Chinese news media have reported that a resident of the port city of Qingdao, the location of the North Sea Fleet's headquarters, has been arrested and is awaiting trial for taking photographs of the naval base from which aircraft carrier Liaoning operates.
He is accused of passing the photos to the editor of a military magazine who the Chinese authorities consider to be a foreign spy. This follows the conviction of another individual in May for selling information and photographs to a foreigner, for which he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In October President Xi Jinping directed the Central Military Commission to take steps to protect military information more effectively and earlier this month China's first counter-espionage law was enacted.
Lighting is crucial to the art of photography. But lights are cumbersome and time-consuming to set up, and outside the studio, it can be prohibitively difficult to position them where, ideally, they ought to go.
Researchers at MIT and Cornell University hope to change that by providing photographers with squadrons of small, light-equipped autonomous robots that automatically assume the positions necessary to produce lighting effects specified through a simple, intuitive, camera-mounted interface.
At the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging in August, they take the first step toward realizing this vision, presenting a prototype system that uses an autonomous helicopter to produce a difficult effect called "rim lighting," in which only the edge of the photographer's subject is strongly lit.
Based only on the specification of the "rim width" — the desired width, from the camera's perspective, of the subject's illuminated border — the helicopter not only assumes the right initial position but readjusts in real time as the subject moves, enabling delicate rim lighting of action shots.
According to Manohar Srikanth, who worked on the system as a graduate student and postdoc at MIT and is now a senior researcher at Nokia, he and his coauthors —MIT professor of computer science and engineering Frédo Durand and Cornell's Kavita Bala, who also did her PhD at MIT — chose rim lighting for their initial experiments precisely because it's a difficult effect.
"It's very sensitive to the position of the light," Srikanth says. "If you move the light, say, by a foot, your appearance changes dramatically."
Taking old World War II photos, Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history in a whole new and unbelievably meaningful way.
