How to fail at media handouts

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.

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, although 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.

In a photo 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.

Update April 28, 2017: A new “world’s fastest camera” has been developed at Sweden’s Lund University. It claims their camera does the equivalent of five trillion pictures per second. The press release has better photos than MIT because the Swedish university hired a professional photographer.

But sadly, Lund University didn’t hire a professional PR person. There are repeated errors throughout the press release which shows that either the PR person didn’t understand what they wrote about or they’re stuck back in the 20th century.

Did the university, as its press release claims, actually invent the “world’s fastest film camera”? Did the university researchers really use their “super-fast film camera” to expose various processes “on film”? If so, why does the technical paper never mention the word “film” and instead only talk about camera chips, imaging sensors and pixels?