The Evolution Of The Image

This volume addresses the evolution of the visual in digital communities, offering a multidisciplinary discussion of the ways in which images are circulated in digital communities, the meanings that are attached to them and the implications they have for notions of identity, memory, gender, cultural belonging and political action. Contributors focus on the political efficacy of the image in digital communities, as well as the representation of the digital self in order to offer a fresh perspective on the role of digital images in the creation and promotion of new forms of resistance, agency and identity within visual cultures.

Rick Sammon’s Evolution of an Image illustrates the creative photographic process from start to finish. In this book, Canon Explorer of Light Rick Sammon pulls back the curtain to prove that creating amazing photographs is a well-thought-out process that involves several stages. Comprising 50 case studies that examine photographs taken by Rick around the world in a wide variety of shooting situations, Evolution of an Image shows the power of creative thinking, getting it right in the camera, and the careful use of image processing using Lightroom. By including his outtakes— and the reasons that he considers them outtakes— Rick suggests the steps that every photographer should take in order to improve their images. Combining technical advice with tips on lighting, composition and using Lightroom, this book will motivate and encourage those looking to evolve as creative photographers and digital darkroom artists. Key features include: • More than 200 before-and-after photographs • Fully illustrated sections on wildlife, seascape, landscape, scenic, action and people photography • Screen grabs showing Rick’s Lightroom adjustments • Suggestions on working in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as well as Adobe Photoshop • Special section on Rick’s "Sammonisms," or quick tips on getting the best in-camera image • Advice on evolving as a photographer • Inspirational photographs from Provence, the Palouse, Kenya, Antarctica, Iceland, Alaska, Mongolia, Myanmar, Colorado and more

In image processing, "motions by curvature" provide an efficient way to smooth curves representing the boundaries of objects. In such a motion, each point of the curve moves, at any instant, with a normal velocity equal to a function of the curvature at this point. This book is a rigorous and self-contained exposition of the techniques of "motion by curvature". The approach is axiomatic and formulated in terms of geometric invariance with respect to the position of the observer. This is translated into mathematical terms, and the author develops the approach of Olver, Sapiro and Tannenbaum, which classifies all curve evolution equations. He then draws a complete parallel with another axiomatic approach using level-set methods: this leads to generalized curvature motions. Finally, novel, and very accurate, numerical schemes are proposed allowing one to compute the solution of highly degenerate evolution equations in a completely invariant way. The convergence of this scheme is also proved.

Emphasizing the changes worked by circulation and copying, interpretation and debate, this book uses the case to explore how pictures succeed and fail, gain acceptance and spark controversy. It reveals how embryonic development was made a process that we can see, compare, and discuss, and how copying - usually dismissed as unoriginal

Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded, cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself admits the difficulty of such a distinction. In The Image before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in warfare. A series of discourses—including gender, innocence, and civilization—have shaped the legal, military, and historical understandings of the civilian and she documents how these discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and charity. She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the two modern treaties most influential for the principle of distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first time formally defined the civilian within international law. She shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these subsequent codifications of the laws of war. As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how best to protect civilian populations.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.

Image compression, the Navier-Stokes equations, and detection of gravitational waves are three seemingly unrelated scientific problems that, remarkably, can be studied from one perspective. The notion that unifies the three problems is that of ``oscillating patterns'', which are present in many natural images, help to explain nonlinear equations, and are pivotal in studying chirps and frequency-modulated signals. The first chapter of this book considers image processing, moreprecisely algorithms of image compression and denoising. This research is motivated in particular by the new standard for compression of still images known as JPEG-2000. The second chapter has new results on the Navier-Stokes and other nonlinear evolution equations. Frequency-modulated signals and theiruse in the detection of gravitational waves are covered in the final chapter. In the book, the author describes both what the oscillating patterns are and the mathematics necessary for their analysis. It turns out that this mathematics involves new properties of various Besov-type function spaces and leads to many deep results, including new generalizations of famous Gagliardo-Nirenberg and Poincare inequalities. This book is based on the ``Dean Jacqueline B. Lewis Memorial Lectures'' given bythe author at Rutgers University. It can be used either as a textbook in studying applications of wavelets to image processing or as a supplementary resource for studying nonlinear evolution equations or frequency-modulated signals. Most of the material in the book did not appear previously inmonograph literature.