Free Republic

On Aug. 3, a mobile camera spotted Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak's city-owned car on 5th Avenue downtown. On Aug. 7, it found the car again on Nicollet Island. On Aug. 9, another camera saw the mayor's car on a side street near the University of Minnesota. All of that data resides in a city of Minneapolis database containing millions of license plates scans, captured by devices mounted on city police and traffic vehicles. As a Star Tribune public records request shows, knowing someone's license plate number gives anyone access to city data about where that vehicle has been seen.

HORICON -- The camera John Noerr found at the bottom of a small creek north of Pharaoh Lake in early July could have belonged to anyone. It wasn’t until he took the Cannon XT digital camera back to his parents’ home on Schroon Lake that he discovered the crusty, soggy memory card still worked, with the most recent picture time-stamped in June 2009. And the 581 photos it contained led the Poultney, Vt., art teacher on a three-week journey to find the camera’s owner. “I started to realize there might be enough information here to track this guy down,” Noerr...

This commercial should send shivers up your spine. A Coca-Cola ad released in June encourages us to look at security cameras in a positive lite by showing uplifting moments captured on security cameras.

This small mountain of gear leads to two very frightening thoughts. Firstly, there’s no ending in sight; one keeps accumulating more and more equipment in order to keep pushing the edge of what’s possible both from a compositional and artistic standpoint, as well as from an image quality standpoint. You’ve either got to have a great day job and very deep pockets, or some good recurring clients. The second thought is around obsolescence. In the film days, the camera body and lenses lasted a long time; you invested in glass, got a decent body – one that fulfilled your personal...

Monitoring a location or person with a camera or microphone has become a lot easier in recent years due to cameras having much higher resolutions while being fitted into ever smaller devices. Just about every smartphone now carries a high resolution camera capable of recording video along with a decent microphone. If you want to record someone covertly though, you still have the issue of hiding your recording devices from view. You’re also going to want to leave them recording for long periods of time without being discovered. Qwonn, a manufacture of security products, has come up with the...

A lone Jew dedicated to fighting for Judea and Samaria in Israel's courts has struck fear into the Arab residents of Arab Susya. The Susya in question, which lies between Kiryat Arba-Hevron and Arad, is eponymously named for a nearby Jewish community that pre-dates its construction. "He comes with small weapons and his camera, sometimes with armed forces, sometimes with settlers,” Susya resident Nasser Nawaja told the Bethlehem-based Maan News Agency. The man in question is Ovad Arad, director of the Judea and Samaria section of the Regavim non-governmental organization. Arad is tasked with photographing and documenting illegal Arab construction...

Amid unaddressed concerns, the Portland City Council on Wednesday sent Police Chief Mike Reese back to his bureau to draft stricter policies before allowing police to place surveillance cameras on private property in Old Town and Chinatown. Commissioner Dan Saltzman echoed concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon when he asked for assurances that police wouldn't use the cameras to peep into private residences. Reese, who wants to put up the video surveillance cameras to help officers monitor drug deals, said "These cameras are not focused on anything but public right-of-ways." The chief, though, did acknowledge in...

DES MOINES — The Iowa House voted Tuesday to ban red light cameras on a 58-42 vote that broke largely — but not completely — along party lines. The bill now goes to the Senate, where there seems to be little chance that it will make it to the floor for a vote. The legislation took a long route to Tuesday’s vote. A camera ban had momentum at the start of the session, including tentative support from the governor and one legislator offering a constitutional amendment to ban the devices in the state. But as the session wore on, support...

Continuing his pattern of appearing on every television show – and particularly, every major sporting event – that will have him, President Obama joined the halftime show of the championship game of the Final Four last night. There he was given a four-minute infomercial about what a great guy he was, in the guise of an interview with CBS’ Clark “Special K” Kellogg. If this wasn’t an in-kind contribution, nothing is. Did Obama talk about the game? Not really. Instead, he continued his obvious campaign to reach out to female voters with gems like this: "A couple of things. Number...

Using facial recognition to process surveillance footage isn't a new concept — Scotland Yard began using the technique in the wake of last year's London riots — but a new system developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric could make the process quicker and more flexible than ever before. Shown off at this year's Security Show expo in Japan, the system processes footage from both still images and live footage, recognizing faces in real-time, and can search through up to 36 million different faces for a comparison in one second. Recognized faces are displayed as thumbnails and grouped with matching footage,...

I am looking to upgrade my camera. I have a point and shoot Sony. I am looking for better quality pictures and the ability to take pictures of my son playing sports (fast speed no blur). Having said this, I am a total novice.. any advice?

Nikon has unveiled a new superzoom compact camera called the P510 that offers a ridiculous 42x optical zoom — the highest zoom ratio ever seen in such a camera. In 35mm terms, the lens goes from a 24mm on the wide-angle side to a 1000mm on the telephoto end. The 16.1MP camera also boasts a 3-inch LCD screen, 1080p video recording, GPS, 5fps continuous shooting, and ISO 3200. It’ll hit store shelves later this month with a price tag of $430.

Investment tips for 2012 With all the turmoil in the market, the collapse of Lehman Bros and the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, we all need some good investment advice For any of you with any money left, beware of the next year's expected mergers. Watch for these consolidations later this year: 1.) Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush, and W R. Grace Co. will merge and become: Hale, Mary, Fuller, Grace. 2.) Polygram Records, Warner Bros., and Zesta Crackers join forces and become: Poly, Warner, Cracker. 3.) 3M will merge with Goodyear and become:...

It just occured to me that although I've been enjoying this site for a long time I've never passed on the link.This site has owners manuals for many older cameras and flashes.It's free to download but the site is supported by donations, so kick in a couple of bucks.If you've ever tried to hunt down an old manual the value of this collection is obvious.SUPPORT FREE REPUBLIC BEFORE YOU SEND MONEY TO ANYONE!!!

Photography related ads from 1880 into the 1990s.

This ought to instill an appropriate level of fear, then The above photo by Ronnie Miranda appeared various places following the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver in mid-June. But the original is not just any wide-angle shot, for what he captured was actually a massive 1.0 gigapixel (one billion) digital image.Such technology offers astonishing detail that is obviously useful to anyone working in law enforcement or security/intelligence -how useful? Simply click on the pic above and then zoom right down by double-clicking on anybody in the crowd... pretty scary. One can clearly see the faces of almost every single individual (prior to the trouble breaking-out) with just...

The defendants stood before the hearing officer, traffic citations in hand, each accused of running a red light in Miami Gardens, as captured by one of the city’s 29 intersection cameras. Within minutes, seven of the cases were dismissed, with the hearing officer ruling they had tripped the cameras while making a legal right turn on red. The remaining three, who will now have to pay a $277 ticket, were sent off with a cheerful “Have a good day … and drive carefully.’’ While presumably those three violators weren’t happy with the outcome, neither are the municipalities in South Florida...

I'm posting my situation on a thread in order to alert others to be on the look out of ways the government, especially the local government, may be ripping us off. I believe we are being targeted as fools to pay for our politicians shortfalls. I live in Maryland, a very liberal state which taxes everything, and am seeing signs they are desperate to raise money instead of ways to cut spending. Here is a situation I found myself in recently: I received a "final notice" for speed monitoring violation from the town of Forest Heights PD (Maryland). However, I...

Memphis City Council Chairman Myron Lowery is proposing to bridge the city’s budget deficit by boosting yields from traffic fines on speeding. The plan is to add radar guns to existing red-light automated enforcement zones and capture photos of drivers exceeding the posted speed limits. “Look, the overwhelming majority of drivers are speeders,” Lowery observed. “That’s a pretty big potential source of revenue that we could get our hands on.” The National Motorists Association contends that “the majority of drivers speed because the posted limits are set below what they should be. They generate millions of pointless traffic tickets and...

I'm looking for a digital camera with no delay between shutter click and capture. Most have a 1-2 second delay. My grand daughter is into acrobatics and my daughter wants to take good pictures. Any help is welcome.