Graduation Success!!!
The Graduation Ceremony 2012 was a great success. The planning started months ago and many people were involved to make the idea reality.
Behind every Graduation ceremony, there are the unsung heroes dressed in black that capture that one moment every graduate will go back to their DVD players and watch. They were the Mediazone crew, which included student Lab Assistants, student volunteers, special community volunteer, and freelancers. A small but dedicated team. There were two graduation ceremonies, one for the University of Nicosia and the second one for Intercollege, as well as the UNIC awards ceremony. We’d meet to break down the ceremonies as if they were missions and rehearse for both of them under the heat of the summer sun, so we’d be sure we were ready to stream live and record each graduate’s big emotional moments with their friends and family at the end, flawlessly no matter what. This year this was accomplished for the first time in full HD! Continue reading
Identity Crisis! – Nokia 808 PureView
Am I a camera or a phone? Well these days people are calling these mega phones with mega mega pixel cameras, “camera phones”. Just to get the statistics out of the way, this camera phone has an incredible 41 megapixel camera with auto focus, face detection, geo tagging, self timer, digital zoom, Carl Zeis lens, image oversampling, lossless zoom and a 1280 or 720 pixels HD video recording capability.
I don’t want to mention the phone side of things, although it is quite impressive with great connectivity and a Nokia bred Symbian OS, (to each their own), but instead I want to “focus” on the incredible camera. Continue reading
Lazy or innovative? You decide!
Although this won “The 50 Best Inventions of 2011” and their website is great as it provides real time demos I still had my doubts. Lytro is the name of the camera where you “shoot and ask where you want to focus..later”. Just compose the shot and click. Now what will be in focus, background, foreground – somewhere in the middle – that’s a decision you can make at a later date. Cutting edge software technology, both in the production and post production ends of this device allow all this to happen.
For many photographers, not just the purists, this may seem like blasphemy. Where is my creative control? Well its there, like any other “point and shoot camera”, but your choices for focus must come later. So in essence you can produce the same photo twice, with 2 different focal points. The choices are limited, see the website and the demo. I am just not sure how much time someone would dedicate after the fact. The point of taking a photograph is what you decide in that fleeting moment before you snap the picture. That timeless few seconds between decision and indecision. Afterwards upon review of the photo you may not be living in that moment any more. You could be far from it – totally removed – it becomes something else. To some that may not be all that bad.
The bottom line that the progress of technology in this case seems to constantly sum up the art form. Create a couple of less steps than a decade ago, to get to the same or similar results. This could be a time saver or a time killer. This could be the answer to all those who love taking pictures but may never get that focusing quite right.
Or it could be something in between.
J.I – Senior Mediazone Officer
