Brilliant!

The old skool anti-paparazzi devices are still the best.

So, what happens if two people have these, and somebody tries to take a picture?

Do they keep setting the other one off... forever?

[I_don't_think_you_thought_your_cunning_plan_all_the_way_through.jpg]

/At work, or I'd find the Mario Bros. one.

hey I bet a mirror could do that too

Celebrities, if you don't want people to look at you, don't stand in the spotlight.

neppyman: [I_don't_think_you_thought_your_cunning_plan_all_the_way_through.jpg]



FTFM.

/Yeah, I'm working REALLY hard...

I could get around this if I cared. Strobe flash to drain the battery, high ISO shot without flash, whatever. If I were a real celeb-stalker I'd have (for example) a Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness. But that's $10,000 worth of gear. Some random hottie who doesn't want drooling Farkers to have her pic could do just fine with this gadget.

neppyman

Networked Unix machines traditionally had a service "finger" which would report who was logged on. Once upon a time somebody came up with the bright idea to have the server respond to a request issuing a request of its own to the origin of the request. And it was clever. You'd know who was checking up on you. You could play mind games with users who didn't know about the hack. "Hey, Joe, why are you fingering me?" And then it caught on, and eventually somebody on a system with the finger-back finger server ran the finger command to another system with a finger-back finger server and they launched into an orgy of recursive mutual fingering until people realized this was a Bad Idea. So they instead changed the server to send a message to the system owner. With no automated back-and-forth it became harmless. Well, mostly harmless.

ZAZ: Networked Unix machines traditionally had a service "finger" which would report who was logged on. Once upon a time somebody came up with the bright idea to have the server respond to a request issuing a request of its own to the origin of the request. And it was clever. You'd know who was checking up on you. You could play mind games with users who didn't know about the hack. "Hey, Joe, why are you fingering me?" And then it caught on, and eventually somebody on a system with the finger-back finger server ran the finger command to another system with a finger-back finger server and they launched into an orgy of recursive mutual fingering until people realized this was a Bad Idea. So they instead changed the server to send a message to the system owner. With no automated back-and-forth it became harmless. Well, mostly harmless.

Q: Why do programmers never shower?
A: Because the instructions on the shampoo bottle say "lather, rinse, repeat".

neppyman: Q: Why do programmers never shower?
A: Because the instructions on the shampoo bottle say "lather, rinse, repeat".

It's funny cuz it's true..

I anxiously await their IPO.

Wait. Somebody invented the slave strobe?

ZAZ: I could get around this if I cared. Strobe flash to drain the battery, high ISO shot without flash, whatever. If I were a real celeb-stalker I'd have (for example) a Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness. But that's $10,000 worth of gear. Some random hottie who doesn't want drooling Farkers to have her pic could do just fine with this gadget.

It's easier than that, tracking back a bit (new window) shows that the thing only works down to 1/125th. Almost any decent SLR synchs its flash at 1/250 as long as the other works allow it, which is pretty trivial with a decently powered flash.

Does it also help expose the holder's vagina?

Could such a thing really work? A camera's flash goes off, the light hits the subject, both bouncing off the subject and triggering the anti-flash device (which has to take some finite amount of time). Wouldn't the light that bounced off the subject make it back to the camera before the light from the anti-flash device? Or will the camera's iris stay open long enough to have the light from the anti-flash spoil the picture?

Manfred J
ZAZ: I could get around this if I cared. Strobe flash to drain the battery, high ISO shot without flash, whatever. If I were a real celeb-stalker I'd have (for example) a Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness. But that's $10,000 worth of gear. Some random hottie who doesn't want drooling Farkers to have her pic could do just fine with this gadget.

It's easier than that, tracking back a bit (new window) shows that the thing only works down to 1/125th. Almost any decent SLR synchs its flash at 1/250 as long as the other works allow it, which is pretty trivial with a decently powered flash.

I think it might even be easier than that. Just carry a second flash, and manually fire it right before you take a picture-maybe even one or more times. I am sure you would be able to out-cycle the thing.

ZAZ: I could get around this if I cared. Strobe flash to drain the battery, high ISO shot without flash, whatever. If I were a real celeb-stalker I'd have (for example) a Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness.

ISO 25,600 FTW

/Would love a D3, but currently only has a D80

SoCalChris: ZAZ: I could get around this if I cared. Strobe flash to drain the battery, high ISO shot without flash, whatever. If I were a real celeb-stalker I'd have (for example) a Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness.

ISO 25,600 FTW

/Would love a D3, but currently only has a D80

Sure, but IF it works, it would take care of most consumer cameras and cell phones.

/could it work? or is this an ad for Eureka?

SteakMan:
/could it work? or is this an ad for Eureka?

Sure, it could work. But as pointed out above, it would be easy to get around in several different ways. It might keep amateurs from taking pics to post on facebook, but it certainly wouldn't stop someone who knew what they were doing.

Also, there's no way it could deal with several photographers taking shots at the same time, it simply couldn't recycle the flash fast enough. Especially not without having to haul around a big ass power supply roughly the size of a car battery.

neppyman: So, what happens if two people have these, and somebody tries to take a picture?

Do they keep setting the other one off... forever?


As long as each purse inserts a flash-received-heade... oh wait, nevermind

Befuddled: Could such a thing really work? A camera's flash goes off, the light hits the subject, both bouncing off the subject and triggering the anti-flash device (which has to take some finite amount of time). Wouldn't the light that bounced off the subject make it back to the camera before the light from the anti-flash device? Or will the camera's iris stay open long enough to have the light from the anti-flash spoil the picture?

Yes, the speed of light is much faster than even the fastest shutters, though possibly a few could beat the counter-flash trigger mechanism.

Similar technology has been available to photographers for decades in the form of remote flash triggers, wherein the light of the attached flash triggers a secondary flash.

Making such a device omnidirectional would be the tricky part.

But LEDs spec'd in the article may be neither fast nor bright enough to do the job. A strobe tube like that in a camera flash would be more effective, but more delicate and power consumptive.

SoCalChris: ISO 25,600 FTW

I need to remember to pick up Photoshop one of these days so doing that kind of stuff will be practical.

I like the pap blaster that was invented in a Spider Robinson novel. Detects camera lenses, beams laser pointers at all lenses in area.

Or, if you're a rich celebrity anyway: just team up with a bunch of celebrities, buy a few pages in a mayor newspaper every week. Hire some photographers and publish weekly updates on the private life of the paparazzi that are bothering you. Beat them at their own game.

Wouldn't that be better as a skirt lining?

Nice!

Hit them anyway though. Makes for good reading when I am bored.

I wonder if this could be adapted to the form factor of an automobile license plate frame?

I've often thought about setting up something like this in a car's rear window to use against those idiots who come up behind you with their high-beams on.

But then you'd have a blind, reckless idiot riding your bumper.

The worst thing about high ISO is the nerds who nothing about lighting and think it is the solution to actually having, uh, lighting.

Nikon D3 with 200mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.4 lens. And I would be shooting at high shutter speed in near darkness.

I have such hardware. Good luck with that. Peephole magazine likely won't pay for color noisy, low DOF photos of the subjects they are interested in when a real photographer, even if it is a scumhole paparrazi, gets the shot with a flash. Often even in the daytime.

Look at some non-posed celebrity shots. They have a lot of DOF, because idiots who read glossies about celebrities want to know who they were near or what venue they were dining at or other such stuff.

Manfred J. Hattan: It's easier than that, tracking back a bit (new window) shows that the thing only works down to 1/125th. Almost any decent SLR synchs its flash at 1/250 as long as the other works allow it, which is pretty trivial with a decently powered flash.

It doesn't have to strobe like a flash, though. Just load up a necklace with some high powered LEDs, and throw off the light balance. It would take quite a few of them to compete with the light emitted by a strobe, but it should be workable.

A quick search of teh intarwebs came up with a few useful pieces of data. Flashes like the 285HV put out about 320,000 lumens (actual math was about 5 stops above the light of a single 10,000 lumen bare bulb). High power LEDs put out 1,400 lumens, but are a lot closer to the subject. If you aimed the led at the subject, you could saturate the flash's light with your own. An LED necklace might be the way to go; it would not cause big white outs like the demo photo but it would make the photo distinctly unusable. Not that the paparazzi care.

And as to why this works at less than 1/125th of a second? No clue at all. A simple photo transistor should operate much faster than that, and the high power led that I found claims a power on time of 200μs. I guess they run the purse straight from batteries instead of a capacitor and charging circuit.

JoGold: I wonder if this could be adapted to the form factor of an automobile license plate frame?

Absolutely, in fact it would be even easier to build than the purse as you already have a good power supply. It would probably also be very illegal as when triggered it would blind anyone behind you. It might also be a challenge to set up the sensitivity/logic to detect just a particular flash rather than the many light sources a car normally encounters. It would probably also only work at night. Estimated development time including hardware, software and limited testing at the local red light camera: 60 hours, most of it finding out how red light flashes are timed, what intensity you're looking at and what level of flash you would need to blind the accompanying camera. DIY cost(parts only including screw-ups and things that don't work): $50-100 or so.

Gandalf approves!

SO COOL!

10 minutes later:

new firmware update allows you to fire off your on board flash (the much less useful one) right before you take your picture using the external flash.

Here's an idea: Just stop taking pictures of celebs (since that's what they say they want you to do), and then, when no one remembers who the hell they were, they'll come back and PAY you to shoot photos of them again.

why not just wear mirrors?

Have been wanting to put a couple of these on my car so I can drive through red lights with impunity.

What? No chaff or flares too?