Crime Scene Investigation: Photographic Portfolio

A former forensic crime lab technician turned professional photographer named Angela Strassheim has used her fascination with crime scenes to create a photographic portfolio.  For the portfolio, she visited dozens of former crime scenes and photographed them using a combination of low light, long exposure times, black and white film, and a chemical reagent used to highlight blood stains.  The results are fascinating and you can see them here.

Photography: Automatic panning device for gigabit images

Engadget profiled the GigaPan Epic some time ago. The Epic is a robotic camera mount that holds your point-and-shoot digital camera and then automatically pans the visual scene, taking picture after picture (up to thousands, according to the manufacturer). Software is included that then automatically stiches the individual images into a single digital panoramic image. Very cool. The inventor used it at the recent inauguration to capture a panorama of the mall. Many more images can be found at a community page devoted to these images. Here is a link to the product page with more details (and the sales price).

Why would anyone need so many pixels in an image? Over the Christmas holidays, the pundits were telling us that no one needs more than, say, 6 megapixels in a camera. Two examples where more pixels are needed include when one needs to zoom in to get small details or when one requires very wide angle shots with good resolution (i.e. which is hard to do with a fisheye lens or a dome mirror).

A potential forensics application is crime scene photography, thanks not only to its functionality, but also its modest cost and compatibility with a wide range of digital cameras.

Enjoy!

CSI: TV show highlights new fingerprint technology

WLFI Television (Indiana, USA) did a piece about the television show CSI spotlighting a new fingerprint technology developed by Purdue University. The piece says that it was supposed to air last month. Neither the researchers who developed the technology (led by Professor Graham Cooks) nor the company that now owns it (Prosolia Incorporated) saw the script in advance, so there is no telling whether it was accurately represented.

If any of you readers did see the episode and would like to fill us in, please do!