Category: Software

Photoer in silhouette

I haven’t taken many photos of people in silhouette, but I should do it more, because it is a really good way to photo people. Maybe the problem is that a person has to be in the dark with lots of light behind him or her, and if you are like me and you just photo people out in the open, and you let the lighting be an act of God, so to speak, God only very rarely obliges with a silhouette.

But God did so oblige, on Jan 5th, which was the day I also took the first four of yesterday’s photos. This photoer was under Blackfriars Bridge and hence in darkness, and behind him, we observe the Millennium Bridge, artistically out-of-focus:

See also this photo, taken indoors, of Christopher Snowdon.

Does face recognition software work with silhouettes? I just shoved that question into google, but answer came there none.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Yes I know – BMdotcom is a mess

By which I mean that the content is what it is, but that the loading up is either very slow or, from time to time, non-existent.

If you had been trying to view this blog today, this is what you would have seen:

I cranked up BMdotcom on my mobile, just to make sure it wasn’t my computer that was in some mysterious way causing this. It wasn’t.

And yes, I cheated with the timing of this posting. I actually stuck this up in the small hours of Monday morning, and backdated the date. If this bothers you, have your lawyers call my lawyers.

Conversations are now ongoing about not only how to get fewer such collapses, but also about how to speed up the loading, to the point where a decent number of people might consider reading it, again, or even for the first time. What I am thinking I will do is set up a new WordPress blog, and leave this as Classic Brian, or some such thing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

My camera is not turning photos yellow – it’s Windows Photo Viewer that is turning photos yellow

Yes, panic over. The situation seemed very bad, but instead is as described above.

Consider this photo, of the roof of the long snakey shed that looks like it’s for growing tomatoes, where the Euro-trains used to arrive and depart from:

I was viewing that in Windows Photo Viewer, but then I found myself simultaneously viewing that same photo in in my photo-editing software, thus:

Do you see? Of course you do. Windows Photo Viewer, on the left, has introduced, from nowhere, a cream background, and shoved it behind and into the photo. On the right, Photoshop(clone) has ignored this cream under(over)lay, and has restored the pure blue of that Waterloo Station roof and has taken the ominous yellow tinge out of the dark grey sky. The white bits of the roof are back to being white. Put the photo in some different software for viewing my archives, and it is similarly cleansed of yellowness. All was well with the original photo, as it emerged from my camera. Windows Photo Viewer is the problem and the only problem.

So, no panic about my camera. Just a question about Windows Photo Viewer. How do I get that to behave itself? I have worked out how to change the brown at the top and bottom of the photo to any other colour you or I would like. But can I get it to stop with the cream? Can I random-punctuation-marks-in-an-angry-little-line. Suggestions anyone?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoers on Primrose Hill and how my camera turns everything yellow

After that trip to Primrose Hill with GodDaughter2, when my camera stopped cooperating, and I later got it working again, I went back there, on my own. I couldn’t be content until I had taken as many photos there as I would like to have taken on the previous visit.

One of the better photos I took on that second trip, of photoers photoing, was this:

Is that guy photoing his photoer lady-friend, as she photos the view? Judging by the red blob on his screen, which has got to be her bright red rucksack, I would say: yes he is. What a peculiar man, wanting to take a photo like that.

Joking aside, there is something else about my camera that troubles me, besides having spent a day thinking it was completely bust. Do you remember that day earlier this year when the sky turned yellow, because of some North African dust storm, or some such thing. Well, when my camera is set on automatic – and when I use it it is always set on automatic – it does this all the time. Everything comes out yellower than it should. Blues are diminished into white. The merest suggesting of actual yellow is intensified. Not good.

The above photo, effective though I think it is, illustrates this only too clearly. Notice how even my photo of the guy’s screen has his sky bluer than my version of the sky. Which means that his screen must have been very blue.

I tried reading the camera manual, but unfortunately this is written in a Serbo-Croation dialect of Sanskrit. Not one word of it makes any sense to me at all. And I tried fiddling around with the camera itself, without any success. I couldn’t even find anywhere on the www where I might be able to ask my question, and more to the point, maybe get some worthwhile answers. Help. I realise that Boxing day is not a good day to be saying such a thing, but I say it anyway. By the time anyone gets around to reading this, the problem is unlikely to have gone away.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Googling for new planets

Incoming from Rob Fisher: link to a piece in the Independent, about machine learning applied to old telescope data is finding new planets.

Quote:

A computer was trained to look through the data from the Kepler space telescope, and look for signals that might belong to planets. And it found new planets within existing systems, by spotting signals that seemed to indicate something of interest but were too weak to have been spotted by humans.

That suggests that there might be whole worlds and solar systems hiding within the data we’ve already collected, but which we had not noticed because there are simply so many signals to pick through. Kepler has collected four-years of data from looking at the sky and 150,000 stars – far more than humans could ever look through.

So, exactly what were these weak signals?

The new planets – just like all of the thousands found by Kepler – were spotted by watching the sky for light coming from the stars. When planets pass in front of their stars, scientists can register the dimming as they go, and use the speed and characteristics of that dimming to work out what the solar system might actually look like.

Much of that work relies on pattern recognition, which until now has been done by scientists looking through the data. But the new findings are the result of work between Nasa and Google, which trained machine learning algorithms to learn to spot those patterns itself and so pick through the data much more quickly.

This is good. Keep Skynet busy with harmless hobbies.

Maybe not. Getting Skynet to compile a huge and exhaustive list of all the places in the universe where biology-based life might be, after biology-based life on this planet has been taken care of.

This is maybe how the robot holocaust will happen. We will have been telling them to “take care of” us and our fellow creatures. But they’ll have been watching too many gangster movies, and …

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Two phone photos

My camera has conked out. The autofocussing is refusing to autofocus. Which is nasty. And even nastier given that I only found out about this when I was trying, with it, to take photos, this afternoon, like this one:

That’s from the top of Primrose Hill, as photoed by my mobile phone, which is a Google Nexus 4. That one wasn’t too bad, but most of the phone-photos I phone-photoed with this annoying gadget, truly good only for telling me where I am and how soon I will reach my tube destination and what the cricket scores are, were rubbish.

Here is one of the few other good ones, taken from one of the bridges over the Regent’s Canal:

That red boat is the Feng Shang Princess.

GodDaughter 2 was with me. Since I couldn’t take lots of photos, there was nothing for it, I had to make do with talking to her. And also listening to her. Which worked out quite well.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A clean dirty joke

Earlier today I was at a party, and sitting in on the party was Alexa, the cylindrical robot from Amazon. So, one of us asked Alexa to tell us a Dirty Joke. Alexa replied: “Why do you call a chicken covered in dirt crossing the road?” Answer, although I didn’t hear if Alexa actually said this or merely assumed that we’d get it: a dirty joke.

Not bad. And funny because, although a joke involving dirt, it is not a dirty joke in the sense of there being any sexual innuendo involved.

But, was Alexa trying to tell a joke? Or merely trying to do as she was told, without in any way understanding what the thing she was being told to do actually meant? I know, Alexa never “understands” anything. She’s a machine, with no consciousness. But, you surely know what I mean.

Another rather perfunctory posting. But, I spent quite a lot of my day going to a party, partying, and getting back from the party. I may, although I promise nothing, do better tomorrow.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Frollicking outside the Abbey (a decade ago)

This blog having been in business for well over a decade, an obvious blog post genre is ten-years-ago-today. This one’s actually more like ten-years-ago-plus-about-a-fortnight, but who, apart from me, is counting?:

What I think this clutch of photos captures rather well is the sheer fun that digital photography unleashed, around that time. I was a photoer-having-fun and so were all the other photoers.

Digital photography wasn’t completely new at that moment. It had already been around for several years. But what my photo-archives tell me is that this is about when it started getting seriously good. This was when the rubbish-to-okay success rate (simply from the point of view of things like blurriness) of the average mostly-automatic-setting photoer like me, or of the photoer in the above photos, started climbing from something like ten percent to more like fifty percent. We weren’t yet at the fifty percent and still climbing rate. Or, we only were if the light was very strong and there was no moving. (That came around five years later.) But these kids frollicking about outside Westminster Abbey were keeping still for their camera and therefore also for mine, and as you can see, there was plenty of bright sunlight sloshing about that day. So their pictures were probably okay, just as mine of them were.

Also, ten years ago was well before the face recognition problem kicked in. Then, I had no problem about posting recognisable photos of people. I also have no problem with the recognisable faces above, because these kids were making a rather undignified spectacle of themselves outside a major place of worship. Which is fine. God loves fun, or why would He have created so much of it? But: the above recognisable faces, all those years ago, are fair game for my blog, I say.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

How Pablo Picasso (and Picasso’s wife Jacqueline) saved the life of Lucien Clergue

I am continuing to read Martin Gayford’s conversations with Hockney book, and it is proving to be most diverting.

Gayford begins the chapter he entitles “Seeing more clearly” with this intriguing anecdote about Picasso, which was related to him by Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson:

Lucien Clergue, the photographer, knew Picasso incredibly well. The other day he said to me, ‘You know, Picasso saved my life.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yes, it was after a bullfight, in Aries.’ Lucien said he had been feeling fine, had lost a bit of weight but wasn’t worried. Out of the blue Picasso said to him, ‘You go instantly to a hospital.’ Lucien asked ‘Why?’ Picasso said ‘You’ve got something seriously wrong with you.’ Lucien was damned if he was going to do it, but Jacqueline [Picasso’s wife] added, ‘When Pablo says that, for God’s sake go.’ So he went, and the doctors had him taken straight into the operating theatre. They said he had an extremely rare type of peritonitis, which is lethal. The bad thing about it is that it doesn’t manifest itself in pain, it just kills you. …

Hockney’s reaction to this is to say, yes, this is because Picasso spent a huge amount of time looking at faces, really looking, the way you only do if you are someone who paints pictures of faces. Picasso could therefore see signs that others wouldn’t.

I’m not the only one to have found this a very striking story.

If it’s right, it occurs to me that maybe face recognition software ought to be able to make similar diagnoses, if not now, then quite soon. Excuse me while I try to discover if the www agrees.

Partially. It seems that face recognition software can already spot rare genetic disorders. Whether it can spot the onset of rare diseases in people previously unafflicted, I could not learn. But I bet, if it doesn’t yet perform such tricks, that it soon will.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

I don’t know whether it’s the weather or my camera

I have a new camera, and I am not as happy as I would like to be about the photos I am photoing with it. They often seem vague and blurry, as if seen through a mist.

But then again, the humidity levels during the last week or two have been very high. Maybe the views have all looked as if seen through a mist because they were seen through a mist.

Here, for instance, is a photo of a favourite building of mine, the big decorated box that is the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, as seen from Westminjster Bridge, which is quite a way away:

But I got to work with my Photoshop clone, and beefed up the contrast, and darkened things a bit.

Thus:

Which looks a bit better. I’ve chased away some of the mist. The trees look greener. The details of the ROH’s exterior decoration are clearer.

I have a vague recollection of trying to reset my camera, so that it did things more darkly and more contrastingly. Maybe at that point, I contrived to do the opposite of what I thought I was doing.

But then again, not long after taking that photo, I took this one, of the giant 4 outside the Channel 4 headquarters building at the top end of Horseferry Road, a short walk away from where I live. I often go past it on my way home after an afternoon of wandering, and so it was that day, nearly a week ago now:

That looks bright enough and clear enough, doesn’t it? That’s without any zoom, i.e. space filled with blurriness. And without this weather making its presence felt, the picture doesn’t look like it needs any artificial editing attention. So maybe the camera is fine, and it has been the weather. And I just made the weather better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog