I’m virtually in Tokyo this week, attending the ISO Photography Standards meeting there by remote video link. Of course I’m actually still in Sydney, enjoying our super wet and humid weather. We had more thunderstorms today, but not as severe as yesterday.
The meeting began at 10:30 my time, so I had time to take Scully on a long walk this morning, with the goal of trying her out so she’d be relaxed for most of the day while I’m wired to the computer. I took her down the peninsula towards the ferry wharf, although not quite that far, as that’s a really long walk. She was indeed tired by the time we got home. Although it didn’t rain, I was soaking wet with the sweat and humidity and had to change my shirt again. On the way back in, we passed the new neighbour and their dog out in the park across the street, so stopped to say hello and let the dogs have another greeting. Their dog is a little growly towards Scully, but they met and sniffed each other a bit. So hopefully Scully is getting more used to the fact that the other dog is around.
When the meeting began we launched into the administrative opening session. I had a presentation to give about the Sydney meeting in October, covering things like the meeting venue, transport from the airport, visas for visiting Australia, hotels, and so on. We have a staff member from the Art Gallery of New South Wales on our Australian standards committee, who has offered to give the international delegates a behind-the-scenes tour of the gallery. This is best done on Wednesday evening, as the Art Gallery is open late on Wednesdays, so there will be staff around to meet and the delegates can browse the gallery at their leisure afterwards. The tour will be of the gallery’s photography labs, where they digitise artworks for preservation and publication purposes. The fact that this is best done on Wednesday evening restricts the exact dates of the meeting to certain days of the week, so we discussed refining the dates.
Other future meetings were discussed, and it looks like a meeting in Shenzhen or Hong Kong may be on the cards for October next year. And then perhaps a meeting in Cambridge in the UK for June 2026. That should be good if it goes ahead!
I took Scully out (in the pouring rain) and made a hurried lunch during the first coffee break, since the actual lunch break was two hours later in my time zone and I didn’t want to wait that long.
We had a presentation by a guy from Adobe about the new digital provenance initiative called C2PA. This is a collaboration between Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC as the founding members, with several other major companies joining in, to establish standards for verifying the provenance of files such as images, videos, and so on. The idea is that there will be digitally cryptographically secure signatures that can be attached to files to establish the creator of the content. If a file is edited, the editor can attach additional information indicating that the file has been edited. Either way, the signature will no longer match the signature hash, indicating that the file is no longer in the same form as the original publisher released it. In this way, you can confirm that a file published by, say, the BBC, is the original content that they published, or if it has been altered in any way. And the metadata can save the original content with hash, so you can actually see what the original file was before it was edited. It’s a little tough to explain in words, given I’m no cryptography expert, but it sounds pretty neat, and something that is desperately needed in our current environment where fake images and edits and AI content abound and it’s getting harder and harder to tell truth from fiction.
The afternoon sessions were dedicated to technical discussion on high dynamic range image file formats. There’s a lot of this topic scheduled for this meeting, and it’s a technical topic that I’m not especially familiar with or interested in, so for me these sessions were a little tedious.
After the meeting ended, I quickly made some fried mushrooms on toast as dinner for myself, as my wife ate earlier without me while I was still listening to the technical discussions.
New content today: