Back in March 2011, we featured an iPhone app that lets you use your iPhone as a makeshift light meter. The app apparently works pretty well, but if you’ve been looking for a fancier solution involving your iPhone, one has finally arrived.
It’s called the Luxi, and is a small clip on accessory that turns your iPhone into a proper light meter.
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A couple of weeks ago we featured a Google Chrome extension for overlaying “rule of thirds” lines over any online photograph. Now we have a different tool for examining other photographer’s photographs: Image Histogram.
Created by developer/photographer Nick Burlett, it’s a Chrome Extension that can quickly bring up the histogram of any online photograph.
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The rise of smartphone photography in recent year has been transforming how people think cameras should look and work. Instead of pulling out a single-purpose device that has dedicated controls for picture-making, legions of consumers are now content with pushing a single button (whether physical or digital) in order to preserve a moment in time.
One of the emerging ideas that directly results from this shift is the modular camera. Since smartphones provide all the computing power a camera needs (as well as apps and wireless capabilities), why not simply treat smartphones as a brain, and use lens, sensor, and interface attachments to give the brain a body? That’s what Snappgrip is trying to do (the interface thing, at least).
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Want larger photos from your iPhone? Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am has a solution for you. The entrepreneurial musician will reportedly be launching a new iPhone attachment next week that will “turn your smartphone into a genius-phone” and boost the phone’s camera resolution from 8 megapixels to 14 megapixels. Like the man who developed it, the device will have a quirky name: i.am+.
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People who spend a lot of time on their feet have products like Dr. Scholl’s gel inserts to help cushion their feet and absorb the shock of walking. Likewise, photographers who press the shutter button so much that they fatigue their index finger now have a similar product as well: the Custom SLR ProDot. It’s a patent-pending dot add-on for your camera’s shutter button that supposedly helps reduce camera shake and finger fatigue.
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Visual Supply Co (AKA VSCO), best known for its film emulation software, has launched a new product that’s designed to reduce the time you spend post-processing your images in Adobe Lightroom. VSCO Keys is a tool that adds powerful and customizable keyboard shortcuts to Lightroom 3 and 4. You can assign keys to the various sliders in the program, allowing you to keep your hands off your mouse during photo editing.
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Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:
They’re designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible — the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.
Malcolm reports that the site “works amazingly well”, making it “trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly”.
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Wolfram Alpha has added a new in-app purchase option to its knowledge engine app that brings advanced image analysis and manipulation to iOS devices. The $0.99 add-on allows users to use photos taken on the fly or from their Camera Roll as input. They can then use the app to do things such as analysis, sharpening, edge detection, and apply various effects. You can find a list of available commands here.
(via Wolfram Alpha via Engadget)
There are plenty of presets out there that attempt to make your digital images look like they were shot with film, but VSCO Film by Visual Supply Co is different: it’s a Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW add-on that uses film profiles to change how the RAW files are interpreted rather than simply perform standard adjustments on the images. The video introduction above shows some examples of what the various options can do. This patent-pending method of film emulation doesn’t come cheap — it costs $120 each for Canon or Nikon profiles, and $200 for both.
VSCO Film (via Jeremy Cowart via John Nack via Wired)
Olympus and Panasonic might be cofounders of the Micro Four Thirds movement, but the companies appear to be taking different approaches toward 3D photography. While Panasonic offers a special 3D lens that contains two lenses, a newly discovered Olympus patent shows an even more novel approach: adding a second lens to a camera via its hot shoe. Simply stick the lens on and turn your camera sideways to transform it into a stereoscopic 3D camera!
(via Photo Rumors via PopPhoto)
