Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Chinese drone manufacturer DJI has been added to the US economic blacklist. According to the US Government’s Commerce Department, DJI is one of four companies that “enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance.”
We’ve seen all kinds of stupid stunts people pull off just to take a photo. Nothing can shock us anymore, right? How about a father who is dangling his young son over a cliff for a photo? Yes, that happened. A man in China was caught on video as he was dangling a young boy over a cliff while another man was taking photos.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many camera companies are experiencing delays and temporarily shutting down factories. Japan’s newest financial incentives stimulate manufacturers to move their productions out of China. And since most major camera companies are Japanese, this could change the industry immensely.
A few months ago, the Chinese government reportedly required Shutterstock to start censoring some topics for China-based users. Some Shutterstock employees disagreed, claiming that “blacklisting” search terms wasn’t in accordance with the right of free speech. But one of the executives responded to it by basically telling them to go and work somewhere else.
Coronavirus has had a huge effect on, not to mention been frightening, everyone, from “common folks” to huge companies like Sony. The fear of infection has left some of China’s cities looking like ghost towns. It’s hard to imagine a city of 24-million people like Shanghai empty as if it were a setup for a movie or a video game. But it is happening, and photographer Nicoco has managed to capture it. In her latest series titled 一个人城市 One Person City, she shows the sad and eerie atmosphere in Shanghai’s streets during the coronavirus outbreak.
The outbreak and spread of the Coronavirus had us all concerned, and the city of Wuhan is where it all began. Its citizens have been living in a government lockdown since 23 January, and the city streets look almost deserted. News agency AFP recently shared a drone video of Wuhan showing what it looks like when an 11-million people city turns into a ghost town.
Facial recognition and video surveillance can have different applications, both good and bad. But government officials in a Chinese city decided to use it for the latter. They photographed people wearing pajamas in public and announced their photos to shame them. And as if that weren’t enough, there were also names and other personal data published along with the photos.
I remember when CCTV really became a big thing. For years, London had the most cameras of any city in the world. Now it appears that London has slipped behind, now sitting third behind Beijing and Chongqing in China. Although, these days, it’s not so much about how many cameras you have as it is about how many megapixels each of them has.
At the China International Industry Fair last week, scientists revealed a 500-megapixel cloud camera system, which they says is capable of capturing facial details of every individual in a crowd of tens of thousands of people.
Charlie Cole, one of “Tank Man” Tiananmen Square photographers, has died in his home in Bali. He was one of four photographers who covered the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and his photo of the “Tank Man” brought him the World Press Photography Award.
A Chinese vlogger known as “Your Highness Qiao Biluo” recently came under fire after she was busted for using a face filter to make herself look younger. Thanks to a glitch during a live stream last week, Qiao Biluo appeared without her usual filter. And as it turned out, she is much older than she presents herself to be online.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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