Earlier this week, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab announced their development of an imaging system that can capture the equivalent of half a trillion pictures per second:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. (…) Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.

From an easier-to-understand article in the New York Times:

To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. (…) If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion … the resulting movie would last three years.

To help promote this first-in-the-world announcement, MIT has media handouts. If you scroll down the page to the three pictures of the scientists behind this research, you’ll find that one link is dead due to bad page coding and the two other pictures are virtually useless.

The four-person picture is grossly out-of-focus with poor exposure, bad colour and poor composition. The two-person photo is out-of-focus with bad lighting but, to some extent, it can be corrected. Neither picture has any IPTC information. Full and proper IPTC info is mandatory especially for media handout photos.

Similarly, on MIT’s own news page, there’s a metal pole going partly through the face of one of the two lead researchers as they look at a glowing soda bottle.

A huge institution like MIT couldn’t be bothered to get it right the first time. Too bad it doesn’t do any research into public relations photography.