A guide to street photography: Antonio Olmos and the dark art of manual exposure

A Palestinian refugee rests his legs beneath a 'Martyr's Portrait' in Gaza City

Street photography is the purest, most spontaneous way to create art with a camera. No studios, no props, no poses; all you need is the right equipment and a street with people on it. In this original series for Engadget, we’ll follow three seasoned street fighters and try to glean some practical wisdom about what engages their eyes, brains and fingers in the moments before they shoot.

In part one, we focus in on Antonio Zazueta Olmos — a street photographer who has learned to rely on manual exposure to capture the images he wants, rather than making use of the ever-smarter, ever-quicker automatic settings available on the latest digital cameras.

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Experimental 3D scanner creates clear images with almost no light

We’ve seen single-pixel cameras, and now MIT researchers have figured out how to create clear images of dimly-lit objects using single photons — in 3D, no less. The technique doesn’t involve any fancy new hardware, either, as the team worked with a standard photon detector that fired low-intensity visible laser light pulses. The magic happens from the algorithms they developed instead, which can pick out variations in the time it takes for individual photons to bounce off of subjects. After the software separated the noise (as shown above) the result was a high-res image created with about a million photons that would have required several hundred trillion with, say, a smartphone camera. That’ll open up new possibilities for low-energy surveying, for instance, or even spy cameras that could virtually see in the dark — because no laser research project is complete with a sinister-sounding military application.

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Source: Nature

This Stealth Camera Captures Images in Almost Complete Darkness

This Stealth Camera Captures Images in Almost Complete Darkness

If you thought low-light photography was coming on in leaps and bounds, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This new camera, developed by researchers at MIT, can capture ultra-sharp images of objects even when they’re illuminated by just a handful of photons.

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MIT’s New $500 Kinect-Like Camera Even Works With Translucent Objects

MIT's New $500 Kinect-Like Camera Even Works With Translucent Objects

Microsoft’s Kinect is great, but it has its limitations. Not so MIT’s new nano-camera, though, which uses similar technology but can weave the same magic with translucent objects, and even work in snow or rain.

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MIT’s $500 Kinect-like camera works in snow, rain, gloom of night

Remember that camera that takes 1 trillion exposures per second? Well, the illustrious folks at MIT have outdone themselves (again) by developing a camera that accomplishes all that and more, for just $500. Similar to the recently released Xbox One Kinect, this three-dimensional “nano-camera” is based on “Time Flight Technology.” That means an object’s whereabouts are calculated by measuring the time it takes light to reflect off its surface and return to the sensor. But, thanks to some fancy math, the nano-cam can capture translucent and moving objects in 3D, using a new encoding method. In the past, the results of the process (which has been dubbed “nanophotography”) could only be achieved with a $500,000 “femto-camera.” With such a dramatically lower price tag, it could be a solution to one of the many hurdles facing self-driving vehicles: the ability to tell the difference between a puddle and a cat in the pouring rain. And, even though it functions like a Kinect, don’t expect it to be standard issue with an Xbox Two (or One II, or whatever Microsoft decides to call it).

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Source: MITnews

The Best Black Friday Deals

The Best Black Friday Deals

Welcome to our coverage of all the best Black Friday deals. Deals are continuing to pour in, and this post will be constantly updated right up to the point when our Cyber Monday guide goes live. These deals are all subject to change and subject to price-matches (especially online price matches), and we can tell you that there are lots of deals still embargoed or not yet announced.

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Shooting Challenge: Your Family’s Thanksgiving Recipe

Shooting Challenge: Your Family's Thanksgiving Recipe

Every family has some dish that only they eat on Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s from the old world. Maybe it’s some amalgamation of mincemeat and lime flavored gelatin. For this week’s Shooting Challenge, I want you to share it—and the recipe.

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Apple Lytro-like camera system patent looks to iPhone for size

There’s a system for shooting photos out there in the world of Apple patents, one that looks to take the light-field camera and make a version of it much, much smaller. Small enough to fit inside an iPhone, as it were. The patent for this system describes the likes of a plenoptic camera, better known […]

Man Swaps Head For iPad. Has No Regrets.

Man Swaps Head For iPad. Has No Regrets.

This superb illusion doesn’t use Photoshop. So how did photographer Nils Bertrand pull it off?

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Apple Patents Lytro-Style Camera Technology for Refocusable Images

Apple Patents Lytro-Style Camera Technology for Refocusable Images

Apple was just awarded a patent for a "plenoptic" or light-field camera, much like the one that Lytro started selling a couple of years ago. This is the type of technology that enables you to refocus photos after you’ve taken them. It would also seriously take iPhone photography to the next level.

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