future

It’s been over two years since DJI released the DJI Mavic 3, an upgrade to their incredibly popular Mavic 2 Pro/Zoom series. In this new form factor, they redesigned the battery to offer a whopping 45-minute flight time, added Occusync 3.0 for better flight distance and stability, added 5.1K video resolution, added an onboard SSD (to the Cine version), and experimented with adding a Zoom lens to capture images and video at different focal lengths.

NASA's huge new James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, but the agency is already looking toward the future. It is currently exploring the possibility of creating liquid lenses to make a gigantic telescope perhaps 100 times the size of the Webb.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his company is renaming itself as "Meta" as it aims at a future in virtual reality, a place he has repeatedly referred to as the metaverse.

The age of the camera is slowly coming to an end—especially the bulky DSLR and all its associated declinations.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group, the committee behind the JPEG image file, recently held its 86th meeting in Sydney, Australia, and among the topics discussed was using artificial intelligence for greater image procession and using blockchain (the technology pioneered by Bitcoin) for a new system of trust.

All digital data storage decays in one way or another. Depending on if your storage media, your digital photos may last just years or decades before "bit rot" destroys it. But Microsoft is working on something called Project Silica that could one day allow you to store your precious memories safely for 10,000 years by etching the data into glass.

Though we went into great detail recently into why the SD card isn't going anywhere anytime soon, the format's days are likely still numbered. Positioned as a response to CFexpress, the SD Association published an initiative about a year ago for the next generation SD card called SDexpress (SDx).

Fake photos are a rampant issue in our digital age, but researchers are working hard to restore a greater degree of trust to photography. One team has created a new AI that can detect when faces in photos were manipulated using Photoshop.

To avoid the dreaded "camera notch" interrupting smartphone screens, some manufacturers have begun introducing pop-up or flip-up selfie cameras. But, thankfully, the future looks like it will be more elegant with the introduction of cameras hidden under the displays themselves.

We are approaching the peak capacity for film photography labs. The machines are old, the parts are scarce, the demand is high. The measly Kodak Pakon Scanner, terrible it may be, fetches absurdly high prices.

There are two major trends in photography today. The first is the ever-increasing numbers of photos being made. I can't even be bothered to look up how many billions of photos are being uploaded to Instickrbook every minute or every day or every year. It's a lot. This is usually talked about in terms of how many photos there are, and how we are drowning in them.

Seoul-based photographer Steve Roe recently took a fractal lens around Asia and captured futuristic views of the narrow streets filled with neon signs.

While companies and researchers around the world work to build the most advanced and powerful AI systems, Facebook has a special treasure trove that most don't: billions of tagged photos thanks to Instagram. Facebook has now used those photos to create a leading image recognition AI.

Designing and manufacturing camera gear ain’t easy, as anyone who has invested in a Kickstarter project can attest. The amount of technology that’s stuffed into gear is astonishing, but that doesn’t mean each product meets the needs of the photographer. So in the spirit of “there’s always room for improvement,” here are a few of our hopes in the new year.

Researchers have created the first "metalens" that can focus the entire visible spectrum of light onto a single point in high resolution. The breakthrough brings metalenses one step closer towards replacing bulky camera lenses with much smaller chips.

Google has introduced a new AI system that's trained to rate photos on whether or not they are good technically and attractive aesthetically. It's called NIMA, or Neural Image Assessment

Want to change winter to summer or day to night in a photo? In the future, that could be as easy as a single click. Scientists at NVIDIA are working on a mind-boggling AI system that can change things like seasons, time of day, and weather in photos.

Instead of searching for the ideal model for a photo shoot, photographers of the future may be able to generate one using artificial intelligence. Neural networks these days can generate portraits of imaginary people.

How might photography evolve in the coming years and decades? The folks over at COOPH took a look at current trends and research projects to come up with 10 productions about the future of photography. They're discussed in the 4.5-minute video above.

Back in 2015, we saw the launch of Affinity Photo, a sleek, lightweight, and powerful alternative to Adobe Photoshop for doing professional edits on photos. Originally released for Mac, it launched for Windows at the end of 2016. Now it seems like there's more big news on the horizon: a possible Lightroom competitor.

The brainiacs at Caltech have produced something really cool: an imaging chip that produces an image from light sensors... without lenses. It's a chip that could be the birth of the future of photography.

In its best form, art can lead major innovations in science and technology. The earliest photographers were more like scientists and chemists than artists.

Virtual reality is an up and coming industry. Big jumps are being made, with many genres of photography and film getting on board. But VR has always been limited in its resolution, with the experience feeling a bit pixelated to the user. Finnish startup Varjo wants to change this with "human eye resolution."

It’s not exactly a camera that can slip in to a coat pocket, but the RED Weapon 8K can capture both 8K motion footage as well as 36MP still photos. Photographer and director Vincent Laforet believes the camera is a harbinger for the future of photography.