Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It’s a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).
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500px, quickly becoming known as the “Flickr for artsy photographers”, has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.
The website has also been experiencing incredible growth. Traffic has grown over the past year by more than 20x to 3.4 million visitors per month, and continues to grow at 30% month over month. The service — which has 12 employees — currently stores 2.5 million photographs.
500px [iTunes App Store]
iPhone photography app Hipstamatic was the king of retro filters before Instagram came along and stole its crown. Now, the developers are hoping to capitalize on the retro photo app craze with a new idea: delivering a disposable camera experience on an iPhone. Pocket-lint reports,
Hipstamatic D-Series is set to bring back the film feel to your digital photography by preventing you from actually looking at your pictures the second after you’ve snapped them. Working like an old disposable camera, you have to finish all 24 shots before it’ll let you go back and review how they all came out. Sounds crazy to begin with but try not to think about coming almost full circle and it might just be crazy enough to work.
“It’s an opportunity to bring back the idea that you have this roll of film and you shoot with it, and you think about what you’re seeing in the moment, more so than snapping a photo and looking at it, deleting it or taking another one,” said Lucas Buick [founder of Hipstamatic]. [...] “It really is a completely different way to experience photography that a lot of people have forgotten about, but it wasn’t so long ago that people don’t remember it, and that’s the key.”
So basically, it’s an app that restricts its users — like an app that only lets people shoot in black and white. While it may sound like a lame idea to the general population, the market for this type of thing (e.g. hipsters) might just be big enough for it to attract a following. They do have one thing going for them though: the app will be free once its released later this month.
(via Pocket-Lint via VentureBeat)
Image credit: Hipstamatic Projekt IV. Chunky + Cano Cafenol by Zé.Valdi
Instagram released a new update today in response to user complaints regarding the filter differences in Version 2.0. Version 2.0.1 features rewritten Earlybird and Branna filters that act much more like their Version 1 counterparts (they were “accidentally altered” in V2). The company also acknowledges that other filters were intentionally changed, but that they’re working hard to bridge the gap between the new and old versions. Other improvements in the update include a smoother tilt-shift and upgraded geotagging.
The company announced a few days ago that it’s now receiving 25 photos per second from its exploding user base — a faster rate than a 24fps motion picture.
Adobe has announced a new Android app called Photoshop Touch for tablet owners. Rather than provide a full suite of image editing features, the app appears to be more geared towards minor edits, effects, and sharing. It’ll be released in the near future for Android at a price of $10, and an iOS version is on the way as well.
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Fast Burst Camera is a best-selling Android app that upgrades your phone camera’s FPS to 5 to 10 frames per second, allowing you to capture action shots by spraying, praying, and selecting the best image afterward. On high end phones, the FPS can even go up to a crazy 30FPS. Like with the burst mode on DSLRs, holding down the shutter will fill up your buffer, and you’ll need to wait for it to clear before continuing. The app can be purchased from the Android Market for $3.63.
Color — the much-hyped but largely ignored photo sharing app — is back, and this time it’s built entirely around Facebook. One of the main reasons for the app’s failure the first time around was the fact that the photo sharing relied on proximity, a huge problem for new users when no one around is using it. Now, founder Bill Nguyen is trying to avoid the “ghost town” problem by harnessing the power of Facebook’s social graph.
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Today Instagram released version 2.0 of its wildly popular iPhone app, which will soon see its 10 millionth user. The base technology has been completely overhauled to bring speed to the app — filters now apply 200x faster, tilt-shift applies 100x faster, and both can be viewed live while shooting. Four new filters have been introduced (seen above), and borders on filters are now optional. Finally, the resolution of photos saved to the iPhone 4 has been increased from 612×612 to 1936×1936 (the size of photos uploaded to Instagram remains unchanged).
Noticeably absent from today’s announcement was an Android version of the app, though with this major release you can bet that they’re working harder than ever on getting it released.
Instagram Version 2.0 (via Instagram via TechCrunch)
Confused about what Google’s new Photovine photo sharing app is all about? Here’s a short video published yesterday that explains the service without blinding us with hairy-chested dudes. “Instead of just posting a photo, you plant it and watch it grow.”
Aside from the fun-factor of “vines” planted for random topics, it seems like the service could be useful for spreading images of real-time news stories (e.g. protests, disasters, etc..), similar to what Twitter does with text and hashtags.
Google’s new Photovine mobile photo sharing app for iOS is now out of private beta and open to public signups. Here’s how the iTunes download page describes it:
Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine.
It has a long ways to go before it can catch Instagram, which is currently the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Instagram has already passed 7 million registered users, who have uploaded more than 700 million photos. Google has a pretty big reach though, so products launched by the company can get really big, really fast — just look at Google+.
Photovine (via TechCrunch)
