Now in its 49th year, the annual competition is designed to highlight "stunning imagery from scientists, artists, and photomicrographers of all experiences and backgrounds from across the globe," according to Nikon's communications manager, Eric Flem, adding, "I am consistently awed by how these advancements make it possible to create art out of science for the public to enjoy." Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s.

Focus group for submissions to Astronomy Picture of the Day

Photos

Hasselblad and NASA’s journey together began in 1962 during the Mercury program. Prospective NASA astronaut and photography enthusiast Walter Schirra had his own Hasselblad 500C with a Planar f/2.8, 80mm lens. Knowing the high quality of the Hasselblad camera, Schirra suggested to NASA that they use a Hasselblad to document space since the previous camera model utilised delivered disappointing results. After buying a few 500Cs, a weight-loss program followed including removal of its leather covering, auxiliary shutter, reflex mirror, and viewfinder. A new film magazine was constructed in order to allow for 70 exposures instead of the usual 12. Finally, a matte black outer paint job minimized reflections in the window of the orbiter. The streamlined Hasselblad would find itself in the payload for Mercury 8 (MA-8) in October 1962. The successful, high quality images that Schirra captured across his six orbits of the Earth would spark a new chapter in the history of Hasselblad and a long, close and mutually beneficial cooperation between the American space agency and the Swedish camera manufacturer.

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After launching on a Falcon 9 rocket in August 2022, the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter slid into orbit around the Moon last month. This was South Korea's first lunar probe, and among its chief objectives was surveying the polar regions of the Moon for resources such as water ice.

One of the six instruments carried by the half-ton satellite was a hyper-sensitive camera built by NASA called ShadowCam. The camera was designed with maximum sensitivity to light, such that it could provide images of permanently shadowed regions of the poles—which is to say, capture images of things that are inherently very dark.

Earlier this week, the ShadowCam team released its first image, which reveals a wall and the floor of Shackleton Crater near the south pole of the Moon. At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about the photo. It looks a lot like... the Moon.

However, what you're actually looking at is an area of the Moon that lies in total darkness. Here is a photograph taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009, shortly after it reached the Moon. That black area on the left of the photo? That's the region of Shackleton Crater imaged by ShadowCam. Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. //

According to the imaging team, the camera's ability to capture clear images at high sensitivity is the equivalent of increasing from ISO 100 to greater than 12,800 without increasing grain.

Unique real-time face generator

The future is here. You can create a unique person with your parameters in one click.

A few years ago, I set out to reinvent photography. I didn’t have a good idea how to do this, I just knew I wanted to make something original, and combining photography with my electronics skills seemed like a good way to do that. It failed at reinventing photography, but I succeeded in writing a clickbait first sentence, and the process was lots of fun too. //

The idea was great, I would use a LED strip to display images in mid-air, like those persistence of vision displays. I could set the camera to record a long exposure, then move the strip and trace a pattern in the air. I had never seen anyone do this before, so the first thing I did was what everyone does when they have a groundbreaking idea: I searched the web to see if this already existed.

The second thing I did was what every self-respecting inventor does when they have a groundbreaking idea: I looked at the first two search results, saw that none of them resembled what I had in mind, said “Well, this conclusively proves that nothing like this has ever been done!” and started working on it.

I call it… Ledonardo!

Images are just too big. A 3 MB bitmap compresses down to a 500 KB JPEG, which, don’t get me wrong, 16% of the original size is great, but why 500 KB? That’s still pretty large.

This is 2022, we shouldn’t have to put up with large images. Our websites might load 60 MB of stuff for a pageview, but that stuff shouldn’t be images, it should be Javascript, as Brendan Eich intended.

We shouldn’t have to put up with fat images, but, until now, we had no choice.

Now we do.

The solution

a computer compressing data, by Caspar David Friedrich, matte painting trending on artstation HQ

A week or so ago, Stable Diffusion was released, and the world went crazy, and for good reason. Stable Diffusion, if you haven’t heard, is a new AI that generates realistic images from a text prompt. You basically give it a description of the image you want, and it generates it.

Now, this alone would be revolutionary, but we got double the revolution this time: This thing can also take an image and tell you the prompt you can use to generate it.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

That’s right, why compress an image to 500 KB when you can compress it to 50 bytes, where the bytes are the prompt that can be used to generate the exact same image again?

You wouldn’t, of course not.

Instead, what you would do, is ask the image-describing AI to describe the image, take the resulting (very small) prompt, transmit it over the wire, where the recipient would then use it to generate the image again based on the prompt.

I call this technique STAV, or Stable Transcription and Artistic Validation. Yes, the acronym might not contain any of the words “image”, “compression”, “reconstruction”, or “diffusion”, but Philip Katzip isn’t going to be the only one giving his name to compression techniques. //

As you can see, there is basically no loss in quality, even though the images’s sizes are around a ten-thousandth the original’s. This is an absolutely astonishing result, and will definitely herald a new era of compression. There are even some cases where quality is better than the original, and it is astonishing for a compressor to achieve 100%+ quality.

There are some minor kinks that need to be worked out, such as the fact that each image takes around a day to generate on mobile, but this is more than acceptable in certain domains. Website visitors, for example, are well-accustomed to such loading times, and would barely notice any difference.

AI image synthesis goes open source, with big implications. //

Realistic image synthesis models are potentially dangerous for reasons already mentioned, such as the creation of propaganda or misinformation, tampering with history, accelerating political division, enabling character attacks and impersonation, and destroying the legal value of photo or video evidence. In the AI-powered future, how will we know if any remotely produced piece of media came from an actual camera, or if we are actually communicating with a real human? On these questions, Mostaque is broadly hopeful. "There will be new verification systems in place, and open releases like this will shift the public debate and development of these tools," he said.

That's easier said than done, of course. But it's also easy to be scared of new things. Despite our best efforts, it's difficult to know exactly how image synthesis and other AI-powered technologies will affect us on a societal scale without seeing them in wide use. Ultimately, humanity will adapt, even if our cultural frameworks end up changing radically in the process. It's happened before, which is why the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said, "the only constant is change."

In fact, there's a photo of him saying that now, thanks to Stable Diffusion.

Dell XPS’s top 10 images from their Wallpapers Topic Takeover

Computer generated faces --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

computer generated cat pictures

Kodak Kodachrome holds a special place in the history of photography. We look back 11 years after the film's demise //

It is eleven years to the day since Kodak announced that it was to stop producing the last of its iconic Kodachrome transparency films. It was on 22 June 2009 that the Eastman Kodak Company broke the news from its headquarters in Rochester, New York, that the much-loved slide film would stop production after a run of 74 years.

But a decade on, Kodachrome still holds a legendary status in the history of photography. To mark the 11th anniversary of Kodachrome's demise here are 11 things about the yellow-boxed film that you may or may not know… //

Kodachrome was launched in 1935 - initially just as a 16mm movie film format. The first stills version of the film was released the following year. Kodachrome movie film ceased manufacture in 2006. //

The secret to Kodachrome's success is that it used a different process to other color film. The film did not contain the color dyes, unlike its rivals. Instead Kodachrome had three different monochrome layers - to which the three primary colors were added with dye coupleer during a complex chemical development.

The exact chemical process had several iterations, but the K-14 process was used from 1974 through the film's ulitmate demise. The K-14 process had 17 distinct stages. //

“The film market peaked in 2003 with 960 million rolls of film, today it represents roughly 2% of that,” said Manny Almeida, president of Fujifilm’s imaging division in North America in a Time interview in 2017.

Even so, last year Fujifilm announced they were bringing back black and white film just 12 months after killing it off - so the comeback is still alive.

Could Kodachrome also rise from the ashes? The complex chemistry needed for its development undoubtedly mean that this is one film that we won't see being re-introduced. But we may still dream of a miracle revival…

ABOUT DWAYNE'S PHOTO
We brought
Kodachrome home
We were the last lab in the world to process
Kodak’s iconic Kodachrome film.

Founded in 1956, Dwayne’s Photo has been a leader in the film processing industry for over 60 years. Owing to the passion and stubbornness of our founder, Dwayne’s has always been a leader in misfit and neglected products in the photographic industry. We love processing old and rare films, and have built our legacy around being the last in the industry to do it.
‍
It was this same spirit in 2010 that gained Dwayne’s international notoriety as the only lab on earth to process Kodak’s famed Kodachrome film. These events were later featured in Netflix’s movie Kodachrome.

Film closest to Kodachrome?

clumsy stranger [deleted] says:
As the stocks of Kodachrome dwindle and processing become more difficult, what film in your view comes closest as a replacement?
12:22AM, 16 January 2008 PDT

few purpose [deleted] says:
No, Kodachrome is unique - there's no process like it, nothing with its archival quality for colours.

Have they stopped manufacturing it then? I have about 5 rolls of 64 in the freezer...

Right now I don't have the sorts of scenes that are best for its use. It is best for family holidays and trips to the sea. It's the colour of memory.
ages ago. //

previous spoon [deleted] says:
This is the best study I have seen of different films on the same subject.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/swept_a/sets/72157602633510838/

West Africa is a very large region with great plant diversity and a high degree of endemism. However, the impact of Man on the native vegetation of the region is great and plant species are being lost without there being any record of their existence.

Let's put together a photographic record of plants found growing in West Africa. And who knows, you may be the first person to have photographed (or even the first to have seen!) that plant.