Group photo - "Who Blinked?!"

Until digital cameras and Photoshop came along, 'blinks' were the scourge of the group photograph.

Nowadays, if you've taken a few captures of a group, it is possible to 'fix' blinks by playing plastic surgeon and replacing someone's closed eyes in one picture with (the same person's) open eyes from another.

The problem with this approach is that it takes a lot longer than just getting a blink-free shot in the first place.

Now, us pros know that more shots generally equal better insurance against problems of many kinds - hence the number one lie of photographers, "one more please".

But what if you're worried about annoying your group by parroting "one more" a few dozen times, and want to know the minimum number of shots needed to get a blink-free capture?

Well, fortunately science has come to the rescue. CSIRO physicist Dr Piers Barnes and writer Nic Svenson went to the trouble of mathematically working out how many captures you need for a given size group to get a 99% chance of a blink-free shot (and they even drew a pretty graph).

For their efforts, Barnes and Svenson were rewarded with a prestigous (?) Ig Nobel prize. Ig Nobels are awarded to scientists who do unusual research just like this.

Other recent award winners were Schwab & May for "why woodpeckers don't get headaches", and Halpern, Blake & Hildebrand for "why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard".

If you haven't already checked them out, you should: Improbable Research.

So how many exposures do you need to make to get that perfect shot? Well of course that depends on the size of the group... but if you can't be bothered reading the orginal article (please, what is with you?), the rule of thumb is:

for groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there's good light and two if the light's bad

Good luck!

"My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents."

This post on Seth Godin's blog about honesty immediately reminded me of George's famous pick up line from the classic Seinfeld episode, "The Opposite" :-)

...at least I can laugh about it

To 'celebrate' the fact that this is the first post in five months, I added an entry for blogfade to Urban Dictionary (it may take a while to appear while it is being reviewed by humans).

So what's news?

Well, the main news is that we have moved to new World Headquarters (mwuahahahaha).

For just over three years we were located in a Business Incubator - which served us well - but thanks to our wonderful family of clients, suppliers, and friends (that's you), we outgrew it.

The new place is just 4km from the CBD and has a purpose-built studio with all the good stuff.

Here's our reception area and client lounge (with a proper espresso machine!):



And our 400 square metre studio:



How did we manage all of this? I'm glad you asked. We've joined forces with the lovely people at D&D Global Group, which also means we can now help you with your high quality offset printing, as well as digital print and design (want to know more? ask me!)

Well, I'd better get to it - got clients coming in for some corporate portraits!

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