Researchers at Google and MIT have figured out a way to automatically remove reflections and obstructions from photographs, and their latest demo of the technology is amazing.
Check out the 6.5-minute video above for an explanation of the algorithm and some examples of what it can do.
Since the introduction of 1080p video recording in the Canon 5D Mark II in 2008, there has been a strong adoption of DSLRs for pro and amateur video production purposes, and video features have become standard in DSLRs in recent years.
But the growth in DSLR usage for pro video applications may be rather short-lived: a recent report predicts that it will actually plummet over the next few years.
Lytro’s research into the world of light field technology has produced two consumer devices. Their first camera was released in 2012 and introduced photographers to the concept of being able to refocus images after they had been taken. Then in 2014, Lytro released their flagship: the ILLUM. Armed with an integrated 30-250mm f/2.0 lens, a 40 megaray sensor, and upgraded software, Lytro was ready to show the world that their technology wasn’t just a gimmick.
Lytro may have launched the world's first consumer light field camera back in 2011 and a more powerful followup, the Illum (pictured above), last year, but it may not be alone in rushing for future milestones in light field photography.
Case in point: Panasonic is said to be working on the world's first light field camera that uses interchangeable lenses.
With Google's first prototype version of its Glass head-mounted computer, users can take pictures by pressing a button on the side or by “OK Glass, take a picture.” In the future, composing a specific photo with Google Glass may be as easy as framing the shot with your fingers.
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?
Celebrities now have another reason to shy away from paparazzi photographers. Scientists have created a new technique for creating controllable digital versions of celebrities using only a set of paparazzi photos to reconstruct faces and create convincing expressions.
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.
A Los Angeles-based cloud graphics company called OTOY has announced the world's first spherical light field capture that creates a navigable scene in virtual reality. By capturing light field data with a special Canon and GoPro camera rig, the company created the beginnings of immersive photos you can move around in.
If you're a photographer who often shoots in very dark environments, would you want night vision eyedrops to help you see better without artificial illumination? It sounds like science fiction, but we're actually getting closer to having it be possible as an item for camera bags.
A team of "biohackers" have announced that they've figured out how to enhance human night vision by dripping a chemical onto eyeballs.
Project Ara is an ongoing effort by Google to create a modular smartphone for which you can swap critical components in and out, allowing users to build the perfect phone for their specific needs.
If its modular design takes over the consumer market in the future, we could be seeing a whole new approach to how smartphone cameras work.
Wireless Internet is now commonplace, but one thing that's generally still wired is electricity. One day, however, you might be juicing up your gadgets with wireless energy routers instead of cables and battery chargers.
Energous Corporation is one company trying to make that vision a reality. It has developed a technology called WattUp that aims to change the way you think about how electronic devices are charged and powered.
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.
During the Max conference, as he was preparing to demonstrate some of the touch functionality baked into Photoshop CC on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, Adobe's Josh Ulm said, "when we started to explore touch, we knew that we would have to radically shift the user interface."
What we didn't know at the time is just what he meant by "radically," but the ad above gives us a sneak peek at just how touch-capable Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe applications will eventually be.
Always fascinated by the then and now series that make their way across the Web, photographer Samantha Decker wanted to give it a shot herself. The thing was, she didn't want to do the exact same thing everyone else was doing.
That's how she settled on a reality-altering series by the name of Now & Then: Seeing the Future from the Past.
“The avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those in 1917. We are experiencing the end of …
In an insightful essay about the "graying" of photography, Kirk Tuck opines about seeing 50-year old men proudly displaying their huge DSLRs while hanging out at the counters at the Photo Plus Expo in New York last month. The generation that obsessed over pristine primes, low noise and 16×20 prints has been supplanted by a gaggle of Snapchatting millennials for whom photography is no different than a text conversation.
Over a half a billion Apple iOS and Android systems have been sold, which means that there are now an unprecedented number of cameras in the world. This monumental increase in smartphone cameras has allowed for the dramatic increase of photos uploaded to social media sites.
I’m often overwhelmed by the fact that I can upload photos to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, 500px, VSCOcam, Artflakes, Snapchat, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, EyeEM, and on, and on, and on. Through such apps, a half billion photos are uploaded to the Internet each day. The sheer scale and accelerated growth of mobile photography and social media integration, which I’ll call the new photography, has quickly changed photography in just a few short years.
Good or bad, photography as a medium is closely tied to the technological heritage of our cameras. As a result, technological developments often influence the type of gear we use and the type of photographs we take.
With that in mind, here are some areas of innovation that are likely to create even more change in the way we take pictures and the way manufacturers design cameras in the future.
Got a few dozen spare DSLRs and fistful of startup capital? Then you, too, could get into the emerging field of 3D selfies, as pioneered by Texas photo studio Captured Dimensions.
Photographer Jordan Williams started the business a few years ago after becoming convinced there was more to 3D printing than making industrial prototypes and the like. He fashioned a 360-degree photo studio in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, outfitted with more than 60 DSLRs, all remoted-out for simultaneous shutter release.
In the space of a few days, two major newspapers have been sold from their corporate entities to billionaires. On August 3, The New York Times Co agreed to sell The Boston Globe to John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for a pittance of $70M. And on August 5, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos agreed to buy the Washington Post for $250M.
Earlier in the year, billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, investigated buying the Tribune Company, which operates the Los Angles Times and Chicago Tribune.
Sigma has been on a tear as of late. Since late 2012, the company has put out a highly regarded 35mm f/1.4 lens, a novel USB dock that lets you calibrate lenses at home, and a revolutionary 18-35mm lens with a constant f/1.8 aperture (shown above).
It appears Sigma is only just getting warmed up: new rumors suggest that Sigma may be building a 24-70mm zoom lens for full frame cameras that boasts a constant f/2.0 aperture.
Just in case you weren't feeling media-saturated enough already: there's word of an emerging technology that could decorate your photos with ads only a camera can see.
You know those computers in Minority Report and Iron Man that are completely controlled through hand gestures? One day soon, we may all be using Photoshop in the same way.
The video above is a short demo showing a Photoshop plugin that introduces some introductory gesture controls to the image editing program.
First Lytro tried to make focusing irrelevant, and now an MIT project wants to make choosing a camera angle a thing of the past.
Aydin Arpa, a reserarcher at MIT's Media Lab, recently presented a paper on CrowdCam, an app in development that would combine images taken from multiple perspectives into a seamless visual field where you could change the perspective just by swiping your finger on the screen.
I’m not really sure why, but if you want to watch the Fanboys go completely insane, the simplest thing to do it is throw out “your brand is probably going to be out of business in a few years.” But the simple reality is that’s what happens to most companies eventually, especially technology companies. Photography companies, since, oh, about 1850, have basically been technology companies.
As Apple's WWDC kicks off this week, my thoughts keep coming back to the heated debate with my friends about the future of photography.
Let me step back for a second. Marissa Mayer famously said a few weeks ago that there’s no such thing as professional photographer anymore. The Internet rage followed, and she apologized, saying that what she meant is that we all take photos now. And it’s true. Nothing has revolutionized photography and made it truly global as Apple’s iPhone.
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
We exist on a treadmill of forgetting and anticipating. We labor to preserve what we treasure of our past, even while the present shotguns us with a thousand new options, one of which must become our future. One of which we must choose.
In this maelstrom of time it is hard to be calm; to understand what warrants attention, and what can be ignored. This state of tranquility and presence has been the essence of the modern photographic act, best characterized in the popular mind by Cartier-Bresson's concept of the "Decisive Moment."
The rumor mill is churning regarding Canon's tilt-shift lens lineup. The company will reportedly be announcing replacements to its two oldest TS-E lenses by the end of this year, and the lenses are likely already floating around in the wild for real world field tests.
Lenses and sensors weren't the only camera components miniaturized and dumbed down when digital photography jumped over into the world of smartphones: flashes did too. In order to fit everything into a tiny package, smartphone makers have largely opted for LED flashes in their phones rather than the bigger and bulkier xenon flashtubes found in proper digital cameras (a notable exception is the Nokia PureView 808). That may soon change.
Scientists in Singapore have developed a new capacitor that may lead to more powerful xenon flash units replacing the LED flashes found in consumer smartphones.
Talking to computers is one of the exciting new trends that's emerging in the tech world, and in the future we may find ourselves casually talking to our gadgets as we go about our lives. One application of this that you may never have considered is photo editing: what if you could post-process your photographs simply by telling an image editor what you would like done to the images?
That's exactly what scientists are currently working on, and the research is further along than you might think. They're already playing around with a prototype version of an app -- one called PixelTone.
At the CP+ show in Japan, Ricoh is showing off a new camera prototype its developing that can capture full 360-degree immersive photographs with a singel push of the shutter. The omnidirectional camera looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a hammerhead shark. Lift it up into the air, press a button, and it will capture an image that shows every direction around you.
Could memory cards and hard drives one day store massive numbers of digital photographs on DNA rather than chips and platters? Possibly, and scientists are trying to make that happen.
Last year, we reported that a group of researchers had successfully stored 700 terabytes of data on a single gram of DNA. The data being stored that time was a book written by one of the geneticists. Now, a new research effort has succeeded in storing something that's a bit more relevant to this blog: a photograph.
Google has been working some time now on a camera-equipped device that's worn over (or above) the eye. Olympus has something similar going on, but instead of a full-fledged camera, their device only serves as an external viewfinder for a separate digital camera.
In the latest issue of Japanese magazine Impress, there's a two-page section that predicts the new DSLRs that Canon and Nikon will be unleashing in this upcoming year. Alongside each model name, design illustration, and spec list is a percentage that indicates the likelihood of the rumor coming true.
Electronic viewfinders have become all the rage as of late through the rise of the mirrorless camera, but many photographers still prefer optical viewfinders due to certain weaknesses of EVFs. One major drawback is the fact that the scene is often laggy, especially in low-light situations, making it difficult to track a moving subject.
Nikon is apparently trying to combine the best of the OVF and EVF worlds by developing a new giant viewfinder that's see-through.
Here's a slightly-oldie but a very-goodie: New York University photography professor Fred Ritchin gave this keynote address last year at the "What's Next?" event put on by Foam. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of digital photography and how it impacts the world around us.
We live in a world that's teeming with digital photographs. More photos are now uploaded every two minutes than were created during the entire 1800s. Facebook is seeing thousands of photographs uploaded to its servers every second of the day, and Instagram was flooded with 10 storm-related photos per second during Hurricane Sandy.
With such a large quantity of photographs flooding the web, it's clear that visual data mining will be an in-demand market in the coming years as more and more people look to glean valuable images from the torrent of useless pixels. One of the companies trying to occupy this space is CrowdOptic, a San Francisco-based startup that's building some pretty interesting location-based photo curation technologies.
What does Nikon have up its sleeve for 2013? According to Nikon Rumors, it may be at least one pro-sumer DSLR early in the year, possibly followed by a beastly high-megapixel flagship DSLR later in the fall.
There are a number of lifelogging camera projects racing to be first movers in the emerging industry of cameras …