Vague Terrain

[Context Photography / Grid_Zoom / 2006]

Throughout the history of photography, technical innovations have affected the way we take and look at pictures. Digital photography for instance has given birth to a new visual culture and enabled new types of practices, such as digital post-manipulation of photographs, direct image sharing using MMS, or web communities. Digital cameras are rapidly becoming a pervasive presence in people’s everyday life, and are now even integrated into other technologies, such as camera phones. However, in terms of actually taking a picture, not much has happened since the days of the analogue camera. The photographer still points and clicks to capture an image that originates from the light reaching the camera lens. The only real evolution in the picture-taking moment has consisted of automating the adjustment of sharpness, shutter speed and aperture, and more recently the possibility of seeing a preview image on the camera display. While these changes have simplified the act of taking a picture, they still rely on preconceptions of what a camera can achieve; preconceptions that have their origin in the optical and mechanical constraints of analogue cameras. What would happen to the picture-taking moment – and to the creative practice of photography in general – if we took advantage of digital technology to break from these preconceptions and introduce entirely new photographic parameters to the user?

In order to explore alternative means of creating pictures and to make use of the new opportunities of digital technology, we have developed a novel concept for digital cameras: context photography. Context photography consists of taking photos that capture not only incoming light but also some of the additional context surrounding the scene. Information such as temperature, sound, pollution, the presence of other users or their activity is gathered from sensors and used to visually affect pictures in real time, as they are taken. For example, loud music at a party could be represented by coarseness in the image that would give an amplified sense of ‘being there’, or the chill in the air on a mountain could be made visible as a bluish tint evocative of low temperatures.

Using input from focus groups of dedicated amateur photographers including Lomographers [Håkansson et al. 2003] but not aiming at them as end-users, we have developed a series of context camera prototypes [Ljungblad et al. 2004]. Our latest context camera prototype is an application running on camera phones [Rost et al. 2005]. It uses sound and movement as context information. The application currently runs on two standard camera phone models, the Nokia 6600 and 6630. It utilizes the device’s own hardware (microphone and lens) as sensors: the microphone is used to sense sound level and spectral distribution, and the image stream from the camera itself is used to identify instances of movements as a vector field in the picture. The application was programmed in C++ using the graphics library GapiDraw, and was ported to the cameraphone by our colleague Mattias Rost from an earlier version of the prototype that ran on a Tablet PC. The programme also uses optimised algorithms from the image processing programme Optica developed by Panajotis Mihalatos, a visual artist we collaborated with on the project. To explore a variety of ways in which context could be represented, we implemented four visual effects that each combined “movement” and “sound” differently. The effects are the following:

1. Colour shadows: Traces of coloured shadows following movement; colour of the shadows affected by the frequency of the surrounding sounds.
2. Zoom: The part of the picture with most movement zoomed in, and rendered as a transparent layer on top of the rest of the image; amount of transparency determined by surrounding sound level.
3. Pixel: Small white dots following movement as a decaying trace; size of the pixels in the picture proportional to the surrounding sound level.
4. Wave: Movement creating waves in the image, making it look like a dense liquid. As in 3, size of the pixels in the picture proportional to the surrounding sound level.

To investigate how people would receive the concept, we conducted an exploratory user study with seven participants using context cameras for a six-week period. The study provided insights into how such a camera is perceived and used, revealing the emergence of new goals, expectations, aesthetics and practice in taking pictures [Håkansson et al. 2006]. Users typically search for dynamic situations and actions to take pictures, and in the lack of it, faked input by screaming or shaking the camera. They did not feel entirely in control of the output due to the dynamic nature of sound and movement, making at time the resulting pictures something of a fluke, but some thought that not being entirely in control was part of what made the camera fun to use. The surrounding context became either something to capture and explicitly represent in a picture, or a parameter to play with the same way one can play with speed and aperture in traditional cameras. Being able to digitally affect photos in real-time as oppose to post-editing them created a special connection to the original place and time of the picture-taking. It felt “more real” but at the same time less flexible. Finally, in terms of visual aesthetics, it was important for the effects to be visible and pictures identifiable as context photographs, but not overwriting what was photographed with too much effects was just as essential.

With context photography, we have shown a novel way of using digital technologies in photography that breaks from the preconceptions originating from the limitations of analogue cameras. Besides enabling new ways of taking creative pictures in everyday settings, context photography broadened the possibilities of using context as a resource in aesthetic practices; taking into account the qualities of the creative medium as well as the resources provided by new technologies.

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References:

Håkansson, M., Ljungblad, S., and Holmquist, L.E. "Capturing the Invisible: Designing Context Aware Photography". Proceedings of DUX 2003, Designing for User Experience, ACM / AIGA, San Francisco, USA (2003)

Ljungblad, S., Håkansson, M., Gaye, L. and Holmquist, L.E. "Context Photography: Modifying the Digital Camera into a New Creative Tool". Extended Abstracts of CHI'04. ACM Press, Vienna, Austria (2004).

Rost,  M., Gaye, L., Håkansson, M., Ljungblad, S., and Holmquist L.E. "Context Photography on Camera Phones". Adjunct proceedings of UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan (2005)

Håkansson, M., Gaye, L., Ljungblad, S., Holmquist, and L.E. "More Than Meets the Eye: An Exploratory User Study of Context Photography". Proceedings of NordiCHI 2006, Oslo, Norway (2006).