Image Fulgurator is Over-hyped

The Image Fulgurator gets its name from fulgar, the latin word for lighting, and roughly translates to "Lightning Thrower." The device was named by its inventor, Julius von Bismark, for just that reason....It throws an image into a photo taken by an unknowing photographer. It made it's internet debut on June 26 and within only 2 days it was already a front page story on Digg.com.

Let's start by looking at how the Image Fulgurator works. The device itself if impressively simple, yet remarkably effective. Atop the device is a light sensor with adjustable sensitivity. The Fulgurator is pointed at the scene that someone intends to photograph and the sensor waits until it detects a camera flash at which time it triggers a flash of its own. This flash is mounted on the back of a regular camera behind the place where the film sits. Now instead of undeveloped film in this camera there is a piece of developed film-a negative. So the flash behind the film is triggered and the light is direct out through the camera lens, projecting the image on the film onto the scene being photographed. Because the trigger is much faster than the human eye can detect, the photographer sees only one flash. From the perspective of the unknowing photographer, nothing is seen because the flash is triggered at the same instant as the photographer's flash. There is a detailed picture of the individual components at Julius von Bismark's own page.

You can see why this has scared the heck out of people. Imagine going to the Louvre and taking a picture of the Mona Lisa only to find that where you had expected to see the most famous portrait in the world,and there is instead an advertisement which you cannot see with your eyes. If you don't think that's a possibility, you're wrong. Even if the Louvre would never allow someone to set up an image fulgurator which projected advertisements on the Mona Lisa, consider what the device is....a modified camera. So it just looks like a fancy camera! There is nothing to stop someone from walking in and pretending like they are taking pictures when in reality they are sitting there, throwing advertisements into other people's pictures.

The power of the Image Fulgurator goes beyond just leaving surprise advertisements into people's photos. Von Bismark has already demonstrated further possibilities. In a Wired.com article, von Bismark demonstrated throwing an image of a naked body into a photograph of a clothed person. The possibilities are endless for what pranksters and advertising firms alike could do with this thing. Some people have gone so far as to call von Bismark, "The man who could destroy photography."

But wait, the point of this article is to show why the Image Fulgurator is just hype and why there is nothing to worry about. Let's look at some reasons why Julius von Bismark's invention has NO chance of ruining the world of photography.

First, the Fulgurator probably won't work well on photos taken in areas which are well lit. The device needs to detect a flash to trigger its own flash projection. If you take a photo in the daytime and don't use a flash, there is no chance of having your image "Fulgurated." Further, the Fulgurator is simply never going to be powerful enough to mess up many images....Imagine how much power an image fulgurator would need to project an image onto the Statue of Liberty. It simply would not be possible to do without being noticed by everyone.

Secondly, it's not going to be hard to spot an image fulgurator. All you need to do is spot the camera which has a bright flash coming out of the lens. While you can take a pretty good photo with a small lens on your typical digital camera, image projection requires a pretty large lens to work well (think about digital projectors.) Julius von Bismark's own design uses a lens around a foot long! Especially when your taking a photo of someone, they're going to notice the creepy guy with the camera which has a big flashing lens.

Third, you could easily "trick" a fulgurator by producing a few flashes before the "real" flash from the camera. If fulgurators became commercially available, camera manufacturers would probably start adding this as a feature. Adding the additional electronics to a camera to make it produce a few extra flashes would probably only cost a couple dollars more. Julius von Bismark is already struggling with enabling his device to differentiate between digital camera's photographic flash and the less intense pre-flashes which are used to reduce red-eye or to improve focus.

We could go on discussing reasons why you could easily spot a fulgurator or why it would be easy to "defeat" one. Julius von Bismark is clearly very brilliant, but the fact is that the Image Fulgurator will quickly become obsolete if the technology becomes commercially produced. Although advertisers will quickly sink their teeth into the device, if it starts ruining people's enjoyment of photography, people and companies will quickly start finding clever ways to defeat it.