The iPhone has evolved in leaps and bounds since the smartphone first burst onto the scene in 2007, and one of the most impressive ways it has evolved is in its capability to take pictures. In the original iPhone, a camera was something of an afterthought; the current model has entire commercials dedicated to the camera.
But knowing intuitively that the camera has improved exponentially is a far sight from seeing it with your own eyes. And so, just like they did in 2011, the folks behind the popular iPhone app Camera+ got every model of the iPhone together took a set of comparison shots for your perusing pleasure. Read more…
Hipstamatic has seen better days. Ever since Instagram came along and stole its thunder by offering filters for free, the app hasn’t had the same following it once did. But the company isn’t going to take this lying down. After having to fire several core employees last August, Hipstamatic is bouncing back by debuting a new social networking app called Oggl. Read more…
For 20 years, 52-year-old photojournalist Mark Hirsch drove by the lonely old Bur Oak two miles from his home in southwest Wisconsin without thinking to take its picture even once. Then, one evening, he took a particularly beautiful photo of the tree at sunset using his newly purchased iPhone.
It was just his way of testing out the phone’s camera (which he was very skeptical of) and, lo and behold, he was hooked. For a full year after that, starting on March 23, 2012, Hirsch took one photo per day of the towering Bur Oak, and he’s titled the resulting project “That Tree.” Read more…
Earlier today, brothers-in-law Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen of HI Resolution Enterprises announced a new product for the photography enthusiast community that they’re trying to get some help funding. Launched via Kickstarter campaign, the Snapzoom is a universal adapter that can attach a slew of optical scopes (i.e. binoculars, telescopes, etc.) to your smartphone in lieu of a telephoto lens. Read more…
In November of 2010, The New York Times made headlines of their own when they chose four Hipstamatic photos to grace their front page. And now, Instagram is getting in on the action as well. For Sunday’s paper, the NYT decided to use a photo of Alex Rodriguez taken by photographer Nick Laham in a locker room bathroom using an iPhone and edited in Instagram. Read more…
Google takes photos pretty seriously. In addition to schmoozing the photography community earlier this week by releasing the entire Nik collection of plugins for only $150, the company also promised to make the cameras in their phones “insanely great.” And a recent patent shows one of the ways Google may go about doing that. Read more…
For his most recent portraiture project, however, he eschewed even the limited studio gear he brought out on the street with him, and issued himself a challenge: take a high-quality, professional portrait, using nothing more than an iPhone and a €10 lighting budget. Read more…
A couple of months ago, we spent some time telling you about CrowdOptic, a company that has been pioneering a way to sift through the millions of photos taken every second of every day and separate the “noise” from the “signal” when it comes to finding newsworthy content.
The company’s technology takes advantage of the fact that smartphone photographs today come with both GPS and heading data attached, allowing algorithms to determine not only where a photo was taken, but also what it was taken of. And in the video above, former football player Jim Kovach explains the tech in detail at TEDxSiliconAlley in New York City. Read more…
The majority of in-camera editing and enhancing, especially on the mobile front, is done via software. Software that, according to MIT’s Rahul Rithe, “consume[s] substantial power, take[s] a considerable amount of time to run, and require[s] a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the user.”
In order to bypass this problem, Rithe and his team of researchers at MIT have developed a new imaging chip that can act as a photographic “jack of all trades” when it comes to taking your smartphone photos to the next level. Read more…
Over the last couple of years, smartphone photography has gained a lot of credibility. Many stock photography agencies, however, have managed to keep their “no smartphones allowed” signs proudly on display even as all of this was happening.
Due to the required megapixel counts and the high quality standards most stock photo agencies try to maintain, smartphones have, for the most part, been kept out of that particular business. Companies are starting to cave though, and the most recent of these is international stock agency Alamy. Read more…
