Tag: photography

LOC on Flickr

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least 2 major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90% of our readers could probably explain better than me).

LOC has a blog? when can we tag the whole LOC catalog?

Suborbital Balloons

SABLE-3 was launched on August 11th, 2007 with a payload, consisting of a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to take 1 image every minute and a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS Tracker, that the Kaysam 1200 gram balloon carried to 36km. The last payload camera photo from the ground was just before it was launched, and the last photo before the balloon burst was the photo above, exactly 2½ hours or 150 images later. And what a photo. The composition couldn’t have been better or the horizon more level and out of the 196 images taken during the flight, only 1 other image is as good. What are the chances?

totally awesome. there’s a few more of these:

My project launched a payload with GPS, camera, sensors and communications to an altitude of 30km.

Pictures taken with a Pentax k10d from a high-altitude sounding balloon. Experiment conducted by Oklahoma State University while testing a new cosmic radiation detector.

Municipal Photographer

In 1999, Michael Lorenzini, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city’s vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic. They also had numbers scratched into the negatives. “It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer”. But who was he? It took many months and uncounted hours of trolling through archives storerooms, the Social Security index, Census reports and city records on births, deaths and employment to find the answer: the photographer was Eugene de Salignac, a municipal worker who took 20K photographs of modern Manhattan in the making. “It felt like a real discovery”.

Automatic photo captioning

The primary objective of Tripod is to revolutionise access to the enormous body of visual media. Applying an innovative multidisciplinary approach Tripod will utilize largely untapped but vast, accurate and regularly updated sources of semantic information to create groundbreaking intuitive search services, enabling users to effortlessly and accurately gain access to the image they seek from this ever expanding resource.

Based on geo clues, IR and other methods.