PPS08: David Vaskevitch Microsoft CTO

Nic — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:14:00 GMT

David Vaskevitch, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, gave the opening key note address at the 2008 Pro Photo Summit last week. Afterwards David was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about the role of photography and imaging in the computing and technology industries as well as some of the biggest trends he's seen in the last few years and what we can expect to see in the near future.

ShutterSpeed Episode 02

Nic — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:31:00 GMT

Welcome to ShutterSpeed Episode 02

My guests in the studio: Michael Palermiti, Bill Crow & Jeff Greene.

Links mentioned and topics covered in this episode:
[01:29] Photosynth on CSI: New York (YT Clip)
[05:22] Top 100 Iconic Photo Locations of the World - Contest
[09:46] Microsoft Pro Photo Tools with Geotagging (free download)
[16:56] What is Metadata and why is it important for photography?
[17:50] Hands-On: Using (the free) Windows Live Photo Gallery to import digital photos directly from the camera, add tags and look at basic automatic adjustment options such as brightness, contrast, saturation, red eye removal, curves and cropping.
[38:15] The first photo Bill Crow ever took; an early example of metadata from the 60's

On the next episode of ShutterSpeed Art Wolfe gives us a tour of his Seattle gallery and talks about the stories and technical challenges behind some of his favourite photos. Stay tuned.

Feedback? Comments? Suggestions? Please let us know via the comments section below or email Tim Grey, Michael Palermiti & Bill Crow join me in the studio to discuss online video storage and photo editing tools. We also get back to basics and talk about the principles of photography and what to look for in a digital camera.

I also visit the home studio of award winning photographer Phil Borges. Phil shows me the equipment he uses in the field - including his home-made lighting rig - and talks about some of the techniques he uses to capture his magnificent portraits.

We hope to make ShutterSpeed a regular series here on Channel 10. For comments on the program or ideas and suggestions for future episodes please email us at
The technique can also be reversed to widen or lengthen images by adding "seams" of pixels or to delete objects - similar to the smart erase feature from Digital Image Suite - but much cleaner.

The technology was developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir and a paper explaining the concept was presented at SIGGRAPH 2007 earlier this month.

A very cool demo video has found it's way onto the net - check it out.

From the SIGGRAPH 2007 web site

Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.
Shai Avidan
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
Ariel Shamir
The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

HD View Beta 2 Released - Now with Firefox support

Nic — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:34:00 GMT

HD View Beta 2 was released last week in conjunction with Siggraph 2007 in San Diego.

The big news in this version is the addition of Firefox support.

Firefox users wanting to get their "gigapixel on" will now be prompted to install a plugin when viewing sites with HD view collections. (Plugin available here)

Another new feature is Auto Tone Adjust. This works like an auto gain; adjusting brightness and contrast ratios in darker (or hazier) areas of a photo to increase clarity.

Check out the HD View Windows Live Spaces blog or the official HD View web site for more on gigapixel imaging.

Entries tagged with imaging - Channel 10

PPS08: David Vaskevitch Microsoft CTO

ShutterSpeed Episode 02

HD View Beta 2 Released - Now with Firefox support