That is a challenge. I have a lot of better photos, but they're already floating around the internet. We have to be careful in here. I am still in a country where growing is considered a serious offence and if not cautious, I could end up several years in prison.
A few tips on photography and security. Make sure there are no details in the photos that can be used to identify you. It is very easy to overlook something. It can be a product from a shop revealing which part of the world you're in or worse, a bill with your name and address on it or anything else that's easy to identify. Then you have the matter of reflective surfaces. Check those to see if your face is on the photo. The same applies to eyes. You can be identified from the reflection of your face in someone's eyes. A pet photo could doom you forever if you forget to check for the small details. The following text is from my thread "
Growing safety - Tips & Tricks on how to avoid getting caught" - I feel this needs to be included in a thread about the special nature of the kind of photography we do:
I often censor my photos. Especially reflective surfaces are pixeled out from many of my photos I post online. The reasons for this are quite simple - Please read the following article
Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil
What do your Instagram and Facebook photos reveal?
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Zooming in on the pupil of a subject's eye reveals hidden bystanders (credit: Rob Jenkins)
The pupil* of the eye in a photograph of a face can be mined for hidden information, such as reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders, according to research led by Dr.
Rob Jenkins, of the Department of Psychology at the
University of York and published in PLOS ONE (open access).
The researchers say that in crimes in which the victims are photographed, such as hostage taking or child sex abuse, reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators. Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations could be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations.
By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, Jenkins and co-researcher Christie Kerr of the School of Psychology, University of Glasgow were able to recover bystander images that could be identified accurately by observers, despite their low resolution.
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Lineup-style array of reflected images from photographs for spontaneous recognition task in experiment. All participants were familiar with the face of the psychologist and unfamiliar with the faces of the bystanders. Correct naming of the familiar face was frequent (hits 90%), and mistaken identification of the unfamiliar faces was infrequent (false positives 10%)
To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, the researchers presented them as stimuli in a face-matching task. Observers who were unfamiliar with the bystanders' faces performed at 71 per cent accuracy, while participants who were familiar with the faces performed at 84 per cent accuracy. In a test of spontaneous recognition, observers could reliably name a familiar face from an eye reflection image.
"The pupil of the eye is like a black mirror," said Jenkins. "To enhance the image, you have to zoom in and adjust the contrast. A face image that is recovered from a reflection in the subject's eye is about 30,000 times smaller than the subject's face." In the research, the whole-face area for the reflected bystanders was 322 pixels on average.
Forensics implications
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You probably recognize this well-known person, even though his face in this image measures only 16 pixels wide × 20 pixels high. (look at my personal remarks regarding this photo below this article - DeVille)
High-resolution face photographs may also contain unexpected information about the environment of the photographic subject, including the appearance of the immediate surroundings, Jenkins explained to KurzweilAI.
"In the context of criminal investigations, this could be used to piece together networks of associates, or to link individuals to particular locations. This may be especially important when for categories of crime in which perpetrators photograph their victims. Reflections in the victims eyes could reveal the identity of the photographer.
"Also, around 40 million photographs per day are uploaded to Instagram alone, he pointed out. "Faces are among the most frequently photographed objects. Our study serves as a reminder to be careful what you upload. Eyes in the photographs could reveal where you were and who you were with."
Although Jenkins did the study with a high-resolution (39 megapixels) Hasselblad camera, face images retrieved from eye reflections need not be of high quality in order to be identifiable, he said. "Obtaining optimal viewers – those who are familiar with the faces concerned – may be more important than obtaining optimal images."
In addition, "in accordance with Hendy's Law (a derivative of Moore's Law), pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely."
It would be interesting to see what hidden information is buried in law-enforcement (and other) photo archives – some of which could even help exculpate innocent persons.
Abstract of PLOS ONE paper
Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subjects' eyes. To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, we presented them as stimuli in a face matching task (Experiment 1). Accuracy in the face matching task was well above chance (50%), despite the unpromising source of the stimuli. Participants who were unfamiliar with the bystanders' faces (n = 16) performed at 71% accuracy [t(15) = 7.64, p<.0001, d = 1.91], and participants who were familiar with the faces (n = 16) performed at 84% accuracy [t(15) = 11.15, p<.0001, d = 2.79]. In a test of spontaneous recognition (Experiment 2), observers could reliably name a familiar face from an eye reflection image. For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g., hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators.
references:
* I have some remarks about the Obama photo. That's a clear weakness of this study. You see - They used a very famous photo of a very famous person. However - If they used a non famous photo of the same person the chances would be considerably smaller for you to be able to identify this person after being pixelated like that. They probably did it to illustrate their point, but it's not very scientific to mislead the reader like this. I just felt I had to say that - DeVille
