Steve Jobs may have had ideas beyond the iPhone when it came to transforming the landscape of photography. In a New York Times interview published today, Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson said,

[Jobs] had three things that he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks and photography. He really wanted to take these on. I didn’t go into details about these products in the book because it was implicitly Apple’s creations and it’s not fair to the company to reveal these details.

Apple dipped its toes in the digital camera market back in 1994, but pulled out a couple years later after Jobs returned to the company and focused it on computers. Of the three product categories, televisions, not photography, is the one that’s being mentioned the most right now — Apple is expected to announce a Siri-powered TV by 2013.

(via NYT via AppleInsider)

Image credit: Steve Jobs Keynote by acaben

Kodak’s fall from grace is an interesting case study that modern day companies can learn from. Even though the world’s first digital camera was invented by one of its engineers, the company was unwilling to cannibalize its film business that, at the time, was making money hand over fist. By the time digital cameras started catching on, Kodak had missed the boat.
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One of the main reasons Apple has been so successful as a tech company is its focus on usability. Even as competitors’ smartphones screens are approaching tablet screen sizes, Apple has stuck with 3.5-inches — an optimal size for operating the phone with one hand. John Gruber of Daring Fireball just published his review of the iPhone 4S today, and writes that Apple focused on speed as one of the main improvements featured in the iPhone 4S camera:

The most profound difference between the 4S and 4 cameras has nothing to do with image quality. It’s that you don’t have to wait nearly as long. That closed iris comes up for a moment and then it’s gone, and you’re ready to shoot. And after you shoot, the camera is ready to snap additional photos almost instantly. The difference is huge, and it’s especially nice in conjunction with iOS 5’s new lock screen shortcut to jump right into the Camera app.

I spoke to some friends familiar with the development of iOS 5 and the 4S, and word on the Cupertino street is that camera speed — time from launch to being able to snap a photo, as well as the time between subsequent photos — received an enormous amount of engineering attention during development. The stopwatches were out, and every single tenth of a second that could be shaved was shaved.

I wonder whether compact camera manufacturers spend as much effort shaving tenths of a second off their cameras’ startup and in-between-shot times. They’ll want to now.

The iPhone 4S [Daring Fireball]

Image credit: speedometer mileometer 88088 by osde8info

If you think about it, there are many parallels between Apple and Polaroid: both companies introduced innovative products that redefined markets in their time, both were founded by college dropouts, and both emphasized design and usability in their products. What you might not know is that it’s not a coincidence. Christopher Bonanos wrote a fascinating article for the New York Times on how Steve Jobs idolized Polaroid founder Edwin Land and modeled his career after Land’s:

The two men met at least twice. John Sculley, the Apple C.E.O. who eventually clashed with Jobs, was there for one meeting, when Jobs made a pilgrimage to Land’s labs in Cambridge, Mass., and wrote in his autobiography that both men described a singular experience: “Dr. Land was saying: ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me, before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said: ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’”

The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.”

Both men were also kicked out of the companies they built, but that’s where the stories differ. Jobs returned to Apple a decade later and his company went on to become the world’s largest tech firm, while Land died a decade later and his company has filed for bankruptcy twice since 2001.

The Man Who Inspired Jobs [New York Times]

After Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, the company replaced its homepage with a well-known photo of the brilliant innovator made in 2006 by photographer Albert Watson. An article published by PDN Pulse today reveals the story behind the (perhaps soon to be iconic) photo:

Jobs didn’t look immediately at Watson, but looked instead at the set-up and then focused on Watson’s 4×5 camera “like it was something dinosauric,” Watson recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, you’re shooting film.”

“I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’”

Jobs gave Watson about an hour–much longer than he ever gave most photographers for a portrait session. [...] I said, ‘Think about the next project you have on the table,’ and I asked him also to think about instances where people have challenged him.

“If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart,” Watson says, adding, “I heard later that it was his favorite photograph of all time.”

As with many other things, he was right about digital photography — he went on to turn the iPhone into one of the world’s most used cameras.

Steve Jobs: Visionary, Inventor, and Very Challenging Photo Subject [PDN Pulse]

Update: The photo was actually made in 2006 (we had said 2008). Sorry for the error.

P.S. Did you know that Jobs was also instrumental in the rise of Adobe?

Last year, Apple purchased Swedish facial recognition firm Polar Rose for $22 million, and yesterday’s iPhone 4S announcement revealed that the technology is now baked into iOS and is touted as one of big new camera features. The iPhone is now a compact camera and mobile computer that can detect — and possibly recognize — faces.
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Apple has just announced its new iPhone 4S, and the new camera found on the phone is pretty impressive. It packs an 8MP (3264×2448) CMOS sensor that’s backside-illuminated, allowing it to gather 73% more light and capture images 33% faster. The lens is now an f/2.4 lens that contains 5 separate elements, which provide 30% more sharpness. Snapping a first shot now takes 1.1 seconds, and subsequent shots require only an addition .5 seconds each.

In terms of video, the iPhone 4S records 1080p HD video with image stabilization and noise reduction. The company is saying that the phone will be the best still and video camera many customers have ever owned.

(via Engadget)

Here’s a bit of photo humor to start off the day: Jeremiah Warren made this satirical video imagining what it would be like if Apple announced an “iPhone 5 iDSLR”:

Who really needs photography skills when you have such an incredible device? You don’t really have to think about it. Just press the button.

What’s sad is that some people will inevitably believe that this is a real product, and of those people, some will be disappointed when they find out this is fake.

Suppose Apple hadn’t abandoned its digital camera business. What effect would Steve Jobs and his team have had on the cameras we use today? Photo enthusiast Karim Ghantous thought about this recently, and came up with the following list of things he thinks Jobs might have pushed for.
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We all knew it wasn’t a question of if, but of when: a major camera review site (Imaging Resource) has published a review of a cell phone (Apple’s iPhone 4) as a digital camera. The review’s conclusion is positive news for camera-makers though:

If you stack them head-to-head, the iPhone 4 is not going to give a good, entry-level point-and-shoot digital camera a run for its money. The 5MP 1/3.2-inch backside-illuminated (BSI) sensor in Apple’s iPhone 4 may be one of the best on the smart phone market right now but it’s simply too small in size to compete with what’s in a dedicated digital camera. Furthermore, while the iPhone’s miniscule 3.85mm lens produced far sharper results than we expected, it’s rudimentary, at best, when compared to most cameras.

Apple is now listed on the site’s camera manufacturers page.

Apple iPhone 4 (via The Online Photographer)