera Down the Hole, and the World Follows It.” It's suggestive of the way the media has all of us “trained” to “follow.” We are going to be shown something and we will be made to believe it.

But if seeing is believing and we are made to watch something so specific and that too a number of times, with no apologies or explanation for its brevity, well, I do have to wonder – are we subtly being told to toe the line and accept a certain agenda without thought or debate? I am concerned that the media will be equated to base propaganda and nothing more.

Via Arul Louis and John Laxmi from the SAJA listserv

Writes Louis:

An article (too long to be posted here) in the Sunday NYT‘s zoned City section deals with the photo-processing businesses in NYC's so-called photo district in the 20s (Manhattan area where the streets are numbered in the 20s). Top photogs like Annie Leibovitz are their customers. The story focuses on a dispute between the non-Indian former-employee of one of the many Indian-owned business there. Among the nuggets in the story: “The patriarch of this combative world is Baldev Duggal, an Indian photographer who moved to New York in 1957.”