It may be confusing to choose from the wide range of accessories for a digital camera available in the market. What people can do is have a look at the sets of photos they have already taken. This would allow them to assess their field of expertise. The accessories that can be purchased are usually those that are geared for a specific purpose. For instance, those who are into indoor photography would not have much use for telephoto lenses. Because ambient light is typically limited indoors, they would surely struggle with keeping blurring to a minimum. At the same time, if people are into taking shots of subjects that are usually far away, it would not make sense to invest on macro lenses. Those lenses can be perfect for people who tend to take shots of still subjects. Just like a DSLR, there are many models of semi-professional digital cameras that allow new lenses to be attached to it.
One accessory that is notable is an external flash. Those who are meaning to improve their shots can try it out. Most people think that it is the next best investment after purchasing a digital camera. Basically, people like the idea that it can be used in many ways. Firstly, an external flash for a camera can deal with the problem of not having enough light. There are a lot of shooting scenarios that do not have enough ambient light. For instance, indoor photography and night scenes would usually result to a lot of blurring.
Contrary to what others may believe, the external flash can also be used in outdoor photography. Though it may not be as useful for landscape photography, it is definitely handy for outdoor portraits. Shots taken in strong light tend to make harsh shadows that become a distraction in the photo. With the use of flash, those shadows are made softer and subtle. Other than that, it widens the angles of the shot to be taken because users will not be so dependent on sunlight.
The external flash can also be effective for red-eye reduction. For night portraits, it is quite common to take shots with red eye when the built-in camera flash is used. More often than not, the external flash can also be more powerful. This means that people would be able to play with light and motion. They can try long exposures and multiple exposures. The bulb mode can also be experimented with if the digital camera has that feature.
Take a power shot with Canon PowerShot
Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we shall be surrounded by electronic environments, sensitive and responsive to people. Ambient intelligence technologies are expected to combine concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent systems putting humans in the centre of technological developments. Ambient Intelligence represents a long-term objective for European research bringing together researchers across multiple disciplines: computer science, electronics and mechanical engineering, design, architecture, social sciences, software engineering, to name a few.
Following a successful first event last year, the 2nd European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, will be held in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, on November 8-10, 2004. It aims to provide a venue for an emerging multi-disciplinary community of researchers that work on Ambient Intelligence.
The symposium addresses the following research areas in Ambient Intelligence systems:
Ubiquitous computing
Wired, wireless and ad-hoc networking, discovery mechanisms, software architectures, system integration and prototyping, portable devices.
Context Awareness
Sensors, tracking and positioning, smart devices, wearable, models of context of use, software architectures for multi platform interfaces.
Intelligence
Learning algorithms, user profiling, personalisation and adaptivity, recommenders, autonomous intelligence, agent based user interfaces.
Natural user-system interaction
Ambient interfaces, multimodal interaction, innovative interaction styles and concepts.
Océ is sponsoring a student competition for describing and visualising a vision of the future office environment for the year 2015.
Student teams (of at least 2 students) are invited to describe their vision of a future office environment, in a written document and a short video.
Selected teams will be nominated for prizes and will be invited to participate in the EUSAI 2004 programme.
At EUSAI 2004, a panel of experts will select the winning teams out of the nominated entries.
The criteria for the selection will be: Innovation, Originality, Clarity and Quality of the presentation in the video and written forms (see submission guidelines).
Wild, “out of the box” ideas are welcome. All rights to the submitted ideas automatically become property of Océ Technologies B.V.
Prizes:
1st prize: 2500 Euro
2nd prize: 1500 Euro
3rd prize: 1000 Euro
For more information, please visit the Oce Student Competition’s web site available at: http://competition.oce.com.
A [PDF] version of the call for participation is also available.
List of Five Nominees
After a hard time selecting the bests candidates for the award, we have chose 5 out of the 8 projects received. The nominees are:
* Smart Office Space – User System Interaction programme, IPO department, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Team members: Anke Eyck, Kelvin Geerlings, Dina Karimova, Bernt Meerbeek, Lu Wang
* Personal Emotional Tool – Dipartamento di Scienze della Comunicazione, Sienna, Italy
Team members: A. Agueci, A. Fedeli, S. Guastaldi, D. Spigolon, M. Valentini
* The Cube: One Office Many Faces – Industrial Design department, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Team members: Loes Smits, Liane Wester, Ivo Stuyfzand, Maarten Brugmans, Jussuf Kopalit, Ingmar Hendriks
* Interficium – Department of Social Psychology of IT and Communication, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Poland
Team members: Marcin Bober, Piotr Haltof
* The Pervasive Office – User System Interaction programme, IPO department, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Team members: Alia Amin, Barbaros Metin, Jutta Schneider, Olga Kulyk