The free face-image search engine PimEyes "scans through billions of images from the internet and finds matches of your photo that could have appeared in a church bulletin or a wedding photographer's website," -us/news/technology/they-made-a-public-rolodex-of-our-faces-here-s-how-i-tried-to-get-out/ar-AA1tlpPuwrites a Washington Post columnist.

So to find and delete themselves from "the PimEyes searchable Rolodex of faces," they "recently handed over a selfie and a digital copy of my driver's license to a company I don't trust." PimEyes says it empowers people to find their online images and try to get unwanted ones taken down. But PimEyes face searches are largely open to anyone with either good or malicious intent. People have used PimEyes to identify participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and creeps have used it to publicize strangers' personal information from just their image.

The company offers an opt-out form to remove your face from PimEyes searches. I did it and resented spending time and providing even more personal information to remove myself from the PimEyes repository, which we didn't consent to be part of in the first place. The increasing ease of potentially identifying your name, work history, children's school, home address and other sensitive information from one photo shows the absurdity of America's largely unrestrained data-harvesting economy.
While PimEyes' CEO said they don't keep the information you provide to opt-out, "you give PimEyes at least one photo of yourself plus a digital copy of a passport or ID with personal details obscured..." according to the article. (PimEyes' confirmation email "said I might need to repeat the opt-out with more photos...") Some digital privacy experts said it's worth opting out of PimEyes, even if it's imperfect, and that PimEyes probably legitimately needs a personal photo and proof of identity for the process. Others found it "absurd" to provide more information to PimEyes... or they weren't sure opting out was the best choice... Experts said the fundamental problem is how much information is harvested and accessible without your knowledge or consent from your phone, home speakers, your car and information-organizing middlemen like PimEyes and data brokers.

Nathan Freed Wessler, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney focused on privacy litigation, said laws need to change the assumption that companies can collect almost anything about you or your face unless you go through endless opt-outs. "These systems are scary and abusive," he said. "If they're going to exist, they should be based on an opt-in system."

Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang built his own full-frame camera and open-sourced the project on GitLab for anyone else to build upon. The camera, named Sitina S1, features a 10MP CCD sensor, custom electronics, and a 3D-printed body. Digital Photography Review reports: Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it's not finished yet. "Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off," he says. He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn't going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what's involved in building a camera from the ground up.

Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang's camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. "Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren't going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available," he explains. The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera.

Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he's currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts. And that's just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together. Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.

The Ansel Adams estate said it was "officially on our last nerve" after Adobe was caught selling AI-generated images imitating the late photographer's work. The Verge reports: While Adobe permits AI-generated images to be hosted and sold on its stock image platform, users are required to hold the appropriate rights or ownership over the content they upload. Adobe Stock's Contributor Terms specifically prohibits content "created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist." Adobe responded to the callout, saying it had removed the offending content and had privately messaged the Adams estate to get in touch directly in the future. The Adams estate, however, said it had contacted Adobe directly multiple times since August 2023.

"Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists' estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms," said the Adams estate on Threads. "It's past time to stop wasting resources that don't belong to you."

Adobe Stock Vice President Matthew Smith previously told The Verge that the company generally moderates all "crowdsourced" Adobe Stock assets before they are made available to customers, employing a "variety" of methods that include "an experienced team of moderators who review submissions." As of January 2024, Smith said the strongest action the company can take to enforce its platform rules is to block Adobe Stock users who violate them. Bassil Elkadi, Adobe's Director of Communications and Public Relations, told The Verge that Adobe is "actively in touch with Ansel Adams on this matter," and that "appropriate steps were taken given the user violated Stock terms." The Adams estate has since thanked Adobe for removing the images, and said that it expects "it will stick this time." "We don't have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel's photography," said the Adams estate. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output -- regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work."

Nikon, Sony Group and Canon are developing camera technology that embeds digital signatures in images so that they can be distinguished from increasingly sophisticated fakes. From a report: Nikon will offer mirrorless cameras with authentication technology for photojournalists and other professionals. The tamper-resistant digital signatures will include such information as date, time, location and photographer. Such efforts come as ever-more-realistic fakes appear, testing the judgment of content producers and users alike.

An alliance of global news organizations, technology companies and camera makers has launched a web-based tool called Verify for checking images free of charge. If an image has a digital signature, the site displays date, location and other credentials. The digital signatures now share a global standard used by Nikon, Sony and Canon. Japanese companies control around 90% of the global camera market. If an image has been created with artificial intelligence or tampered with, the Verify tool flags it as having "No Content Credentials."

Scharon Harding reports via Ars Technica: On Thursday, Leica Camera released the first camera that can take pictures with automatically encrypted metadata and provide features such as an editing history. The company believes this system, called Content Credentials, will help photojournalists protect their work and prove authenticity in a world riddled with AI-manipulated content.

Leica's M11-P can store each captured image with Content Credentials, which is based on the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity's (C2PA's) open standard and is being pushed by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Content Credentials, announced in October, includes encrypted metadata detailing where and when the photo was taken and with what camera and model. It also keeps track of edits and tools used for edits. When a photographer opts to use the feature, they'll see a Content Credentials logo in the camera's display, and images will be signed through the use of an algorithm.

The feature requires the camera to use a specialized chipset for storing digital certificates. Credentials can be verified via Leica's FOTOS app or on the Content Credentials website. Leica's announcement said: "Whenever someone subsequently edits that photo, the changes are recorded to an updated manifest, rebundled with the image, and updated in the Content Credentials database whenever it is reshared on social media. Users who find these images online can click on the CR icon in the [pictures'] corner to pull up all of this historical manifest information as well, providing a clear chain of providence, presumably, all the way back to the original photographer." The M11-P's Content Credentials is an opt-in feature and can also be erased. As Ars has previously noted, an image edited with tools that don't support Content Credentials can also result in a gap in the image's provenance data.

The Washington Post reports: A new spectacle is taking over the tented world of acrobats, clowns and juggling entertainers. And while it may have a trunk and tusks, it weighs absolutely nothing. Circuses, once known for showcasing elephants in all their heft are now presenting a much lighter creature — a 3D hologram.

The Circus-Theater Roncalli in Germany was the first to do it, and photographer Davide Bertuccio wanted to see for himself how the group pulled it off. When he attended a show at the end of 2022, he was immediately struck by the quiet atmosphere inside the tent. "Finding a circus without the din of animals, but the simple noise of people was a surprise" he said.

The holographic figures are custom-built for the circus using 3D animations, photography and virtual rendering. The system of 11 digital laser projectors positioned around the stage flash animations onto a circular net hoisted up for each performance. The entire light show is operated by one person, and it takes about 10 people to take down the metallic netting to make room for the other performers, including acrobats, clowns and dancers, Bertuccio said.
The circus introduced the holograms in 2019, the Post reports, and "other acts have followed suit, including the French circus L'Écocirque, which features holograms of a lion, an elephant and beluga whales, accompanied by a live orchestra blaring rock music."

The New Yorker argues that photos on newer iPhones are "coldly crisp and vaguely inhuman, caught in the uncanny valley where creative expression meets machine learning...."

"[T]he truth is that iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of 'computational photography,' a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information. Each picture registered by the lens is altered to bring it closer to a pre-programmed ideal." In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro... But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, "I feel a little duped." Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl's upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that, when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), "what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture." The new iPhone promises "next level" photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. "Make it less smart — I'm serious," she said. Lately she's taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google's line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures....

Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, "I've tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing." A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device "sees the things I'm trying to photograph as a problem to solve," he added. The image processing also eliminates digital noise, smoothing it into a soft blur, which might be the reason behind the smudginess that McCabe sees in photos of her daughter's gymnastics. The "fix" ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original.

Earlier this month, Apple's iPhone team agreed to provide me information, on background, about the camera's latest upgrades. A staff member explained that, when a user takes a photograph with the newest iPhones, the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a "Deep Fusion" feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. This process is an extreme version of high-dynamic range, or H.D.R., a technique that previously required some software savvy.... The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame — faces, landscapes, skies — and exposes each one differently. On both the 12 Pro and 13 Pro, I've found that the image processing makes clouds and contrails stand out with more clarity than the human eye can perceive, creating skies that resemble the supersaturated horizons of an anime film or a video game. Andy Adams, a longtime photo blogger, told me, "H.D.R. is a technique that, like salt, should be applied very judiciously." Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not....

The average iPhone photo strains toward the appearance of professionalism and mimics artistry without ever getting there. We are all pro photographers now, at the tap of a finger, but that doesn't mean our photos are good.

A team of researchers from Cornell University used a computational aesthetic system to teach an AI robot "to not only determine the most pleasing picture in a given dataset, but capture new, original -- and most importantly, good -- shots on its own," writes Engadget's A. Tarantola. The project is called AutoPhoto and was presented last fall at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. From the report: This robo-photographer consists of three parts: the image evaluation algorithm, which evaluates a presented image and issues an aesthetic score; a Clearpath Jackal wheeled robot upon which the camera is affixed; and the AutoPhoto algorithm itself, which serves as a sort of firmware, translating the results from the image grading process into drive commands for the physical robot and effectively automating the optimized image capture process.

For its image evaluation algorithm, the Cornell team led by second year Masters student Hadi AlZayer, leveraged an existing learned aesthetic estimation model, which had been trained on a dataset of more than a million human-ranked photographs. AutoPhoto itself was virtually trained on dozens of 3D images of interior room scenes to spot the optimally composed angle before the team attached it to the Jackal. When let loose in a building on campus, as you can see in the video above, the robot starts off with a slew of bad takes, but as the AutoPhoto algorithm gains its bearings, its shot selection steadily improves until the images rival those of local Zillow listings. On average it took about a dozen iterations to optimize each shot and the whole process takes just a few minutes to complete.

"You can essentially take incremental improvements to the current commands," AlZayer told Engadget. "You can do it one step at a time, meaning you can formulate it as a reinforcement learning problem." This way, the algorithm doesn't have to conform to traditional heuristics like the rule of thirds because it already knows what people will like as it was taught to match the look and feel of the shots it takes with the highest-ranked pictures from its training data, AlZayer explained. "The most challenging part was the fact there was no existing baseline number we were trying to improve," AlZayer noted to the Cornell Press. "We had to define the entire process and the problem." Looking ahead, AlZayer hopes to adapt the AutoPhoto system for outdoor use, potentially swapping out the terrestrial Jackal for a UAV. "Simulating high quality realistic outdoor scenes is very hard," AlZayer said, "just because it's harder to perform reconstruction of a controlled scene." To get around that issue, he and his team are currently investigating whether the AutoPhoto model can be trained on video or still images rather than 3D scenes.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool summarizes a report from Polygon: Photographer Judy Jurasek has sued Capcom for copyright infringement of at least 80 of her photographs in their recent game, Resident Evil: Devil May Cry and other games. Jurasek claims the textures in the video game where copied from her 1996 book Surfaces which contained 1,200 images of surfaces and textures. The book was sold with a CD-ROM with digital copies of the images. Jurasek's damages could total $12M from Devil May Cry alone.

Jurasek claims that Capcom never licensed the images for use in their video games. The initial filing is over 100 pages with many detailed photographic examples of her claims. Part of her evidence comes from Capcom's 2020 data breach. The data breach leaked among other things files and filenames of images used by Capcom. At least one filename appears to match those found in the CD-ROM from Surfaces.
Jurasek is also seeking additional damages of $2,500 to $25,000 for each used photograph for "false copyright management and removal of copyright management," according to Polygon's report, which says she's alleging her photos were used for "everything from marbled textures to ornate sculptural details that are recognizable and abundant in Capcom games," and even the shattered glass texture used in the Resident Evil 4 logo.

A Capcom representative told Polygon that the company is "aware of the lawsuit" and has "no further comment."

During the Great Conjunction event in which Jupiter and Saturn appeared closer to each other in the sky than they have for hundreds of years, photographer Jason De Freitas captured a photo showing the ISS zipping between the two planets. PetaPixel reports: While planning to photograph the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, De Freitas realized that he could also include the ISS in the frame. "I had the incredible luck of figuring out I could see the path of the International Space Station traveling through the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction," De Freitas says. After a great deal of planning, on December 17th, De Freitas drove an hour -- "quite a short distance in the scheme of things," he says -- to a location where everything would be aligned perfectly for his shot.

At around 9:54pm from Jellore Lookout in New South Wales, Australia, De Freitas pointed his Pentax 67 and Takumar 600mm f/4 at the planets and captured a 10-second exposure on Fujifilm Provia 100f film. The tracking was done with a Skywatcher NEQ6 equatorial mount. The photo above is what resulted. Here's a closer crop in which you can more clearly see the planets and Jupiter's moons. De Freitas also used a Nikon D750 and Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 to capture digital video of the event. "Probably the most unique shot I've ever taken," De Freitas says. "[S]omehow everything on the night worked out. Beyond thrilled with this one.

Olympus, once one of the world's biggest camera brands, is selling off that part of its business after 84 years. The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable. From a report: The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said. It had recorded losses for the last three years. The Japanese company made its first camera in 1936 after years of microscope manufacture. The Semi-Olympus I featured an accordion-like fold-out camera bellows, and cost more than a month's wages in Japan. The company continued to develop the camera business over the decades, becoming one of the top companies by market share. "There's a huge amount of affection for Olympus, going right back," says Nigel Atherton, editor of Amateur Photographer magazine. The 1970s was a high point, with their cameras advertised on television by celebrity photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Lichfield. "Those cameras were revolutionary - they were very small, very light, they were beautifully designed, had really nice quality lenses," adds Atherton.

Germany will outlaw the morphing of passport photos, in which pictures of two people are digitally combined, making it possible to assign multiple identities to a single document. Reuters reports: Morphing can trick artificial intelligence used at passport control into recognizing different individuals. The government on Wednesday backed a law requiring people to either have their photo taken at a passport office or, if they use a photographer, have it submitted in digital form over a secure connection, spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics have found that it is possible to morph photos of the faces of different people who are not even related. A certain degree of similarity is sufficient, such as the eyes being aligned. Such manipulation of photos is typically invisible to the human eye, the researchers found.

The Washington State Attorney General's Office has charged a Seattle man for setting up a fake talent agency for adult entertainers in order to trick women into posing nude and having sex with him. NBC News reports: Michael-Jon Matthew Hickey is accused of creating a fictitious business and using deceptive ads with bogus employment offers to find his victims. The lawsuit alleges Hickey offered and advertised commercial services solely for his "own personal gain" and to "satisfy his sexual desires" with no intention of following through on the promised services to help these women find jobs. Hickey, a 40-year old technology blogger and aspiring photographer, is charged with numerous violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act and the Commercial Electronic Mail Act. Assistant Attorney General Andrea Alegrett, who is handling the consumer protection case, told NBC News Hickey had developed "a sophisticated scam" which involved fake business websites, fictional people, and bogus contact information. The lawsuit alleges Hickey pretended to be a woman named Deja Stwalley, who claimed to live in Las Vegas where she ran a number of talent companies, including New Seattle Talent, West Coast Talent and FMH Modeling. The New SeattleTalent website stated: "We work as recruiters and scouts for some of the top studios in the Northwest. Our goal is to be the top recruiting group for girls in America. We're woman-founded and woman-owned, and take the talent's safety and welfare seriously." Hickey, posing as Stwalley, would contact women between the ages of 17 and 25 via Facebook and offer them a chance to audition for an adult film studio. Stwalley assured each woman that they "TOTALLY have the look they're going for" and could earn between $1,200 and $3,500 a day, the AG's complaint alleges. Digital Security expert Adam Levin, Chairman and founder of Identity Theft 911, said this case shows just how easy it is for someone to use social media for fraudulent purposes.

Earlier this year, photographer Carol Highsmith received a $120 settlement demand from Getty Images after she used one of her own public domain images on her website (which is she had donated to the Library of Congress and made available to the public to reproduce and display for free). Highsmith responded with a $1bn lawsuit but after a few short months, as TorrentFreak reports, the case is all over, with neither side a clear winner. From the report: To begin, on October 28, US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff dismissed each of Carol Highsmith's federal copyright claims. "Defendants Getty Images (US), Inc., License Compliance Services, Inc., Alamy, including that Inc., and Alamy Ltd. collectively moved to dismiss all claims of plaintiffs Carol Highsmith and This is America!, Inc. under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act,... the Lanham Act,... New York General Business Law,... and New York common law of unfair competition," the Judge wrote. "Upon consideration, the Court grants defendants' motions,â he added. With the federal claims gone, three state law claims were including that Getty charged licensing fees for images when it shouldn't have and collected settlements from alleged infringers when it had no right. However, these claims have now also been dismissed, along with the rest of the case. "It is hereby stipulated and agreed, by and among the parties, that this action shall be dismissed with prejudice pursuant to Rule 41(a)(l)(A)(ii) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, each party to bear its own costs and fees," the Judge wrote in his dismissal. Since the case was dismissed with prejudice, it is done and cannot be brought back to court.

An anonymous reader writes: The Olympics Committee has introduced a new set of social media guidelines for the 2016 games. Not only will streaming applications and vines be prohibited, but GIFs will be too. TechCrunch reports: "Part of the new restriction appears in the official broadcast rules (PDF), under 'Internet and Mobile Platforms': '[...] the use of Olympic Material transformed into graphic animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines and others, is expressly prohibited.' Then, in the FAQ for the social and digital media guidelines (PDF): 'Broadcasting images via life-streaming applications (e.g. Periscope, Meerkat) is prohibited inside Olympic venues.' The versions of these documents updated for the 2014 games in Sochi don't have any comparable language, or at least nothing this specific. A possible exception is the 'Photographer's Undertaking,' which states: 'The dissemination of moving images or sound captured in an Olympic venue, through any media, including display on the internet, Mobile Platform and other interactive media or electronic medium, is strictly prohibited.'"

Back in November you had a chance to ask Rachel Sussman about photography and her work. Her most famous project may be the Oldest Living Things in the World, a collection of organisms that are 2,000 years old and older from around the world. Below you'll find her answers to your questions.

An anonymous reader writes "Hungarian photographer Adam Magyar doesn't work like most artists. He takes the world's most sophisticated photographic equipment, then hacks it with software he writes himself — all in order to twist our perception of time inside out. In this latest story from the digital publisher MATTER, Joshua Hammer discovers how Magyar's unique combination of technology and art challenges the way we understand the world. At one point, Magyar realized he needed a 'slit-scan' camera, 'the type used to determine photo finishes at racetracks and at Olympic sporting events by capturing a time sequence in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar set out to build one himself. He joined a medium-format camera lens to another sensor and wrote his own software for the new device. Total cost: $50. He inverted the traditional scanning method, where the sensor moves across a stationary object. This time, the sensor would remain still while the scanned objects were in motion, being photographed one consecutive pixel-wide strip at a time. (This is the basic principle of the photo-finish camera.) Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a busy Shanghai neighborhood and scanned pedestrians as they passed in front of the sensor. He then digitally combined over 100,000 sequential strips into high-resolution photographs.' There are pictures and videos interspersed throughout the article."

Last week you had a chance to ask "Chairman Bruce" about the state of sci-fi, dystopian futures, and the modern surveillance state. Below you'll find his answers to those questions, including who would win if he fought William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in a no-holds-barred battle.

Sally Wiener Grotta and her husband Daniel wrote some of the first books and articles about digital photography. Sally was an award-winning photographer in film days, and has maintained her reputation in the digital imaging age. In this interview, she talks about how to buy a digital camera -- including the radical idea that most people really don't need to spend more than $200 to take quality photos. (We had some bandwidth problems while doing this remote interview, but the sound is clear so we decided to run it "as is" rather than try to remake the video and lose the original's spontaneity.)

Nancy_A writes "Photographer and digital artist Michael K. Chung said he couldn't believe what he saw when he was processing images he took for a timelapse of the Perseid meteor shower this week. It appears he captured a meteor explosion and the resulting expansion of a shock wave or debris ring. After this article was posted, Universe Today received more 'explody' footage from the Perseid meteor shower, which has been added to the article."