Want to focus your camera simply by looking at a particular area of the viewfinder? If you're a Sony shooter, you might be enjoying that feature as early as next year. The company is reportedly working on building Eye Tracking autofocus into its cameras, with the initial version arriving in a flagship camera sometime in 2014.
Facebook summoned a group of tech journalists to its Menlo Park headquarters this morning to unveil the latest products its legions of programmers have been hard at work building. The major announcement was a new search engine called "Graph Search," which will allow users to run extremely powerful search queries on the social networks database of 1 billion members, 1 trillion social connections, and 240 billion photos.
We were just able to get some hands-on time with the new Fujifilm X100s immediately after the company's press conference. In addition to blazin' fast autofocus speed, the company has also introduced a couple of new features that manual-focusing photographers will love.
One is something many photographers are already familiar with (and have been clamoring for): focus peaking. The second hasn't been received with as much fanfare, but is actually quite fantastic. It's split image focusing -- something rangefinder users will appreciate very much.
When consumer electronic products have photographs leaked to the world prior to their official announcements, they're often blurry shots that appear to have been taken with a quick snap of a smartphone camera by some not-so-loyal employee or factory worker. Blackberry maker RIM wants to help companies who value privacy plug up these leaks, and has created a smartphone feature that is meant to make snapping stealthy shots a much more difficult thing to do.
We've all used a little bit of Photoshop magic to take care of a blemish or two when taking portraits, but Sony's newly announced Smart Skin Evaluation Program (SSKEP) is taking on blemishes in a whole new way. The sensor technology, which was announced just a few days ago, can actually go beyond skin-deep and take a peek at blemishes that haven't even surfaced yet.
Even if you've never heard of Peter and David Turnley, you've likely seen at least one of their photographs at some point in your life. The identical twins are two of the most renowned photojournalists to have covered world events over the past few decades. The video above is a fascinating 13-minute-long feature titled "Double Exposure," which aired on 60 Minutes back in 1996 (warning: there are some strong images of violence).
Today Facebook finally launched the photo sync feature that it has been privately testing for smartphones over the past couple of months. The feature is built into the social network's official mobile app for Android and iOS, and makes it easier to automatically sync your phone photos to the Facebook cloud.
Bloomberg published this short feature earlier today titled, "The World's Most Wanted Camera vs. the iPhone Era." In the video, reporter Nejra Cehic takes us on a brief behind-the-scenes tour of Leica's gear manufacturing headquarters in Solms, Germany, and discusses what the future holds for the brand.
We've known since last month that Lytro is planning to roll out at least one fancy new feature for its light field cameras (parallax-based 3D), but now the company has taken the wraps off the feature to give us a sneak peek at what they'll offer. The two new features that will soon appear in Lytro's Desktop software are called Perspective Shift and Living Filters.
Subscription-based photo-sharing service SmugMug caused a lot of grumbling back in August by effectively raising raising prices by 67% for Pro members who wanted to retain all of their existing features. Members who didn't want to pay double their membership costs could stay at the same rate but lose their ability to price and sell prints. The story and reaction was strikingly similar to Netflix's poorly-received pricing change enacted earlier this year.
Flickr has quietly rolled out a great incremental update to its photo-sharing service. Individual photo pages now display a number of EXIF details under a new section labeled "Additional Info", found in the column to the right. With a quick glance, you'll be able to see the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and focal length that a photographer was using when he or she snapped any photo.
This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users' photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user's photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
Apple may have launched a neat panorama feature with iOS 6, but Google is one-upping the Cupertino-based company today with its new Jelly Bean flavor: Android 4.2. The OS now comes with an official 360-degree panorama app called Photo Sphere.
Is "camera toss" photography ready to go from fad to feature? Apparently Nikon thinks so. A recently published patent (No. 2012-189859) shows that the company has been thinking about building specific features into its compact and mirrorless cameras that would assist in using the technique.
When tourists visit famous landmarks, they commonly pull out their own cameras to snap some photographs as mementos, even if they themselves aren't in the picture. Despite the fact that there's almost always guaranteed to be an identical photograph taken by someone else, somewhere online, there's something about capturing the moment for oneself that makes redundant photos special.
That's why a new patent filed by Google is a bit puzzling. It's called "Image zooming using pre-existing imaging information" and, as the title suggests, revolves around using other people's photographs to "boost" a digital camera's zoom.
Facebook is testing out a new feature for its Android mobile app called "Photo Syncing". The feature automatically backs up your smartphone's photographs by uploading them to Facebook as they're shot, tucking them away inside a private "Synced from Phone" tab on your photos page that isn't visible to anyone but you. You can then later choose which photos you'd like to make private and which you'd simply like for Facebook to hold on to.
After Nokia unleashed its 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone back in February, most people thought that it would set the bar for future phones branded with the PureView monkier. "PureView" came to mean, "a ridiculous number of megapixels in a phone camera." Turns out that's not the case.
The company unveiled its new Lumia 920 phone today, which also carries the PureView name. It features a much more modest 8-megapixel camera, showing that PureView isn't about the megapixels after all.
As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming …
Fujifilm has uploaded a video to its Japanese YouTube account showing its not-yet-announced XF1 (or XP1) retro-styled compact camera. The video shows that there's a twisting feature that's used to turn the camera on and off. Turning on the camera involves twisting the lens to unlock it, pulling it out of the camera until it clicks, and then rotating it some more to open up the lens cover. Turning it off involves doing the same things in reverse.
One of the interesting technologies Sony introduced into its line of NEX mirrorless cameras last year (starting with the NEX-C3) was "focus peaking", a feature from the video recording world that highlights in-focus areas of an image to aid in manual focusing. You know those colorful pixels that image editing programs use to indicate blown out or underexposed areas of photos? It's like that, except for focus. What's awesome is that you can adjust things like focus, focal length, and aperture, and then see the depth of field adjust on your screen in real time. Check out the 10-second video above for a demo.
GIMP, the image editing program that's a popular open-source alternative to Photoshop, is now easier than ever for Mac users to start using. Though it was completely free, installing it has long required that X11 also be installed -- a major pain in the butt. That changes with the latest version of GIMP: the app is now a self-contained native app that's a breeze to install. It's as simple as dragging and dropping.
If you've been looking for a way to hold "photo conversations" with friends and family as easily as you chat through text messages, Skype has a solution for you. The company has added one of the features requested the most by its millions of users: mobile photo sharing. Upgrade to the latest version of Skype's iPhone and iPad apps, and you'll be able to beam your latest snaps to anyone on your contact list without having to worry about things like file size limits or paying for MMS charges.
Facebook has rolled out a new feature that may make privacy-wary Internet users cringe. It's a link called "seen by" that shows up under photos posted to groups. The link reveals a box that shows exactly who has seen the photographs -- timestamps and all.
Ingrid Lunden of Techcrunch writes that UC Santa Barbara professor Ben Zhao first noticed the feature last Friday after sharing a photograph of his daughter to one of his groups.
Face detection has become the snapshot photographer's invaluable assistant in ensuring tack-sharp faces, but soon it'll be able to add two more job responsibilities to its resume: exposure metering and speedier autofocus. Two patents recently awarded to Apple show that future iOS cameras (perhaps the next iPhone?) will have standard camera features that rely much more on face detection technology. The first patent, titled "Dynamic exposure metering based on face detection", allows the camera to automatically select faces as the primary target for metering. In more difficult situations -- group shots or people standing in front of a crowd, for example -- the camera will use factors such as "head proximity" to select the primary subject.
Ever since Google+ was launched in June 2011, users have gushed over the beautiful mosaic view for photos uploaded …
Instagram grew to its $1 billion acquisition price through a service that's used almost entirely through a mobile app. As it continues to balloon in size, it only makes sense that it would expand onto the web to compete against the likes of Flickr and 500px. That day may be closer than you think.
Here’s a short video by PBS about Duluth, Minnesota-based street photographer Kip Praslowicz.
Flickr announced today that it has partnered with Nokia to overhaul its geotagging …
Instagram's latest 2.5 update has swapped out their "popular" tab for a new "explore" feature which allows users to browse photos based on users and hashtags -- it's a more functional search system. Now, instead of seeing photos that have the most likes, users can search for hashtags based on events and topics, which also makes it possible for users to have wider circulation of their images.
File hosting powerhouse Dropbox has added automatic camera uploads to …
After rolling out a similar mobile update a few weeks ago, Facebook is now bringing the “bigger …
Tired of fiddling with cables and memory cards? You might not have to in the near future as wireless data transfer becomes more and more common. This brilliant concept video by designer Ishac Bertran imagines how we might soon be using "spatially aware devices", or devices that can share data simply by holding them close together. Want to transfer some photos off your camera? Simply hold it close to your computer monitor and drag them off!
The folks at Flickr don't seem to be slowing down for anything. In the fight to stay relevant as more and more competition springs up, we've seen the Yahoo! photo sharing site go through an overhaul ranging from looks to a new uploader. And now Flickr is adding two new photo sizes and a new image control setting for its Pro members.
PBS art series Off Book created this short video that presents a brief history of the animated GIF.
We’ve all seen photographers make mad dashes into group portraits, hoping to get into position before the camera’s self …
Photoshop CS6 will have a new Iris Blur tool that lets you quickly add blur to an image that …
One of the new darlings of the Internet world is Pinterest, a photo-sharing …
Pentax released a new compact camera today called the Optio VS20, which offers a feature we haven’t seen before …
Apple’s doing it. Adobe’s doing it. Now Dropbox wants …
Olympus and Panasonic might be cofounders of the Micro Four Thirds movement, but the companies appear to be taking …