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“5D” glass discs could hold 500TB of data and last for up to 13.8 billion years

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Some of us are struggling just to maintain our ever-growing archive of photographs and video footage. Every few years, we have to update all our drives to newer, faster, higher capacity and more reliable ones to try to ensure we don’t lose anything. And for most of us, that’s only a few terabytes. But what if you could store half a petabyte, indefinitely?

Well, technically, it’s 13.8 billion years, but for all intents and purposes, that’s pretty much indefinitely. Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a new technique that could allow up to 500TB of data to be written to a CD-sized “5D” glass disc. For comparison, CD-Rs store 650MB of data.

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This extreme Raspberry Pi camera mod uses a laser to removes the Bayer filter array

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There are a lot of reasons why one might want to have the sensor in their camera modified. We see it all the time for those who wish to shoot infrared or ultraviolet photography. There are even companies out there who will do the whole process for you. Usually, though, it doesn’t involve stripping off the Bayer filter array. Typically it’s just removing the filter that blocks UV and IR.

Well, for Les Wright at Les’ Lab, just removing the blocking filter on his Raspberry Pi camera wasn’t enough. he wanted all the raw data, without any colour interference at all from every pixel on the sensor. So, he went on a mission to figure out away to remove it without killing the sensor. Ultimately, the best method proved to be to burn it off with a laser!

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Hong Kong protesters are using laser pointers to confuse facial recognition and they’re frying photographers’ camera sensors

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Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have been using laser pointers to distract police officers and confuse facial recognition cameras. But while they are beating facial recognition, they are also causing more serious problems for police officers and photographers covering the protests. The laser beams have caused eye damage to several people so far, and they have been frying camera sensors as well.

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Take your light painting game to the next level with these unconventional techniques

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Light painting is typically done one of two ways. Either you have a flashlight and wave it around your scene from behind the camera to light up your subject over time or you have the light source actually in the scene and you’re creating a long exposure of its movements. But there are many light sources besides flashlights that you can use for light painting. In this video from COOPH, we take a look at five ways to paint with light.

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Watch as diffused reflected laser light kills pixels in this Sony A7SII sensor

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It’s not a secret that things like lasers and lidar can kill camera sensors. You get an intense beam of light pointed towards your camera, and then the lens focuses it into an even brighter point, frying pixels. But did you know that diffused reflected laser light can also cause this to happen?

Photographer Andy Boyd knows. He had to learn the hard way after filming a laser tattoo removal which very quickly and easily fried a bunch of pixels on the sensor of his Sony A7SII in a series of rapid laser bursts.

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360TB Disc that lasts 13.8 Billion years. Is this the future of data storage?

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When the clouds evaporate and your DVD, Blu-Ray and hard drive backups are no longer readable, what are you going to do about accessing your data?

Valuable personal images might be gone forever (of course, that’s also a good argument for printing your photos), or perhaps you shoot for a living, and keep a permanent archive of all your work.

It’s a lot of hard work to maintain reliable digital backups and to keep shifting all your data from one storage medium to the next generation every few years – especially when some hard drives might not be as reliable as we were led to believe, and cloud services have the potential to accidentally delete data at will.

Scientists at the University of Southampton seem to have found a potential answer for the issue of long term storage, in the form of small glass discs.

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Laser pointers and mirrors brought this album cover photo to life

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If internet anecdotes are anything to go by, laser pointers are good for nothing more than endlessly teasing your cat. But, as this video shows, it appears that isn’t the case.

Photographer Kim Manchul shows us that something as simple as cheap lasers and a handful of mirrors can create an incredible ethereal image worthy of an album cover.[Read More…]

Using Lasers To Shut Down Street Lights And Get Better Space Photos

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One of the biggest obstacles of taking good astronomical photos is light pollution, this is why almost every tip article on night photos has a tip about getting away from the city. But what if you want to take photos in your driveway? In that case, street lights will most probably kill each and every one of your photos.

Astronaut Don Pettit (previously) has a neat little trick he uses to shut down that annoying street light he has just outside his driveway. He points a laser at the street light sensor which tricks the street light into thinking that it is still day outside and preserve energy by shutting down.

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