Interesting article here about a Russian billionaire who had this thing installed on his yacht to protect against paparazzi.
They say it hasn’t been tested yet though. So first of all, is such a device feasible? And secondly, would it be likely to damage the camera lens/sensor as the article suggests it may?
Otherwise known as “shining a flashlight at a photographer.”
The biggest problem I see is that the light would have to be fairly close to the subject. Otherwise the light would easily be blocked by a lens hood. The light would have to be amazingly bright to damage the sensor, i.e. as bright as the sun. Even then, it would probably only cause problems if many pictures were taken.
As for whether the technology would work, I’ll leave that to smarter minds. But it seems like an IR filter would easily negate the tech.
Once you know where a believed camera is, modulating the output light level to just account for diffraction in the air shouldn’t be hard. It only needs to be bright enough to mess up the image.
But no, I doubt it would work. The issue is going to be with detecting the camera. The field of view that is blocked by an object drops off at an exponential rate as the distance is increased. You have a full search space of 360 degrees horizontally and maybe 20 degrees vertically (unless you’re worried about helicopters overhead).If you divide that into 10,000,000 roughly square pixels to detect–around 14,000X700–while that seems like a lot, it really isn’t.
Say that a paparazzi can shoot from a mile away (which seems to be accurate, though Google is being amazingly obtuse at stating viable camera ranges), a light sensor perhaps 2 centimeters tall at a mile out is only like 1/10,000th of a degree. Remember that there’s 360 degrees, so we would need ~3,600,000X200,000 or 720,000,000,000 pixels to detect it.
And then there’s very easy ways to get around the issue. For instance, you just turn off the light sensor and set it manually. You could invent a camera that cycles through a couple of different light settings and takes the same picture in rapid succession. You could also set off another, stronger signal at the same time as you take your picture, so that the blocking beams go for it rather than you.
Detects them how? What is it about a charge-coupled device (CCD) that makes it detectable?
This description may be mangling what’s supposedly happening. The laser, I imagine, is the “focused beam of light”, and would work at long distances (laser beams hardly spread, even over fairly long distances). I think it would work if the laser could be aimed right at the camera. But the detection and aiming? How?
Uh-huh. So the guards flip a switch. How does the system know precisely where the camera is?
Oh? Why not? They couldn’t try to take a picture of it and see what happens? The people who developed it never tested it along the way?
Sounds like nonsense to me. Perhaps this billionaire wants people to believe he has such a system.
Yeah Uncertain (true to username I see), it didn’t make sense to me either - especially the claim it hasn’t been tested. But I was still curious about discussing the theoretical feasibility of the device with the good folks here who are much more knowledgeable than I.
I actually thought it would be possible for someone to wear a series of infrared LED’s on their clothes to effectively ruin paparazzi pictures. No need for James Bond LASER’s.
Hell, if you’re rich just hire people to follow the paparazzi around looking for nekid-drunkin-booger shots and them post them on a web site.
Abramovich is spending over GBP 700M on his yacht- call it 1.2 billion dollars - a few quid on an untested secret weapon isn’t going be noticed in the bill 
Firing “a focused beam of light” at a distant camera will require an accurate aiming system. And it had better be fast: if I press the button on my little POS digital camera, I’m capturing an image less than a second later. Depending on how narrow this “focused beam of light” is, and how distant the target is, this could be a pretty challenging task.
As previously noted, it would also have to be pretty damn bright to seriously screw up a camera’s ability to take a photo.
Cameras have all kind of things that make this device pretty difficult to implement. Aside from the above, there are things like filters one can apply to one’s lens. One can adjust things such as the aperture diameter, the sensor sensitivity, and the amount of time the sensor is exposed to light. One could use a traditional film camera which has no sensor to detect. One could use an array of 10 cameras; presumably the yacht won’t be equipped with 10 such machines.
Different focal lengths have different fields of view; a laser would presumably blind only a single point regardless of the focal length. So then we’d be talking about shining a bright flashlight into the lens. You’d need something pretty brilliant to account for all possible focal lengths.
I am not going to go into the aiming or detecting issues.
But you aim a decent laser at a digital camera and I am pretty darn sure its gonna screw up the image.
There is a reason you can look directly at a 100 watt light bulb safely but looking directly into even a few milliwatt laser (which is, say 25,000 times less powerful) is a hazardous thing to do.
I can’t believe that you’d try to sell such a system without testing it, given how easy it would be to test. All you need to do is to hire a photographer to sneak up on a given location from an unknown direction, and see if the system really detects the camera and really spoils the picture. Two people working together for half a day could test it.
I can’t believe this would work as a practical device. Certainly shining a laser down the barrel of a camera will swamp the CCD, but unless your laser is moving around over a large area, the aiming is going to be a bitch. If the aiming is good, just using two cameras simultaneously will defeat the system.
Of more concern to me is that this same laser will probably be shining through the viewfinder right into the photographer’s eyes. Blinding the photographer – THERE’S a lawsuit waiting to happen.
I just tried it with a less than 5 millwatt laser and my digital camera.
As I suspected and Calmeacham suggests, the amount of light from the laser on the CCD surface overwhelms a good fraction of the frame. And the stuff not overwhelmed doestn look so good either.
Given you can get some lasers in the WATT range, under certain circumstances it would work.
You can get 'em way bigger than a watt. when I was doing flow viz in grad school, I had a 20-watt copper-vapor laser. That’s 20 watts light output on a 1-inch spot (you could focus it down to a much tighter beam with lenses if you wanted to), and about 1980 watts heat output from the lasing medium via cooling fans; the lab got pretty warm when I was running it.
But if you’re going to shoot a 1+ watt laser toward people’s heads, you might as well just shoot at them with guns; you’ll end up with a lawsuit and jailtime either way.
An important part of the challenge here seems to be how to disable a camera without permanently injuring the photographer.
I have seen an anti-paparazzi system that seems to work, but only with flash photos. Basically it detects the camera’s flash and sets of a couple of bright strobes of its own, resulting in an image of nothing but a couple of bright flares.
They’re basically nothing but a slave flash so there is nothing to it, but again it only works with flash photos.
I bet there are no lasers involved at all. If it can be turned on just by a switch its probably just a bunch of IR flood lamps. Enough IR and it’ll mess up pictures because many CCDs pick up IR but it doesnt bother humans as we cant see it. Sure, a simple filter defeats this, but its security through obscurity and until everyone is sporting an IR filter it’ll work.
I am having serious doubts about the whole laser thing too. Something like this makes much more sense.
As mentioned above, trying to target a laser on a camera lens some distance way is going to be a bear. Now try doing it from a boat. Remember, this is going on a yacht. No way are you going to be able to do that with any accuracy. Of the lawsuits there would be, when you miss not just the camera, but the photographer, and blind someone standing down the block.
Not a damn thing that I can think of, CCD’s absorb ambient light energy to create an image, and are exposed to light for tiny fractions of a second. It would probably be easier to take a picture purposely trying to catch them blinking, from 100 yards away.
I don’t recall the details, but I DO recall about 10 years ago give or take, of reading about just such a system that would detect another optical system looking towards it. And this was in an optics or trade journal not the national enquirer or the internet.
And at the time, I don’t recall remotely thinking “that won’t work”.
take that for what its worth.
As for the aiming issue. I just did a back of the envelope calc. My measely 4 milliwatt laser did a fair job of messing up my pics. If you spread the beam out to a foot wide at the target to make the targeting reasonable/easy, you’d need about 40 watts. Within the range of doable. Make it a half foot by a half foot and you are down to 10 watts.
And while that intensity level would be quite unpleasant to look towards with your eyes, its probably not going to cause instant damage (note, DO NOT take that as suggesting its ever safe to look towards any laser, at ANY power level). If you purposely stared at it, you could probably cause permanent damage, but the glare would be sooooo bad and unpleasant you probably have a hard time forcing yourself to do it.
There are military systems that detect any nearby optical device by reflections off the surface of the lens. They are intended for battlefield use, and are able to detect binoculars and nightsights if they are turned towards the detector. A modulated scanned laser would probably work for such a system, along with some nifty processing of the reflected beam.
1.5um wavelength lasers are considered as intrinsicly eye-safe, in that light of that wavelength won’t make it all the way to the retina, being absorbed earlier in the eye. So whilst a very powerful laser of this wavelength can cause heat damage, you can have lasers of much higher power than other wavelengths and still be safe.
So, in principle, even if not in reality, a system as described is not too unrealistic.
Indeed the two technologies could be combined. Create a scanning platform that constantly looks for the glint of an optical system, and if it finds one, it reduces its scanning to keep the laser over the device it finds. The laser could be both eye-safe, and able to effectively blind a CCD based camera.
Adding an approriate filter to the camera would largely defeat the system. Also a crowd of people milling about wearing sunglasses would probably confuse it pretty solidly. But for those times when you think you are alone, and would like to add a bit of technological privacy, it might be useful.