technology

Native Versus Extended: The Science and Marketing of Digital ISO Ranges

Many digital cameras these days give you the option of selecting between the camera’s ‘native’ ISO range and a special ‘extended’ (or expanded) ISO range. If you are just starting out in photography, you may be confused about what each labeling means and whether or not there is a technical difference or if it just a bit of marketing. Today we'll be taking a look at the differences between native ISO and extended ISO ranges.

Future A.I. Will Be Able to Generate Photos We Need Out of Nothing

What will we do with all the data we accumulate from photos? On a daily basis, Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft use highly sophisticated deep learning engines to better understand the content of billions of images uploaded, liked and shared. For now, it is to better serve advertising, but what else can be done?

Cameras of the Future Will Be Able to Identify Things They See

One of the emerging trends in the world of photography is the idea of automated recognition and tagging of things found in photographs. Flickr can now suggest autotags for your photos, and Google's new Photos service lets you search through your unlabeled photos using advanced image recognition.

The same technologies are coming for real-time camera features as well. Qualcomm is working on a system called SceneDetect that lets cameras recognize what they're looking at in real time.

Google Working on Seeing Calories in Food Photos

Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.

Time-Lapses Made with Photos Mined from the Web

Time-lapses are usually created with one or more cameras by one or more photographers working together to document a particular subject, but now scientists have created a new method of time-lapse creation that uses photographs found on the Internet.

Photos of Giant Science Facilities That Look Straight Out of Science Fiction

Scientists around the world create massive and elaborate facilities for carrying out groundbreaking research. Photographer Enrico Sacchetti is a guy who specializes in capturing them on camera. He's a "science, technology, and industrial" photographer based out of Rome and London, and his images have appeared in many of the world's top science and technology magazines.

Apple Invents a Camera with 3 Sensors and a Prism That Splits Light

The camera on smartphones is one of the main selling points these days, and Apple is working hard to push its iPhone camera ahead of the pack. A newly discovered patent reveals that Apple has created an innovative sensor design that increases quality by using three separate sensors and a prism for splitting light.

How Humans Are Teaching Computers To See and Understand Photos

Three year old children can make sense of what they see in photos and describe them to us, but even the most advanced computers have historically had difficulties with that same task. That's quickly changing though, as computer scientists are developing powerful new ways to have computers identify what a photograph is showing.

The video above is a new TED talk given by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor who's one of the world's leading experts on computer vision. She talks about her revolutionary ImageNet project that has changed how computers "see."

Catstacam Turns Your Cat Into an Instagram Photog

If you've always dreamed of seeing your cat share photos of its life on Instagram, there's now a camera being developed that may make your dream a reality. It's called Catstacam, and is a wearable collar camera that automatically posts photographs to an Instagram account you set up for your cat.

Olympus to Make 40MP Sensor Shift Photos Possible During Handheld Shooting

One of the main innovations found in the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II is its ability to shoot massive 40MP photos with its 16MP sensor by doing "sensor shifting" and combining multiple shots. The main downside, however, is that you need a tripod to make sure the camera doesn't move between shots.

That may soon change: Olympus says its working on making the sensor shift technology work even when the photographer is shooting handheld without stabilization.

Nikon May Be Working on a Modular Lens System with Mix and Match Pieces

In the past several years, there have been quite a few mentions of modular camera designs that split sensors, screens, and bodies of cameras into separate, replaceable parts. Today is the first time we've heard of a completely modular lens system.

A recently published Nikon patent appears to show just that: a lens that is assembled by connecting a number of circular pieces to form a complete barrel.

Researchers Develop 2D Camera Capable of Shooting 100 Billion Frames Per Second

Biomedical researchers at the University of Washington have created what they claim to be the world’s fastest 2D ‘receive-only’ camera. Just how fast exactly? Up to 100 billion frames per second with the help of a technological process called Compressed Ultrafast Photography.

This allows the scientists to SEE laser light moving... actually watch it move... think about that for a second (or 100 billion frames).

Fancam Captures Massive 20 Gigapixel Group Photos of Fans at Large Events

To celebrate the return of LeBron James yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers decided to do a massive group photo with all the fans in attendance. Today they released the 360-degree, 20-gigapixel photograph online for fans to find themselves in, tag, and share.

The giant group panorama -- and many others like it -- was captured by a company called Fancam, which specializes in shooting some of the largest group shots in history.

A Look Into Google’s Impressive HDR+ Feature for Its Latest Nexus Phone Cameras

Google's Nexus 5 and 6 smartphones have a new Camera app feature called HDR+. This mode uses fancy computational photography tricks to help you capture better photos in situations with uneven lighting or low amounts of light.

In a post published to the Google Research blog this past week, researchers behind the new feature offer a peek at the inner workings.

Nikon Patent Shows a Vibrating DSLR Shutter Button That Helps You Track Moving Subjects

Cameras have many different methods of guiding photographers toward capturing quality shots, but physical feedback isn't really one of them... yet. In addition to providing useful visual and auditory information, DSLRs in the future might actually guide photographers through their sense of touch.

A recently published Nikon patent shows a DSLR that helps photographers capture moving objects without having to look through their viewfinder. Instead, the camera uses vibrations to guide the shooter.

Adobe Shows Off Features for Changing Time of Day Lighting and Removing Fog

At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.

It’s Official: A.I.s are Now Re-Writing History

The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.

It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened.