I set off just before dawn on Monday morning to head up the M6 to try and make some more photographs for the Service Stations project, but as I was heading up the M56, the sky suddenly began to turn a deep red. So I figured I’d swing by Manchester on my way. I shot this off the bridge over the Irwell near the Opera House. I timed it pretty well, as no sooner had I half a dozen frames in the bag, the sun appeared on the horizon, and the red glow in the sky disappeared. The latest results from the Service Stations project, being film based, will have to wait to be posted until I get round the developing the film. I don’t really have the facility to do any processing at home, film or digital, so they’ll have to wait until later on today.
Incidentally, I read about a new image search engine which is in private beta at the moment. TinEye enables you to find your photos in use online, attempting to “do for images what Google does for text”. The service offers various services which leverage Idee Inc’s image recognition technology which finds images in use in print as well as online. Their clients include Getty Images, Jupiter Images, Masterfile and SuperStock from the stock photography market as well as Adobe Systems, Associated Press and Digg. TinEye is the latest application of their technology and one which has massive and broad potential application. Although TinEye’s database contains ‘only’ 500 million images at this time, I was able to find a few examples of my microstock photos in use. It’s able to match partial and altered images. Searches can be made by uploading the image you wish to match, or pasting the address of an online image. TinEye then matches the image with those in its database. I’ve managed to get signed up, and test the service which is really quite impressive. There’s also a very handy Firefox plugin. Check it out for yourselves here: http://tineye.com
