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UltravioletPhotography

License Plate


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Though I would shoot my plate just for fun and see if any special coatings or other unusual things were on it. Meh.

 

Nikon D70 unmodified

 

Visible;

1/30s f8 iso200 No Flash or Filters

post-51-0-96999400-1408332115.jpg

 

UV:

15s f8 iso320 baader U No Flash

post-51-0-59368200-1408332120.jpg

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Cool plate, Damon with the Piny/Pinelands tags.

 

At least there is some false colour difference. Wonder how it looks in IR?

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Most if not all traffic cameras use some kind of IR, thus it is not surprising license plates are required to show maximum visibility and contrast in that light.

 

By the way, seeing a Peugeot with a UV license plate just was too tempting. Never mind having only an IR camera with me. (obviously Danish license plates, as seen by the Rødovre dealer sign, and unfortunately not a red car. But I have my own and it is indeed red).

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Andrea--yeah I couldn't believe Piny wasn't taken...Lol --piney was :D

For anyone even slightly interested--A piney is someone who lives in the pine barrens of NJ (1.4 million acres) basically cut off from the grid and subsisting off the land with wife, kids, dog, maybe a pig, chickens, shotgun, rusted pickup and a lot of Jersey Devil stories. Thus I am not a "true" Piney as I don't fit that description completely :D --nowadays they are as rare as an honest politician. It's tough to hide these days.

 

Bjørn, I would have thought your plate also had UV somewhere on it :D

 

I suppose it is a decent example of negligible focus shift with my El-Nikkor. It is straight out of camera with 1click WB and Raw to Jpeg conversion

 

-D

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The pineys sound like our 'okie' stories from Oklahoma. Rusted pickup must be up on cement blocks for authenticity. Doorless fridge a requirement for front porch. [Then oil was found in everyone's back yard and all the okies became millionaires. Kept the pickups though.]

 

Love the Jersey Devil stories !

It is amazing that the Pine Barrens survive to the extent that they have and have not been filled with the Jersey McMansions. There are some really cool flowers which grow down there.

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  • 2 months later...
I have seen some license plates with red type which actually had very poor legibility in IR; I am not sure all the regulators are completely up to speed on this point. Someone with malicious intent might even stencil in a different number using Maxmax's invisible IR ink pen. Hmm....
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Traffic speed cameras have used IR for decades.

 

Making your license plates unreadable in IR is a criminal offence (in my country and likely everywhere else using such systems) so instead of avoiding a fine you go to jail. Take your pick.

 

Toll cameras use the same principle although camera recognition is not the primary method (we use an electronic gadget inside the wind screen). Purchasing a national subscription for passing toll booths gives you the gadget and is what nearly all Norwegian drivers use as subscribing to such service is far cheaper than the old-fashioned camera recording.

 

If you try to manipulate your license plates, the risk of being caught is actually high as all traffic controls use portable cameras for automatic recording of vehicle data including (of course) whether your road tax and insurance have been paid. Obfuscating the readability of the license plates will make the police pull you over immediately.

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.......all traffic controls use portable cameras for automatic recording of vehicle data including (of course) whether your road tax and insurance have been paid.

 

I can just imagine how well this would go over here in the US !! Half of the population thinks they shouldn't pay taxes and the other half think it is unconstitutional to force a driver to buy auto insurance. The remaining halves of said population would complain loudly and rant about Big Brother keeping track of them via traffic controls.

 

Those of us who don't mind being "tracked" have those windshield gadgets for a speedy trip through the numerous New Jersey tollbooths.

 

Sigh. We are sometimes a very weird country.

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In my country, there is no real choice. Driving a car without having paid road tax and insurance is illegal. If you are caught in a road control, they rip off your license plates and make you a pedestrian.

 

The flip side of course is that there always is insurance to cover expenses in an accident whether you are the culprit or victim.

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We also have something called EZPass in NJ that goes inside the window (if you pay for the service) and most people who run the highways and into the cities do use it. They cannot check if you have insurance that I am aware of though. Just if you have the card. Now the license and registration they can and do. The worst I ever did was to throw 35 pennies in the 35c toll bucket at the booth--which didn't work but I drove on anyway.

 

-D

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The portable cameras used on traffic controls are hooked up in real time to official databases of the road authorities. Once the (automatic) reading of your license plate has been completed, all the other data follows directly. The law enforcement officer will have you flagged in red immediately if you haven't paid. This occurs in a split second.

 

The subscription service for paying tolls is now expanded to cover the entire nation and I believe also other Nordic countries. You can automate it even further by signing a contract to allow funds to be drawn automatically from a designated banking account. The system actually works extremely well and is highly transparent to the driver. No need to slow down just drive through at full speed (I think it'll keep pace up to nearly 300 km/hr which is a suicidal speed on our roads and three times the highest speed limit anyway).

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Let us see how North Carolina license plates perform in various bands:

 

post-66-0-87872800-1415666974.jpg

 

As you see, there are multiple kinds of license plates in North Carolina; here are three of the most common. The comparison is not really scientific, because I did a poor job of matching background brightness in all of the test frames, and one may legitimately debate how that should be done; nevertheless, I think a couple of things are apparent. Where black pigment is used for the lettering, wavelength does not seem to affect legibility very much, as the special plate shows. With blue or red pigment, however, not only do both the infrared filters perform more poorly than the visible filter, but they produce results less legible even than those from the Baader. Predictably, the trailer plate, with its red pigment, fares the worst; it would be completely blank in the IR were it not for the embossing of the metal. The normal plate's numbering is somewhat faint through the Hoya, but still legible. Certainly the IR does these plates no favor, and one must be skeptical on the point of whether law enforcement would really prefer to use it.

 

I gather that in some parts, if someone scribbled all over your license plate with this

 

https://www.maxmax.com/aXRayIRInks.asp

 

you could find yourself in trouble with the authorities--and never suspect a thing until you were arrested.

 

Stateside, there are companies actually hawking products such as this:

 

http://www.ontrackco...Plate.cfm?id=01

 

I think where I live, it would probably just represent a waste of suckers' money.

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European license plates are much more standardised. The ability to be read by 'remote sensing' has been a decisive influence in their design. In practice the automated reading is done in near IR as this interferes the least with human vision. The modern speed cameras easily go undetected except for stretches where they do average measurements and need to alert the driver he has entered such a part of the road. Yet the 'warning' is just a tiny red blink.
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Cool Carolina plate array. Thanks, Clark.

 

************

 

We also have something called EZPass in NJ that goes inside the window (if you pay for the service) and most people who run the highways and into the cities do use it. They cannot check if you have insurance that I am aware of though. Just if you have the card. Now the license and registration they can and do. The worst I ever did was to throw 35 pennies in the 35c toll bucket at the booth--which didn't work but I drove on anyway.

 

The EZPass works all over New York State and New England too. Makes it handy for my summer travels up east. "-)

I can't remember if it works in the tunnels, because we usually take the train into the city.

 

I had to laugh at the 35 pennies!

Back before EZPass - we have ALL been THERE in New Jersey scrabbling for whatever change we could dig out of the car seats because we had forgotten to top up our car coin stash.

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When we drive into the state of Maine every summer to enjoy some time on the coast, we are greeted with this sign:

 

Maine-the-way-life-should-be.jpg

 

[bTW, there are a lot of humorous re-writes of this slogan by various internet wits.]

 

After touring around Norway with Bjørn I think that there should be a sign for Norway that says:

 

Norway - The Way a Country Should Be

 

The Norwegian traffic system being one such example - it is automated, everyone knows how it works and therefore there is no evasive 'crime' because there is no way to get away with it. The greater good is served for all the people regarding insurance, licensing and speeding. And it all really works.

 

I doubt that we could ever enact such a system in the US. For one thing, we have 50 road authorities - none of which would ever cooperate with another one.

Note to non-US readers: Roads/traffic/licensing issues are managed by each individual State not by the US federal government. Although we do have some national highways.

 

Even if we could get the current Do-Nothing US federal government to attempt a national traffic system, there would be very difficult problems to be solved in terms of a database large enough to encompass such a huge road system and the number of drivers in the hundred million range.

 

Some things, unfortunately, just don't scale up.

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Norway is a beatiful country that I really love. In Winter and in Summer. And I love the people there.

 

Back to the license plates. In germany a license plate is standardized in dimenions (only a few availeable) colour (only black letters on white background). And it is a document too because of the seals of the authority and car examinations on it. Any alterings are "falsification of douments" so one should be very carefully with stickers, foils, pens...

 

Last month a driver in Coburg was punished with a penalty of 30 earnings of one day. In his case about 1000000 Euros (1 Million!). He used a self adhesive license plate on his car without the sealings.

 

Even if I do not like this it is fact.

 

On my ATV I need 2 license plates. The back is no problem but the front plate is mounted on the bumper (only possibility because certain mounting position is also required !) hitting all obstacles during off road use or races. It is bent, wrinkled, bruised, battered, abraded, lost and run over. But I will not remove it like most ATV drivers do!

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Losing any license plate here means your vehicle has to get a new set of plates with a completely *new* registration number. The old number is null and void thereafter.

 

Been there myself a few times, a pity if you had a 'nice' registration number, but cannot be avoided I'm afraid. On the other side, the renewal is quick and takes only a few minutes plus a phone call to your insurance company.

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I do not wish to give the impression that I am making light of this or encouraging unwise action here. No government takes kindly to alteration or falsification of their license plates. Even in North Carolina, I believe that is some kind of felony fraud offense, i.e. you would face large fines and a lifetime criminal record if caught with tampered plates on your vehicle. Being a convicted felon is no joke here, as it means a lifetime ban from voting, holding a passport, residing in many areas, or holding most jobs. The flip side is what a nasty prank it could be if someone else could do it to your plates without your knowing. I don't think I need worry about that here, but elsewhere it might be theoretically possible.

 

In the US, the primary speed enforcement tool is the radar gun, with a few lidar guns out there as well and a very few aircraft using stopwatches and timing marks. The only modes having anything to do with license plates are automated cameras slaved to robot radar guns, and there has been protest about these, because one cannot directly prove who was actually at the wheel of a vehicle, only that a violation was committed with said vehicle; so a lot of such charges have not stood up in court. With a live officer wielding the gun, that is another thing entirely.

 

I must say that a million euros for using an incorrect fastener seems a bit over-the-top.

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It is not because of the fasteners. It is because of the license plate itself and it visibility, inclination and legibility, missing (or falsificated?) seals and the amount in "earnings per day".

 

I do not know details but if the common "amount" in this case ist 30 days and the driver has earnings of 35000 Euros per day then it is ok for me. Because 2000 Euros may be as hard for a working family father as a million for this top manager. The question to me is if it's worth 30 days...

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