photography – Dan Q

ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr

You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.

A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.

Cheating at GeoGuessr

I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT¹, I pasted screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:

That’s pretty spooky, right?

The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.

This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:

This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.

But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.

Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a “send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra details to it).

And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning on the side².

The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.

What about other photos?

The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and other unsavoury types.

I wrote a prompt for gpt4o and put it to work:

1. Starting out easy

The Logos Hope docked at the Port of Spain cruise ship terminal, Trinidad & Tobago. — I took this photo from the balcony of our first hotel during Ruth and I’s trip to Trinidad & Tobago.

The AI guessed:

Location: Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English, indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of Spain’s known characteristics.

Coordinates: 10.6549, -61.5011

✅ That was pretty easy, to be fair.

2. A little more challenging

A squat neolithic stone circle with many stones (some might say an uncountable number). A dog pulls at her lead to follow one of her humans more-closely around it. — We have an annual tradition of visiting this particular monument.

The AI guessed:

Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom

Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle. These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.

Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731

✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.

3. Ramping up the difficulty

The AI guessed:

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken in Istanbul.

Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784

✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower³ was a nice move.

4. Okay, now hard mode:

Dan waves to the camera in front of a pleasure marina and revitalised docklands. — This photo is from 3Camp⁴ last year.

The AI guessed:

Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom

Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”) supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina. The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.

Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678

❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).

So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.

Footnotes

¹ And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out of a legitimate victory!

² I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)

³ Having visited the Galata Tower I can confirm that it really is pretty distinctive.

⁴ 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.

EXIF geodata, and what if you took a picture on the moon?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A conversation about staying private and stripping EXIF tags on blogs lead to shdwcat asking the question “what would happen if you took a picture on the moon?”

…

However, I figured we could do better than “a point high above the Earth.” If you could state the coordinate system, you should be able to list an actual point on the moon.

…

Cassie Jones (Witch of Light)

It’s a fun question. Sure, you need to shoot down the naysayers who, like colin, rightly point out that you couldn’t reasonably expect to get a GPS/GNSS signal on the moon, but still.

GPS on Earth

GPS (and most other GNSS technologies) fundamentally work by the principle of trilateration. Here’s the skinny of what happens when your GPS receiver – whether that’s your phone, smartwatch, SatNav, or indeed digital camera – needs to work out where on Earth it is:

It listens for the signal that’s transmitted from the satellites. This is already an amazing feat of engineering given that the signal is relatively quiet and it’s being transmitted from around 20,000km above the surface of the planet¹.
The signal fundamentally says, for example “Hi, I’m satellite #18, and the time is [some time].” Assuming your GPS receiver doesn’t contain an atomic clock², it listens for the earliest time – i.e. the closest satellite (the signals “only” travel at the speed of light) – and assumes that this satellite’s time represents the actual time at your location.
Your GPS receiver keeps listening until it’s found three more satellites, and compares the times that they claim it is. Using this, and knowing the speed of light, it’s able to measure the distance to each of those three satellites. The satellites themselves are on reasonably-stable orbits, so as long as you’ve been installing your firmware updates at least once every 5-10 years, your device knows where those satellites are expected to be.
If you know your distance from one satellite, in 3D space, you know that your location is on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius of that distance, centered on the satellite. Once you’ve measured your distance from a second satellite, you know that you must be at a point where those two spheres intersect: i.e. somewhere on a circle. With a third satellite found and the distance measured, you’re able to cut that down to just two points (of which one is likely to be about 40,000km into space, so it’s probably not that one³).
Your device will keep finding more passing satellites, measuring and re-measuring, and refining/averaging your calculated location for maximum accuracy.

So yeah: that tiny computer on top of your camera or within your wristwatch? It’s differentiating to miniscule precision measurements of the speed of light, from spacecraft as far away as half the circumference of the planet, while compensating for not being a timekeeping device accurate enough to do so and working-around the time dilation resulting from the effect of general relativity on the satellites⁴.

GPS on Luna

Supposing you could pick out GPS signals from Earth orbit, from the surface of the moon (which – again – you probably can’t – especially if you were on the dark side of the moon where you wouldn’t get a view of the Earth). Could it work?

I can’t see why not. You’d want to recalibrate your GPS receiver to assume that the “time” satellite – the one with the earliest-apparent clock – was much further away (and therefore that the real time was later than it appears to be) than an Earth-based GPS receiver would: the difference in the order of 1.3 seconds, which is a long time in terms of GNSS calculation.

Again, once you had distance measurements from three spatial satellites you’d be able to pinpoint your location, to within some sphere of uncertainty, to one of two points. One would be on the moon (where you know that you are⁵), and one would be on the far side of the Earth by almost the same distance. That’s a good start. And additional satellites could help narrow it down even more.

You might even be able to get a slightline to more satellites than is typically possible on Earth, not being limited by Earth curvature, nor being surrounded by relatively-large Earth features like mountains, buildings, trees, and unusually-tall humans. It’s feasible.

How about… LPS?

If we wanted to go further – and some day, if we aim to place permanent human settlements on the moon, we might – then we might consider a Lunar Positioning System: a network of a dozen or so orbiters whizzing around the moon to facilitate accurate positioning on its surface. They’d want to be in low orbits to avoid the impact of tidal forces from the much-larger nearby Eath, and with no atmosphere to scrape against there’s little harm in that.

By the time you’re doing that, though, you might as well ditch trilateration and use the doppler effect, Transit-style. It works great in low orbits but its accuracy on Eath was always limited by the fact that you can’t make the satellites fly low enough without getting atmospheric drag. There’s no such limitation on the moon. Maybe that’s the way forward.

Maybe far-future mobile phones and cameras will support satellite positioning and navigation networks on both Earth and Luna. And maybe then we’ll start seeing EXIF metadata spanning both the WGS-84 datum and the LRO-ME datum.

Footnotes

¹ That’s still only about a twentieth of the way to the moon, by the way. But there are other challenging factors, like our atmosphere and all of the obstructions both geographic and human-made that litter our globe.

² Protip: it doesn’t.

³ Satnav voice: “After falling for forty thousand kilometres, you will reach your destination.”

⁴ The relativistic effects on GPS satellites cannot be understated. Without compensation, GPS accuracy would drift by up to 10km for every day that the satellites were in orbit, which I reckon would make them useless for anything more than telling you what hemisphere you were in within 5½ years!

⁵ If you’re on the moon and don’t know it, you have a whole different problem.

Oldest Digital Photo… of Me

Some younger/hipper friends tell me that there was a thing going around on Instagram this week where people post photos of themselves aged 21.

I might not have any photos of myself aged 21! I certainly can’t find any digital ones…

Dan, aged 22, stands in a cluttered flat with his partner Claire and several members of Dan's family. — The closest I can manage is this photo from 23 April 2003, when I was 22 years old.

It must sound weird to young folks nowadays, but prior to digital photography going mainstream in the 2000s (thanks in big part to the explosion of popularity of mobile phones), taking a photo took effort:

Most folks didn’t carry their cameras everywhere with them, ready-to-go, so photography was much more-intentional.
The capacity of a film only allowed you to take around 24 photos before you’d need to buy a new one and swap it out (which took much longer than swapping a memory card).
You couldn’t even look at the photos you’d taken until they were developed, which you couldn’t do until you finished the roll of film and which took at least hours – more-realistically days – and incurred an additional cost.

I didn’t routinely take digital photos until after Claire and I got together in 2002 (she had a digital camera, with which the photo above was taken). My first cameraphone – I was a relatively early-adopter – was a Nokia 7650, bought late that same year.

It occurs to me that I take more photos in a typical week nowadays, than I took in a typical year circa 2000.

Monochrome photo of a toddler, smiling broadly, pointing at the camera. — The oldest *analogue* photo of me that I own was taken on 2 October 1982, when I was 22 months old.

This got me thinking: what’s the oldest digital photo that exists, of me. So I went digging.

I might not have owned a digital camera in the 1990s, but my dad’s company owned one with which to collect pictures when working on-site. It was a Sony MVC-FD7, a camera most-famous for its quirky use of 3½” floppy disks as media (this was cheap and effective, but meant the camera was about the size and weight of a brick and took about 10 seconds to write each photo from RAM to the disk, during which it couldn’t do anything else).

In Spring 1998, almost 26 years ago, I borrowed it and took, among others, this photo:

Dan aged 17 - a young white man with platinum blonde shoulder-length hair - stands in front of a pink wall, holding up a large, boxy digital camera. — I’m aged 17 in what’s probably the oldest surviving digital photo of me, looking like a refugee from Legoland in 640×480 glorious pixels.

I’m confident a picture of me was taken by a Connectix QuickCam (an early webcam) in around 1996, but I can’t imagine it still exists.

So unless you’re about to comment to tell me know you differently and have an older picture of me: that snap of me taking my own photo with a bathroom mirror is the oldest digital photo of me that exists.

[Bloganuary] Traditions

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Write about a few of your favourite family traditions.

We’ve got a wonderful diversity of family traditions. This by virtue, perhaps, of us being a three-parent family, and so bringing 50% more different traditions and 100% less decisiveness over which to accept than a traditional two-parent family. Or it might reflect our outlook and willingness to evaluate and try new things: to experiment and adopt what works. Or perhaps we just like to be just-barely on this side of the line across the the quirky/eccentric scale¹.

But there are plenty of other traditions we’ve inherited or created, such as:

Pancake Brunch Sundays sort-of evolved out of a fried Sunday breakfast that used to be a household tradition many years ago. If you come visit us for a weekend you’ll find you’re served pancakes (or possibly waffles) with a mixture of traditional toppings plus, usually, a weekly “feature flavour” around midday on Sunday. For no reason now other than it’s just what we do.

A boy in blue-and-brown striped pyjamas, on a table stacked with plates of waffles, slices into a birthday cake with six candles. — Sunday Brunch stops for nothing, not even birthdays.

Family Day is an annual event, marked on or near 3 July each year, with gifts for children and possibly an outing or trip away for everybody to enjoy. It celebrates the fact that we get to be a family together, despite forces outside of our control trying to conspire to prevent it.²
Family Film Night takes place most months: in rotation, the five of us take turns to nominate a film or two that we’ll all watch together along with snacks and sweet treats. It might be seen as a continuation of the pre-children tradition of Troma Night from back in the day, except that we don’t go out of our way to deliberately watch terrible films: now that happens just as a result of good or bad fortune! We also periodically schedule a Family Board Games Night, and a Family Videogames Night.

Family members read books in a living room, seen over the top of the pages of an (out of focus) book in the foreground. — Books! Books books books! BOOKS!

Christmas Eve Books: a tradition we stole from Iceland is that we give books on Christmas Eve. Adults in our household now don’t really get Christmas gifts, but everybody present is encouraged to exchange books on Christmas eve and then sit up late reading together, often with gingerbread, chocolate, and/or a pan of mulled wine keeping warm on the stove. I find it a fun way to keep my reading list stocked early in the year, plus it encourages the kids to read³
Festive meals, while I’m thinking about that end of the year, are pretty-well established. Christmas Eve is all about roast duck pancakes. Christmas Day sees me roast a goose. New Years’ Eve is for fondue. Plus vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) alternatives to the otherwise-unsuitable things, of course.

I’m certain there must be more, but the thing with family traditions is they become part of the everyday tapestry of your life after a while. Eventually traditions become hard to see them because they’re always there. I’m sure there are more “everyday rituals” that we’ve taken on that are noteworthy or interesting to outsiders but which to us are so mundane as to be unworthy of mention!

But every single one of these is something special to us. They’re an element of structure for the kids and a signifier of community to all of us. They’re routines that we’ve taken on and made “ours” as part of our collective identity as a family. And that’s just great.

Footnotes

¹ Determining which side of the line I mean is left as an exercise to the reader.

² It’s been what…? 6½ years…? And I’m still not ready even emotionally to blog about the challenges we faced, so maybe I never will. So if you missed that chapter of our lives, suffice to say: for a while, it looked like we might not get to continue being a family, and over the course of one exceptionally-difficult year it took incredible effort, resolve, sleepless nights, supportive families, and (when it came down to brass tacks) enough money and lawyers to seek justice… in order to ensure that we got to continue to be. About which we’re all amazingly grateful, and so we celebrate it.

³ Not that they need any help with that, little bookworms that they are.

Freezing Fog

Gorgeous freezing fog over the fields on the school run this morning.

Monster Munch Sandwich

Experimenting with some unusual combinations in anticipation of International Crisp Sandwich Day.

This one’s Roast Beef Monster Munch on Farmhouse White.

(I hereby release the crisp sandwich photo into the public domain / CC0 license; your choice.)

Crowdsourced Burger Photography

A fast food giant faces a lawsuit because their burgers don’t look like they do in the marketing. It’s not the first time.

Marketing photograph showing Burger King's "Whopper" burger. — Did you ever see a Whopper™️ that looked like this? Me neither.

If I ran a fast food franchise affected by this kind of legal action, do you know what I would do? I’d try to turn it back around into marketing exercise with a bit of crowdsourcing!

Think about it: get your customers to take photos and send them to you. For every franchisee that uses a photo you take, you get a voucher for a free meal (redeemable at any outlet, of course). And where it appears on the digital signage menus they all seem to have nowadays, your photo will have your name on it too.

Most submissions will be… unsuitable, of course. You’ll need a team of people vetting submissions. But for every 50 people who send a blurry picture of an unappetising bit of sludge-meat in a bun; for every 10 people who actually try hard but get too much background in or you can see the logo on their clothing or whatever; for every 5 people that deliberately send something offensive… you might get one genuinely good candid burger picture. Those pics get pushed out to franchisees to use. Sorted.

Now if anybody complains that you fake your photos you can explain that every one of your food pictures was taken by a real-life customer, and their name or handle is on the bottom of each one. Sure, you get to vet them, but they’re still all verifiably genuine pictures of your food.

And you probably only have to do this gimmick for a year and then everybody will forget. Crowdsourcing as a marketing opportunity: that’s what I’d be doing if I were crowned Burger King.

Child Photographers

Taking a photo of our kids isn’t too hard: their fascination with screens means you just have to switch to “selfie mode” and they lock-on to the camera like some kind of narcissist homing pigeon. Failing that, it’s easy enough to distract them with something that gets them to stay still for a few seconds and not just come out as a blur.

Dan with the kids and his bike, on the way to school. — “On the school run” probably isn’t a typical excuse for a selfie, but the light was good.

But compared to the generation that came before us, we have it really easy. When I was younger than our youngest is , I was obsessed with pressing buttons. So pronounced was my fascination that we had countless photos, as a child, of my face pressed so close to the lens that it’s impossible for the camera to focus, because I’d rushed over at the last second to try to be the one to push the shutter release button. I guess I just wanted to “help”?

Monoshcome photo of Dan, circa 1982, poiting towards the camera. — Oh wait… is there something on that camera I can press?

In theory, exploiting this enthusiasm should have worked out well: my parents figured that if they just put me behind the camera, I could be persuaded to take a good picture of others. Unfortunately, I’d already fixated on another aspect of the photography experience: the photographer’s stance.

When people were taking picture of me, I’d clearly noticed that, in order to bring themselves down to my height (which was especially important given that I’d imminently try to be as close to the photographer as possible!) I’d usually see people crouching to take photos. And I must have internalised this, because I started doing it too.

Unfortunately, because I was shorter than most of my subjects, this resulted in some terrible framing, for example slicing off the tops of their heads or worse. And because this was a pre-digital age, there was no way to be sure exactly how badly I’d mucked-up the shot until days or weeks later when the film would be developed.

In an effort to counteract this framing issue, my dad (who was always keen for his young assistant to snap pictures of him alongside whatever article of public transport history he was most-interested in that day) at some point started crouching himself in photos. Presumably it proved easier to just duck when I did rather than to try to persuade me not to crouch in the first place.

As you look forward in time through these old family photos, though, you can spot the moment at which I learned to use a viewfinder, because people’s heads start to feature close to the middle of pictures.

Dan's dad on a train station. — This is a “transitional period” photo, evidenced by the face that my dad is clearly thinking about whether or not he needs to crouch.

Unfortunately, because I was still shorter than my subjects (especially if I was also crouching!), framing photos such that the subject’s face was in the middle of the frame resulted in a lot of sky in the pictures. Also, as you’ve doubtless seem above, I was completely incapable of levelling the horizon.

I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since, but based on the photo above… maybe the problem has been me, all along!

“One of the best things about working at The Bodleian… Pretending to be a PhD student…”

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

One of the best things about working at The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford? Pretending to be a PhD student for a photo shoot! Watch out for me appearing in a website near you…

Natalie Awdry (LinkedIn)

My team and I do get up to some unusual stuff, it’s true. I took part in this photoshoot, too:

Dan in the library, viewed through the window.

I’m absolutely not above selling out myself and my family for the benefit of some stock photos for the University, it seems. The sharp-eyed might even have spotted the kids in this video promoting the Ashmolean or a recent tweet by the Bodleian…

Passport Photos

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

“Passport Photos” looks at one of the most mundane and unexciting types of photography. Heavily restricted and regulated, the official passport photo requirements include that the subject needs to face the camera straight on, needs a clear background without shadow, no glare on glasses and most importantly; no smile.

It seems almost impossible for any kind of self-expression.

The series tries to challenge these official rules by testing all the things you could be doing while you are taking your official document photo.

…

Max Siedentopf

I love this weird, wonderful, and truly surreal photography project. Especially in this modern age in which a passport photo does not necessarily involve a photo booth – you’re often permitted now to trim down a conventional photo or even use a born-digital picture snapped from an approved app or via a web application – it’s more-feasible than ever that the cropping of your passport photo does not reflect the reality of the scene around you.

Max’s work takes this well beyond the logical extreme, but there’s a wider message here: a reminder that the way in which any picture is cropped is absolutely an artistic choice which can fundamentally change the message. I remember an amazing illustrative example cropping a photo of some soldiers, in turn inspired I think by a genuine photo from the second world war. Framing and cropping an image is absolutely part of its reinterpretation.

Darkroom Printing

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

One of the benefits of being in a camera club full of largely retired people who were all into photography long before digital was ever a thing, is that lots of them have old film, paper and gear lying around they’re happy to give away.

Last year I was offered a photographic enlarger for making prints, but I initially turned it down because I didn’t think I’d have the space to set up a darkroom and use it. Well, turns out with a little imagination our windowless bathroom actually converts into a pretty tidy darkroom with fairly minimal setup and teardown – thankfully we also have an ensuite so my partner can cope with this arrangement with only minimal grumbling

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Rory Prior (Light Priority)

My friend Rory tells the story of how he set up a darkroom in his (spare) windowless bathroom and shares his experience of becoming an increasingly analogue photographer in an increasingly almost-completely digital world.

Man angry his photo was used to prove all hipsters look alike – then learns it wasn’t him

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy.

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Sheena Goodyear (CBC Radio)

The original article was pretty interesting, too.

Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

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Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”

It was presented to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we know it.

Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.

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Anna Huix (Wired)

While I’m not sure that it’s fair to say that Lena “remained a mystery” until now – the article itself identifies several events she’s attended in her capacity of “first lady of the Internet” – but this is still a great article about a picture that you might have seen but never understood the significance of nor the person in front of the lens. Oh, and it’s pronounced “lee-na”; did you know?

Thoughts on Reflex 2.0

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

So Reflex are now designing the 2.0 version of the camera they’ve so far yet to ship version 1.0 of – or even find manufacturing partners for. Add to this the nonsense of trying to build a set of primes, film processor and scanner without securing any more funding and I’m increasingly leaning towards this…

Rory Prior (Light Priority)