Graham Flint of the Gigapxl Project talks about the cameras he uses to capture amazing images of such depth they must be seen to be appreciated. The Project's camera still use film and the resulting images are digitized in a laborious process.
The Project is currently working on the Portrait of America, photographs of interesting locations across the US and Canada as a form of archive. In partnership with Google, the Gigapxl Project hopes to expand its cataloguing process around the world and integrate the results with Google Earth.
This talk was from the Seeing What's There session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Bob Hanner. The question and answer period can be heard at the end of Bob Hanner's talk.
Graham Flint, a physicist by profession, has sought to bring the perspective of a physicist to other fields; especially to architecture, astronomy, medicine, military science, photography, and, most recently, to information display. Early in his career, he was co-inventor of the world's first infrared laser rangefinder and subsequently has pioneered the application of lasers in areas as diverse as eye surgery and space-based weaponry. In the context of photography, he has designed cameras for applications which range from cold-war espionage to the Hubble Space Telescope. He has published more than a hundred technical papers and holds a dozen patents.
Graham has held positions as Chief of Lockheed Martin's Laser Devices Laboratory, as Executive Vice President of International Laser Systems, and as Director of the Air Force's Developmental Optics Facility. Most recently, and until joining the ranks of the semi-retired last year, he served as President and CEO of Photera Technologies, a California-based corporation specializing in ultra-high-resolution imagery and laser digital cinema. Along the way, he has been Chairman of the Laser Division of the U.S. Electronic Industries Association and Co-chairman of the Channel Islands Alternate Energy Commission. As an avocational endeavor, he has pursued the Gigapxl Project, a project which brings together the cutting edges of photographic optics, film technology, and digital processing so as to create landscape photographs which contain unprecedented amounts of information.
Resources:
This free podcast is from our Pop!Tech series.
For The Conversations Network: