My CEO at Fanpop, Dave, clued me in on this photoblog: Visions of China from Newsweek. The photos are outstanding, but what really captures my attention are the stories that the photographers tell.

One entry in particular captured my attention: Trying to Break out of the Olympic “Bubble” by Vincent Laforet. He tells the story of one day beginning with using China’s bureaucracy against itself so he could spend 30 minutes capturing an overhead shot of table tennis.

(  Click here to read the rest of Newsweek’s Incredible PhotoBlog of the Olympics  )

I haven’t talked much about the preparation of articles for Cooking For Engineers in the past, but I thought this might be of interest to some. Here’s a photograph of one of the setups that I used in preparing baby back ribs for smoking. This setup was for a shot demonstrating the removal of the tough membrane found on the back of the rib bones.

The final shot selected for the article:

So, I went to the Castroville Artichoke Festival this year with my wife, Tina, and my friends, Dave (founder of Sendori, not the founder of Fanpop who is also a Dave) and Rachel. At the Castroville Artichoke Festival are artichokes, live music, BBQ, cultural performances, food art, arts and crafts for sale, and crazy hats. Yep, crazy hats. There’s this guy who sells crazy hats. Witch hats, USA red-white-blue hats, alien hats, pirate hats, mad hatter hats, Statue of Liberty hats, hot dog hats… you name it. Rachel spotted the hot dog hat and put it on and Dave took a picture of her. Then, the crazy hat seller came out and told us that there were no photographs allowed.
(  Click here to read the rest of No photos!  )

Today, I had lunch with an old Intel coworker from my first role at Intel in the Microprocessor Research Labs. Ara Nefian developed many of the applications and functions in the Open Source Computer Vision Library as well as an amazingly accurate face recognition system while I was there and who knows how many other cool and unbelievably projects he’s been working on since. He’s started working on a personal project - a website that catalogs his travel photographs from around the world. That in itself is not all that exciting - image galleries are a dime a dozen these days - but his site uses pattern recognition algorithms to find photos that are related based on the images themselves. The photographs are organized in two (orthogonal) classifications - location and subject. The images can be perused on either of the two axes while a related pictures search utilizes pattern recognition to pull up other images that are similar. He’s hoping that the site will help people decide where they want to travel to on vacation. By looking at photographs and deciding that you like a particular view, you can use the related pictures search to find similar photos and reveal other destinations that you might also enjoy. For example, if you like beaches, then you can find a beach that you like, click on related photos and see other beaches that share visual characteristics with the one you started with. It’s like a photographic brainstorm for choosing a travel destination!

http://www.anefian.com/