A year ago...

Ahhh, a year ago I bumped into this lady in the most famous Ice Cream place in Cascais, Portugal. And as kindly as she is beautiful, she said to me: "Paaaarrrrdon!"

Ahh, beautiful 2008 Summer nights!

The invisible flash

Using the flash while taking some photos may be, in some situations, the only choice you have in order to produce decent lighting in a picture. However, most flash pictures are ruined because of the excessive light in the foreground and not enough light on the background.

In the ideal world of photography, a camera would be able to capture just enough light to make the picture perfect but not suffer from the disadvantages of using flash. Basically, what we need is an "invisible flash". But how can one produce such a paradox: a blast of light but that is not visible?



The answer is given by a student of the New York University, Dilip Krishnan and his advisor Rob Fergus. They have developed a dark or invisible flash which uses infrared and UV light to take photos in dark places without the nasty glare of a standard flash.

Basically, what they did was modify a light bulb to emit light over a wider range of frequencies (not visible at the human eye). They also changed their camera to adapt to these new conditions by using a set of filters to prevent the silicon image sensor from detecting infrared and ultraviolet rays.

This is not exactly new as this is more or less like night vision works. The difference is that, instead of having those photos where we all look like vampires, they managed to find a way to produce the correct colour balance by taking a quick colour image right after the dark flash image.

Even though the image produced in this second image is of low quality (grainy and unclear), the colours are correct. This allows them to produce a correct final image by using special software that combines the information from the photos (you can see the process on the 3 images above).

The technology is not yet perfect but it definitely looks pretty promising. To know more about it, you can check the website here.

Source: Engadget

Anti-paparazzi gadgets

Adam Harvey, a student of of Interactive Telecommunication at New York University has created a new gadget that will probably be the next sensation of all those paparazzi-harassed celebrities: a purse with a flash sensor and flash.

So what does it do? It's simple. The purse contains a sensor that is triggered by any flash going off, and it instantaneously fires its own flash, completely ruining paparazzi shots.

Source: core77

Creative USB flash drives

There are more here.

Retro-blogging: Best posts of July 2008

Previously, on "The Tech In Me":

• Close Encounter with a Star
• This is so true
• How to really cool down your laptop
• Two girls, one cup - Thank God for the Internet
  
• Putting those retro-3D-glasses to work
• Another way to generate power while dancing
• Testing your website in different browsers
• Just don't click it
• Using Quicksilver to tweet
• R2-D2 and C3PO make a special appearance
• 3D tetris... kind of!
• Internet ramblings
• The other side of the world
• PacMan is everywhere
• A different kind of alarm clocks
• Rotate screen display in Windows Vista

Turn your pictures into a miniature model

By now you've probably seen around the Web some of those pictures that look like miniature models but are in fact pictures of real places that were just modified to look like it. Here are a couple of examples of photos that I tilt-shifted to make it look like a miniature street filled with small cars:



Looks nice, right? And you don't even have to be a Photoshop genius to pull something like this. All you have to do is use TiltShiftMaker.com. This website is quite simple and allows you to create this kind of photos quite easily and without having to have that much of photography knowledge.

Enjoy!