The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram’s holidays by pushing out its new filters by year’s end. Read more…
It seems like we’re saying this every week, but the cloud photo storage industry is becoming more and more packed. Heck, even AT&T launched its own service called Locker earlier this month. The next entrant to the arena looks like it will be a photography company we didn’t expect: wireless SD card maker Eye-Fi. Read more…
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. Read more…
Since launching last year, JPEGMini has become a popular web-based option for trimming the file size of JPEG images without compromising their appearance. The web app magically shrinks photos by up to 5x while keeping the quality relatively unchanged. In May of this year, the company repackaged the technology for Macs as a simple space-saving app. Its next frontier? Mobile photo sharing and iOS. Read more…
I’m in Cologne, Germany covering Photokina right now. It’s the day before the trade fair opens, and as I was walking through the exhibition center to a press event (which I’ll write more on soon), I passed by some of the main exhibition halls. Instead of the squeaky clean “photographer’s Disneyland” that guests enjoy when the fair is up and running, everything was a mess, as companies were working hard to set up their impressive displays.
Since this isn’t a view that most people who visit the fair see — after all, who wants to waste time walking around a day early? — I decided to roam around and snap some photos of what Photokina looks like the day before opening. Read more…
Gamification — the application of game design elements to non-game contexts — is a pretty hot idea right now in the online startup world. More and more startups are introducing things like badgets, achievements, leaderboards, points, and progress bars to encourage users to do things such as visit new businesses, answer questions, and, of course, play games. One particularly interesting application of gameification is in the area of education, using fun to motivate learning.
Lunchbox is a stealthy startup that’s planning to introduce this kind of learning to the world of photography. Read more…
We’re in the year of the camera’s app. Not the camera app, which you use on your phone, but the camera’s app, which is found on your camera. A boatload of new cameras this year will have Internet connectivity and app support built right in, giving photographers access to all kinds of custom features and functions that weren’t easily available in the old age of cameras.
While Android is one of the big operating systems manufacturers have gravitated towards, Sony has decided to go the Sony way and make its system proprietary. Instead of running Android, the Sony NEX-5R and the NEX-6 will offer apps through the PlayMemories ecosystem. Read more…
Nikon’s massive 800mm f/5.6 super-telephoto lens hasn’t been launched yet, but English press photographer Leon Neal was given the enviable opportunity to play around with a pre-release copy at the London Olympic Games. After shooting two sessions at the aquatics center with the beastly piece of glass, Neal published a blog post with some sample photos and thoughts on how the lens performs:
The shot above is an unsharpened 100% crop of the frame below with no noise reduction applied. As you can see, not only has the lens done a pretty good job of tracking but the D4 has provided good results at 4000ISO. Image stabilisation seemed subtle with no obvious “clunk” as it kicked in like some lenses. The only discernible giveaway was the soft purr of the IS motor disengaging after I took my finger off the trigger. Likewise, the effect of the stabilisation was equally subtle with only a barely noticeable delay when looking through the viewfinder at a subject.
Head on over to Neal’s blog to read his short review.
Where the action cam market is concerned, GoPro is king. For the last few years if you wanted to go sky diving, snowbording, mountain biking, or any other extreme sport and video tape yourself doing it, you’d probably be strapping a GoPro to one of your appendages. Sony and JVC, however, are looking to get in on some of the extreme sports action — and both are doing it in style with new action cam offerings. Read more…
Photoshop CS6 will have a new Iris Blur tool that lets you quickly add blur to an image that fakes a shallow depth of field. It’s a one tool-process that eschews the traditional methods of using masks, layers or depth maps.
