Good or bad, photography as a medium is closely tied to the technological heritage of our cameras. As a result, technological developments often influence the type of gear we use and the type of photographs we take.
With that in mind, here are some areas of innovation that are likely to create even more change in the way we take pictures and the way manufacturers design cameras in the future.
Adobe made several announcements yesterday, and one of the most talked about revolved around projects Napoleon and Mighty, the digital ruler and pressure sensitive stylus the company debuted in early May.
Back then, both pieces of hardware were basically prototypes in the "technology exploration" phase, but now Adobe has announced that Mighty and Napoleon will be hitting store shelves in the first half of 2014, and they won't be alone. Two accompanying iOS apps -- Parallel and Contour -- are being designed as well.
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If you feel like you've been lacking for inspiration lately, you're about to strike the photographic gold mine. In celebration of their 125th anniversary, National Geographic is launching PROOF, a photography blog all their own that is already full of great content -- and it's only been running for 2 days.
If you've turned on the news over the past couple of days, the name Costa Concordia probably came up a time or two. The massive 114,500-ton luxury liner crashed into the reef off the coast of Tuscany in January of 2012, where it has been sitting on its side ever since.
Yesterday, a group of 500 engineers were given the O.K. to finally begin righting the ship, and what followed was an incredible 19-hour salvage operation that the BBC was kind enough to capture in time-lapse.
After a runner taking a selfie caused a "pile-up" at this year's Hong Kong Marathon in February, the marathon's organizers aren't taking any chances. Starting early so as to get the word out, the marathon is banning selfies and urging runners to leave the smartphones on the sidelines.
What happens when you give a bunch of skaters, some photographers and a light painter free reign to create a Street View tour of a French concert venue/cultural hotspot? We'll give you a hint, it's similar to what a French ski shop did for its virtual tour.
In conjunction with the iPhone 5S debut, Apple also announced that the phone -- or more importantly, it's camera -- would be put to the test at luxury fashion house Burberry's London fashion show. And now that the show is over, the duo is sharing photos and videos taken with the phone to whet your appetite for the September 20th release.
Short and sweet, the video above is also impressive. Although it might seem banal enough -- what's so special about a video of the moon going through a full rotation? -- what you're looking at is a super-high resolution time-lapse that shows all of the Moon, including the part that's never visible from Earth. And it was all made possible by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Not everybody can afford to drop the cash required to get a Leica, but that doesn't mean you can't still rep the brand. Check out these new, official Leica T-shirts that have started showing up in authorized Leica camera shops all over the US.
Fujifilm has some very capable X-Mount shooters in its repertoire, and today that repertoire grows with the addition of the X-A1 entry-level X-Mount interchangeable lens camera. After months of rumors and photo leaks, the official camera is finally here.
The thinking behind the new Android and iOS app Chirp is that if animals in nature communicate through sound, machines should too. And so, the four person Animal Systems team created an app that does just that: no bluetooth, no email, no 'bumping' -- images and other files are sent using only 2-second sound clips.
Then-and-now photos are always fascinating to see. Historical scenes come to life when blended into or placed side-by-side with modern-day photographs of cities we all know very well. Be it Paris, New York or San Francisco, most of the best-known cities have gotten the then-and-now treatment to great effect by many a photographer.
The most recent Then and Now series we've run across, however, isn't just meant to show how the scenery has changed. When photographer and historian Marc A. Hermann created the images, he purposely used only vintage (Note: and sometimes gruesome) crime scene photos to fill in the "then" part.
Of all the items that can be destroyed in a disaster, few are as valuable or hard to replace as family photo collections. Photographer Brian Peterson saw that first-hand while living and working in Japan two years ago, when an earthquake and even more devastating tsunami swept away everything many families owned.
Sensing that photography could be a way to help them heal, Peterson started the organization Photohoku (named for the Tohoku region devastated by the tsunami) to help families rebuild their photo albums.
For you and me, RGB color spaces may just be an obscure but important mechanism towards achieving properly color-balanced photos. For a certain group of image nerds, however, it's the whole enchilada.
It's rare that we get to report happy news from the intellectual property side of the photography business, so let's take heart from a win-win settlement achieved between a wronged photographer and viral media site BuzzFeed.
You probably already know this if you have older siblings, but a new British study has confirmed it: the first child gets all the camera attention from Mom and Dad.
For those people who are fed up with constantly wiping water drops off of their lens when shooting in rainy weather, Tokina has a pretty ingenious solution for you: a hydrophilic "rain dispersion filter."
If you like using your smartphone to do any kind of photography or videography, a great mount can go a long way in making your life easier. eleMount is just that, except that it offers so much more. Eye-catching and incredibly practical all at the same time, the little flat surface and tripod mount has taken the Internet by storm.
French photographer Julien Coquentin's series Please Draw Me a Wall is a curious combination of street art and photography. By having his subjects (sometimes himself) interact with wall art as if it were real, he creates fantasy worlds using only a few props and drawings that some call art and others defacement.
We told you about it in March of 2012, but the Digital Bolex D16 Cinema RAW camera only just made it into a few choice cinematographers hands this month, giving them a chance to put together sample footage that'll make the videographers out there salivate.
Here's a crazy video that's equal parts cute, touching and absolutely terrifying. In the short clip, a photographer gets closer and more friendly with a pack of wolves than we ever care to try for ourselves.
Sarah Palin is being sued after her political action committee (or PAC) posted an iconic September 11th photo on her Facebook page and website without asking permission from the copyright owner.
DSLRs and Compact System Cameras are becoming increasingly capable video capture devices in addition to being solid still shooters. But when it comes time to focus or zoom using the lens' or camera's built-in motor, you're often left with glaringly obvious noise on your soundtrack.
So far manufacturers have tackled this problem by introducing silent focusing motor lenses, but one group of engineers is taking a firmware-based approach that seems to work just as well (if not better) and might someday soon do away with zoom and AF noise entirely.
SanDisk made it clear last September that it would not be pursuing the XQD memory card format, but instead would focus its energies on CFast 2.0, the then newly-announced high-speed CompactFlash spec.
Almost a year later, SanDisk has finally debuted the fruits of that decision: a card that is both the world's first CFast 2.0 card, and the world's fastest memory card of any kind.
Here's a really cool idea that mixes photos and video in a creative and interesting way. By hiding photos "in plain sight," the video breathes new life into mostly standard (and sometimes shaky) aerial video footage, engaging the viewer's full attention by giving him/her something to watch out for.
Once in a while we stumble across a great archive of public domain or creative commons imagery that just blows us away. Sometimes it's historical photos, other times beautiful photos from space, but this time around it's neither.
Thanks to the US Geological Survey's Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr, we now have access to over 1,200 gorgeous macro photos of bees and other insects.
Those readers who often find themselves afflicted with a serious case of wanderlust might want to avoid this post. In the 10-minute documentary above, director Charlene Winfred will take you on a journey with self-proclaimed "gypsy" and "nomad" photographer Flemming Bo Jensen that will have you reaching for your camera gear with one hand while you shop for plane tickets online with the other.
I get asked a couple of questions every time I publish a graph showing Imatest results for multiple copies of lenses like the one below. Most people understand that some copy-to-copy variation is inevitable in the manufacturing process. Most are surprised, though, at how large the sample variation seems to be. Heck, I was surprised at how large the sample variation was when I started doing this kind of testing.
ExpoImaging has just announced a new DSLR attachment for the amateur photographer who wants better flash capability, but doesn't feel the need to buy an external flash. It's called the Rogue Safari Pop-Up Flash Booster, and once mounted to your Canon or Nikon SLR, it promises to provide up to 8x more light and a lot more range from your less-than-capable pop-up flash.
For some reason, corrupting photos has become something of a thing recently. From the Gliché App for iPhone we shared a few months ago to Doctor Popular's glitched ethereal double exposures, people are trying more and more to turn digital corruption into art.
Well, if you're curious and want to give it a shot yourself, developer Georg Fischer has a quick and easy solution for you.
Recent rumors have hinted that Canon might be making a move into medium format -- be that by investing heavily in a medium format manufacturer or building its own camera -- but a new patent seems to indicate that Nikon is at least thinking about it as well.
Martin Klimas is no stranger to capturing things as they're in the process of being smashed to bits. You might remember his series of photos showing porcelain figurines crashing against the ground we shared back in February of 2012.
His most recent series takes the same high-speed "explosion" approach, only the subject has changed from porcelain figures -- which by nature smash up fairly easily -- to flowers ... a significantly less brittle subject.
A couple of weeks ago, Seattle-based production group Super Frog Saves Tokyo took the Internet by storm with their slow-motion photo booth footage from a recent wedding they shot. Now they're back by popular demand to share some of the specifics about how they set up their slow-motion experience.
There is no shortage of your typical cat photo online, but photographer Arne Svenson's series Strays isn't exactly typical. Instead of cute photos of cute cats doing cute things in cute ways (enough cutes?) he photographed kittens turning away, looking up, walking away and otherwise doing their best to keep you from seeing their faces.
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Back in March, Canon announced that it was working on a special 35mm low-light sensor that would blow away all other competition when it came to seeing things in near complete darkness. In order to further prove that point, the company sent a prototype out to shoot tiny fireflies in less than 0.01lux on Japan's Ishigaki Island.
My last post featured stylized photographs of elderly people looking into mirrors and seeing their younger selves reflected back. While I was writing that story and contemplating the broader theme of reflection, serendipity occurred when I stumbled upon this Kickstarter project by Connecticut-based photographer Christopher Capozziello.
Earlier today, Redditor excranz shared a downright horrible set of promo photos that he claims ABC published on its PR site and took down shortly after. Apparently, the photos are for the ABC show "Once Upon a Time," and between the blur, poor lighting and awkward poses, people have a hard time believing these didn't go straight into the "unacceptable" pile.
It's more or less a given these days that cameras are everywhere and privacy is a quaint notion from the past. But it turns out that people were already starting to feel that way in the 1880s, when advancing technology allowed the production of cameras small and fast enough to be hidden by the user and produce shots of unprecedented candidness.
After recovering from the initial shock and devastation of September 11th in 2001, the city of New York began laying down plans to erect a new World Trade Center complex. A symbol of recovery and strength, the complex consists of 4 main buildings, the One, 2, 3 and 4 World Trade Centers.
It took many years of fits and starts, but the crown jewel of the new complex -- the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center -- is complete, and the time-lapse above shows what almost 9-years of construction has yielded.
We've featured some amazing instances of lightning strikes being caught on camera in the past, but none quite like this. The video above is security camera footage that shows what it's like to have a bolt of lightning strike the ground just a hop, skip, and a jump away.