The aim of this thesis is to describe selected modern trends in photography and show their impact on society. The thesis describes the history of photography, sorting of digital cameras, and selected trends such as DSLR, mobile phones, selfie phenomenon, Polaroid, Lytro and aerial photography. In each trend there will be examples, users and financial demands.

The thesis deals with the involvement of digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLR) with video-capturing capacity in documentary and ethnographic film, more particularly, it examines whether and to what extent these genres were influenced by a trend called DSLR revolution. The main contribution of the work is a qualitative analysis of the testimonies of ten filmmakers, who used DSLR cameras while working on their films during the years 2010-2014. The synthesis of this analysis is conceptualised as a reconstruction of the process of decision-making whether to use or not to use a DSLR camera, considering its benefits (affordability, technical and aesthetic qualities, compactness and simplicity) and its limits (ergonomics, visual artifacts, workflow limits). The reconstruction of this decision-making process is considered in the context of specific experiences of the participants and it focuses on the impact of DSLRs on filming workflow and final product. The final chapter deals with the DSLR revolution as a social trend which was stimulated by the influence of online communities of DSLR filmmakers who actively participated in the course of the revolution. Appendix of the thesis contains a brief description of the film projects of all participants and the model of the structured questionnaire used for data...

The primary aim of this project is getting a complete understanding of photography’s development process and looking into future, user-centered innovations. Digital evolution changed the rules of product design. Products became a part of a complex system, consisting of a variety of different touch-points which also constantly extend. Photography and cameras are changing. Mobile phones, wireless connections and sharing platforms have a big impact on photography. Everything is getting connected to each other, both people and devices. How will digital photography adapt to this new world? How will people change their perception of images? Is it possible to design a camera considering all other systems around it? While designing a highly technological device, how can user-perspective be included in the design process?

Project PANOPTES (http://www.projectranoptes.org) is aimed at establishing a collaboration between professional astronomers, citizen scientists and schools to discover a large number of exoplanets with the transit technique. We have developed digital camera based imaging units to cover large parts of the sky and look for exoplanet transits. Each unit costs approximately $5000 USD and runs automatically every night. By using low-cost, commercial digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras, we have developed a uniquely cost-efficient system for wide field astronomical imaging, offering approximately two orders of magnitude better etendue per unit of cost than professional wide-field surveys. Both science and outreach, our vision is to have thousands of these units built by schools and citizen scientists gathering data, making this project the most productive exoplanet discovery machine in the world.

Digital radiography systems are important diagnostic tools for modern medicine. The images are produced when x-ray sensitive materials are coupled directly onto the sensing element of the detector panels. As a result, the size of the detector panels is the same size as the x-ray image. An alternative to the modern DR system is to image the x-ray phosphor screen with a lens onto a digital camera. Potential advantages of this approach include rapid readout, flexible magnification and field of view depending on applications. We have evaluated lens-coupled DR systems for the task of signal detection by analyzing the covariance matrix of the images for three cases, using a perfect detector and lens, when images are affected by blurring due to the lens and screen, and for a signal embedded in a complex random background. We compared the performance of lens-coupled DR systems using three types of digital cameras. These include a scientific CCD, a scientific CMOS, and a prosumer DSLR camera. We found that both the prosumer DSLR and the scientific CMOS have lower noise than the scientific CCD camera by looking at their noise power spectrum. We have built two portable low-cost DR systems, which were used in the field in Nepal and Utah. We have also constructed a lens-coupled CT system, which included a calibration routine and an iterative reconstruction algorithm written in CUDA.

This project consists of a prototype of a stereo camera rig where you can mount two DSLR cameras, and a multithreaded software application, written in C++, that can move the cameras, change camera settings and take pictures. The resulting 3D-images can be viewed with a 2-view autostereoscopic display. Camera position is controlled by a step engine which is controlled by a PIC microcontroller. All communication with the PIC and the computer is made over USB. The camera shutters are synchronized so it is possible to take pictures of moving objects at a distance of 2.5 m or more. The results shows that there are several things to do before the prototype can be considered a product ready for the market, most of all the camera callback functionality. / Detta projekt består av en stereokamerarigg som kan bestyckas med två DSLR-kameror, samt en applikation indelad i flera trådar (multithreaded) , skriven i C++, som kan förflytta kamerorna på riggen, ändra fotoinställningar och ra bilder. Resultatet blir 3D-bilder som kan ses på en autostereoskopisk skärm. Kamerornas position kontrolleras med en stegmotor, som i sin tur styrs av en PIC-mikrokontroller. Kommunikationen mellan PIC-enheten och datorn sker via USB. Slutarna på kamerorna är synkroniserade så det är möjligt att ta bilder på objekt i rörelse på ett avstånd av 2,5 m eller mer. Resultaten visar att det är flera punkter som måste åtgärdas på prototypen innan den kan anses vara redo för marknaden. Den viktigaste punkten är att kunna få fungerande respons (callback) från kamerorna.

This master's thesis deals with the search of commercially available luminance analysers and cameras that use the measurement of correlated colour temperature. It also deals with calculations of correlated colour temperature according to various available methods. The luminance analyser LDA-LumiDISP is based on a DSLR camera. The principle of its operation and possible errors in capturing pictures are discussed here. The work deals with extensive testing of the LDA-LumiDISP luminance analyser, which is primarily intended for measuring luminance in the set scene, but can also be used to measure the correlated colour temperature. The device is being tested in terms of measuring the correlated colour temperature in laboratory and field conditions. The result of the master's thesis is the calculation of measurements uncertainty for certain light sources and the optimization of the measuring algorithm to reduce them.

Práce se zabývá měřením křivek svítivosti světelných zdrojů a svítidel konvenčními a nekonvenčními metodami. Úvodní část práce je věnována popisu zrakového systému a základních fotometrických veličin. Hlavní teoretická část je zaměřena na popis současných metod měření křivek svítivosti a nových metod měření pomocí jasového analyzátoru. Současně jsou pro jednotlivé metody uvedeny zdroje nejistot, které ovlivňují výsledky měření. Těžiště práce spočívá v návrhu metodiky měření křivek svítivosti z jasových skenů svítidla a následném ověření tohoto postupu vlastním měřením. Dále bylo provedeno srovnání naměřených výsledků navrženým postupem, s výsledky konvenčního měření na goniofotometru s luxmetrem.

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of sensor nodes distributed over a geographical region to obtain the environmental data. It can have different types of applications ranging from low data rate event driven and monitoring applications to high data rate real time industry and military applications. Energy efficiency and reliability are the two major design issues which should be handled efficiently at all the layers of communication protocol stack, due to resource constraint sensor nodes and erroneous nature of wireless channel respectively. Media access control (MAC) is the protocol which deals with the problem of packet collision due to simultaneous transmissions by more than one neighboring sensor nodes. Time Division Multiple Access based (TDMA-based) and contention-based are the two major types of MAC protocols used in WSNs. In general, the TDMA-based channel access mechanisms perform better than the contention-based channel access mechanisms, in terms of channel utilization, reliability and power consumption, specially for high data rate applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). TDMA-based channel access employs a predefined schedule so that the nodes can transmit at their allotted time slots. Based on the frequency of scheduling requirement, the existing distributed TDMA-scheduling techniques can be classified as either static or dynamic. The primary purpose of static TDMA-scheduling algorithms is to improve the channel utilization by generating a schedule of smaller length. But, they usually take longer time to generate such a schedule, and hence, are not suitable for WSNs, in which the network topology changes dynamically. On the other hand, dynamic TDMA-scheduling algorithms generate a schedule quickly, but they are not efficient in terms of generated schedule length. We suggest a new approach to TDMA-scheduling for WSNs, that can bridge the gap between these two extreme types of TDMA-scheduling techniques, by providing the flexibility to trade-off between the schedule length and the time required to generate the schedule, as per the requirements of the underlying applications and channel conditions. The suggested TDMA-scheduling works in two phases. In the first phase, we generate a valid TDMA schedule quickly, which need not have to be very efficient in terms of schedule length. In the second phase, we iteratively reduce the schedule length in a manner, such that the process of schedule length reduction can be terminated after the execution of an arbitrary number of iterations, and still be left with a valid schedule. This step provides the flexibility to trade-off the schedule length with the time required to generate the schedule. In the first phase of above TDMA-scheduling approach, we propose two randomized, distributed and parallel TDMA-scheduling algorithms viz., Distributed TDMA Slot Scheduling (DTSS) and Randomized and Distributed TDMA (RD-TDMA) scheduling algorithm. Both the algorithms are based on graph coloring approach, which generate a TDMA schedule quickly with a fixed schedule length ( Colouring), where is the maximum degree of any node in the graph to be colored. The two algorithms differ in the channel access mechanism used by them to transmit control messages, and in the generated schedule for different modes of communication, i.e., unicast, multicast and broadcast. The novelty of the proposed algorithms lies in the methods, by which an uncolored node detects that the slot picked by it is different from the slots picked by all the neighboring nodes, and the selection of probabilities with which the available slots can be picked up. Furthermore, to achieve faster convergence we introduce the idea of dynamic slot-probability update as per which the nodes update their slot-probability by considering the current slot-probability of their neighboring nodes. Under the second phase of the proposed TDMA-scheduling approach, we provide two randomized and distributed schedule compaction algorithms, viz., Distributed Schedule Compaction (DSC) and Distributed Schedule Length Reduction (DSLR) algorithm, as the mechanism to trade-off the scheduling time with the generated schedule length. These algorithms start with a valid TDMA schedule and progressively compress it in each round of execution. Additionally, Furthermore, the execution of these algorithms can be stopped after an arbitrary number of rounds as per the requirements of underlying applications. Even though TDMA-based MAC protocols avoid packet loss due to collision, due to erroneous nature of wireless medium, they alone are not sufficient to ensure the reliable transmission in WSNs. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) is the technique commonly used to provide error control for unicast data transmission. Unfortunately, ARQ mechanisms cannot be used for reliable multicast/broadcast transmission in WSNs. To solve this issue, we propose a virtual token-based channel access and feedback protocol (VTCAF) for link level reliable multicasting in single-hop wireless networks. The VTCAF protocol introduces a virtual (implicit) token passing mechanism based on carrier sensing to avoid the collision between feedback messages. The delay performance is improved in VTCAF protocol by reducing the number of feedback messages. Besides, the VTCAF protocol is parametric in nature and can easily trade-off reliability with the delay as per the requirements of the underlying applications. Finally, by integrating all the works, viz., TDMA-scheduling algorithms (DTSS/RD-TDMA), schedule compaction algorithms and link layer feedback mechanism for reliable multicast/ broadcast, we propose a TDMA-based energy aware and reliable MAC protocol, named TEA-MAC for multi-hop WSNs. Similar to VTCAF, TEA-MAC protocol uses the combination of ACK-based and NACK-based approaches to ensure reliable communication. But, instead of using virtual token-based channel access, it uses contention-based channel access for NACK transmission. All the algorithms and protocols proposed in this thesis are distributed, parallel and fault tolerant against packet losses to support scalability, faster execution and robustness respectively. The simulations have been performed using Castalia network simulator to evaluate the performance of proposed algorithms/protocols and also to compare their performance with the existing algorithms/protocols. We have also performed theoretical analysis of these algorithms/protocols to evaluate their performance. Additionally, we have shown the correctness of proposed algorithms/protocols by providing the necessary proofs, whenever it was required. The simulation results together with theoretical analysis show that, in addition to the advantage of trading the runtime with schedule length, the proposed TDMA scheduling approach achieves better runtime and schedule length performance than existing algorithms. Additionally, the TEA-MAC protocol is able to considerably improve the reliability and delay performance of multicast communication in WSNs.