'Flying Flashbulb' Drones Could Light Up Photo Shoots

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">By Elizabeth Palermo</span><br /><br /> <table border="0" style="border-spacing: 0px; margin-top: 0px !important; width: 1px;"><tbody style="margin-top: 0px !important;"> <tr style="margin-top: 0px !important;"><td style="margin-top: 0px !important;"><img alt="Drone Could Help Create Lighting Effects" src="http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/068/597/iFF/lighting-drone.jpeg?1406322185" style="margin-top: 0px !important; width: 270px;" /><div id="picad_div" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; text-shadow: none; z-index: 9000;"> <div id="picad_overlay_div" style="color: white; cursor: pointer; font-family: Arial, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: left; width: 0px;"> <div id="picad_overlay_holder" style="border: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding: 0px;"> </div> </div> </div> </td></tr> <tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(211, 211, 211); font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; margin-top: 0px !important; padding: 10px;"><span style="float: right; margin-top: 0px !important; padding: 2px 25px 0px 5px; width: auto;"><a class="pin-it-button" count-layout="horizontal" href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A//www.livescience.com/47022-photography-drones-lighting-effects.html&media=http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/068/597/original/lighting-drone.jpeg?1406322185&description=A%20drone%20equipped%20with%20a%20light%20could%20help%20photographers%20achieve%20tricky%20lighting%20effects%20during%20photo%20shoots." style="color: #0099cc; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/images/PinExt.png" style="border: none; margin-top: 0px !important;" title="Pin It" /></a></span>A drone equipped with a light could help photographers achieve tricky lighting effects during photo shoots.<br /><span style="float: left; margin-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px;">Credit: MIT</span><span style="float: left; margin-top: 5px; max-width: 270px;"><div style="margin-top: 0px !important;"> <a class="make_big" href="" rel="#custom0" style="color: #0099cc; margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">View full size image</a></div> </span></td></tr> </tbody></table> <div style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.235294); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> Photographers looking to capture the perfect shot might soon be able to call on some unlikely helpers: a swarm of small robot helicopters.</div> <div style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.235294); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Cornell University are experimenting with a <a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://www.livescience.com/45242-future-of-drones.html" style="color: #0099cc; margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">new autonomous drone</a>, equipped with a light to create special effects during photo shoots. The drone, they say, could help photographers achieve difficult lighting effects more easily than with conventional lighting systems.</div> <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; color: #666666; float: left; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;"></span><br /> <div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> </div> <div class="about_adsense" id="nointelliTXT" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; float: left; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; margin: 40px 0px; width: 540px;"> <span id="ad_sense1" style="margin-top: 0px !important;"></span></div> <br /> <div style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.235294); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.301961); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"> The first version of this flying flashbulb will debut in August, at the 10th annual International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging, in Vancouver, British Columbia. [<a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://www.livescience.com/45152-drones-surprising-uses.html" style="color: #0099cc; margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future</a>]</div> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">At the conference, researchers said the drone will produce a particularly difficult effect known as "rim lighting," in which only the edge of a photographer's subject is strongly lit.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"[Rim lighting is] very sensitive to the position of the light," Manohar Srikanth, a senior researcher at Nokia who worked on the drone as a graduate and postdoctoral student at MIT, <a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/drone-lighting-0711" style="margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">said in a statement</a>. "If you move the light — say, by a foot — your appearance changes dramatically."</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The newly developed system allows photographers to input the direction from which they want the rim light to come, as well as the width of the desired rim, or how much of the subject should be lit. The<a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://www.livescience.com/topics/drones/" style="margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">drone</a> then flies itself to the proper side of the subject and maintains the specified rim width.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"If somebody is facing you, the rim you would see is on the edge of the shoulder, but if the subject turns sideways, so that he's looking 90 degrees away from you, then he's exposing his chest to the light, which means that you'll see a much thicker rim light," Srikanth said. "So, in order to compensate for the change in the body, the light has to change its position quite dramatically."</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The handy drone can also adjust itself based on the photographer's movement. The <a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://www.livescience.com/43426-parrot-ar-drone-2-0-quadricopter-guide.html" style="margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">robotic flier</a> uses control signals from the photographer's camera to determine how to position itself.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">These control signals are emitted from the camera about 20 times a second, with the camera producing an image that, rather than being stored in the camera's memory, is transmitted to a computer. The computer runs an algorithm, created by the researchers, that constantly evaluates the rim width and adjusts the drone's position accordingly.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Frédo Durand, one of the project's researchers and a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, said that this self-correction feature was the most difficult part of the drone project.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"The challenge was the manipulation of the very difficult dynamics of the [drone] and the feedback from the lighting estimation," Durand said. "That's where we put a lot of our efforts, to make sure that the control of the drone could work at the very high speed that's needed just to keep the thing flying and deal with the information from the [drone's laser range finder] and the rim-lighting estimation."</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The prototype drone performed well in the <a data-ls-seen="1" href="http://www.tomsguide.com/us/priovr-hands-on,news-18176.html" style="margin-top: 0px !important; text-decoration: none;">motion-capture</a> studio where it was tested, Srikanth said. However, making the drone robust enough to serve as a photographer's assistant in the real world may be trickier.</span><br /> <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But overcoming such challenges should be possible, given the rapid advancements in robotics and related technologies, said Ravi Ramamoorthi, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego.</span><br /> <div> <br /></div> </div>

'Flying Flashbulb' Drones Could Light Up Photo Shoots

By Elizabeth Palermo A drone equipped with a light could help photographers achieve tricky lighting effects during photo shoots. C...

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