phone

Louie Schwartzberg on Smartphone Pics & How They Offer a Glimpse Into Your Soul

 
In the age of smartphones whose cameras are getting better with each passing day, we tend to snap more photographs now than ever before. But have you ever wondered, looking back at your photos, what they say about you as an individuals?

Well, award-winning filmmaker, time-lapse photographer and incredible TED Talk presenter Louie Schwartzberg has, and in the short clip above, he shares his thoughts on it with Oprah.

Two Photos of the Orion Nebula Show Just How Far Photography Has Come

The saying goes, "your cell phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launched a bird into pigs."

Thankfully, in addition to launching furious balls of feathers into evil swine, we also use our phones for taking photographs. And just as our phones have more computing power than all of NASA in 1969, our phones also have better imaging capabilities than many of the astrophotography endeavors of the past.

Apple Wins Patents for Removable-Lens iPhone Designs

For those intrigued by the notion of add-on lenses for smartphones but put off by the bulky design, Apple offers hope with a couple of recently patented designs for swapping camera components on an iPhone without turning it into an unwieldy monster.

Brand Licensing and the Nikon Phone

By this point, the crippling blow dealt to compact cameras by the rise of smartphones is old news, but camera manufacturers are now mounting counterattacks. They've certainly suffered for long enough. Sales for compact cameras fell by 30% in 2011 alone, and kept on falling. They're at 102 million units for this year, compared to 144 million units just three years ago.

Asking Random People to Tell the Story Behind the Last Photo on Their Phone

San Francisco-based interactive artist and freelance creative Ivan Cash recently had a neat idea: go out on the streets of San Francisco and ask random people to share the story behind the most recent photo on their phone (note: there is one racy photo and a few curse words dropped by some of the interviewees).

Video: Mechanical Shutter Spotted on the Nokia ‘EOS’ Phone

A mysterious tech blog called Vizileaks appeared on the web yesterday and stirred up some excitement in the tech world by claiming to have gotten its hands on a Nokia "EOS" smartphone. The site's "hands-on mini review" of the device features a number of photos and one video (shown above) that shows that the device features a mechanical shutter.

Nokia Teases Next Lumia’s Photo Powers, Shows Large Lens and Serious Flash

Last Friday, Nokia launched its new Lumia 928 smartphone that has a strong emphasis on photography. The device features PureView technology, optical image stabilization, a Carl Zeiss lens, and a xenon flash.

It was exciting news for photo-lovin' Nokia fans, but sit tight: there's more to come. Nokia will reportedly have a major launch event tomorrow to unveil a phone that has some serious photography chops.

My Hospital Eye or: How I Started to Love iPhoneography

Professional photographers using their smartphones is just a fad, I thought, but it all came to me sooner than I expected. Some 3 weeks ago I was diagnosed with central serous retinopathy in my left eye and was hospitalised for 3 days. In the process, I finally discovered smartphone photography!

Cyber-shot Branding May Return to Sony Phones Alongside Serious Specs

Sony has used its "Cyber-shot" brand for digital cameras since 1996, and from 2008 to 2009 the company also slapped the brand on its Sony Ericsson camera phones. Now, with the smartphone industry investing heavily in camera technologies, Sony may soon be reintroducing the brand to its Xperia smartphones in order to compete against other photo-focused phones.

Google Patent Changes Camera Settings Based on Local Weather

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.

Give Your DSLR a Brain by Connecting an Android Phone

Here's a walkthrough of how I hooked up my Android phone to my DSLR. Why did I do this? Because of Dropbox, social media, quick editing for the web, an intervalometer, macro/low-angle photography, an external LCD screen for video, Wi-Fi, and more.

Samsung Unveils the Galaxy S4, A Phone with a Emphasis on Camera Tricks

At a launch event in NYC last night, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphone: the Galaxy S4. It's a phone that looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, and one that is heavily geared toward photography. Having just launched a smartphone-style compact camera, the Galaxy Camera, Samsung appears to have stuffed many of the same technologies and features inside this latest smartphone.

Photojojo University: Learn the Basics of Snapping Photos With Your Phone

Smartphones are being used more and more to capture daily life photography, but many of its loyal users are perpetually stuck at the point-and-shoot level of photographic know-how. If that describes you, and you'd like to add a little more technical understanding to your brain, Photojojo has a new service designed just for you. It's called Photojojo University, a new educational service that teaches you photography lessons through bite-sized tutorials and assignments delivered into your email inbox.

Nokia Loses Its Head Honcho of Imaging, Face of PureView Technology

There was some surprising news in the smartphoneography world yesterday: Amateur Photographer reported that Nokia's imaging chief Damian Dinning -- "considered the driving force behind the firm’s smartphone camera technology" -- would be leaving the company for personal reasons at the end of this month.

Macro Photos Shot Using a Smartphone and a Laser Pointer Lens

Last month we wrote about how the small focusing lens inside a laser pointer can be repurposed as a cheap macro lens for your smartphone. After seeing this project online, photo enthusiast John Coleman decided to give it a shot. To keep the lens secure against your phone, you'll need something to hold it (e.g. a hair pin) and some tape to attach the holder to the phone. The photo above shows the super simple attachment Coleman created.

iPhone 5 Camera Sensor Pitted Against the Canon 5D Mark III

We live in strange and exciting times in which phone camera photos can be compared side-by-side with top-of-the-line DSLR photos without anyone laughing (too hard). Having just gotten his hands on a shiny new iPhone 5, photographer Dustin Curtis decided to test out its camera's quality by pitting it against his Canon 5D Mark III (with a 50mm lens fixed at f/2.8).

Facebook ‘Photo Syncing’ Uploads Your Smartphone Photos As They’re Shot

Facebook is testing out a new feature for its Android mobile app called "Photo Syncing". The feature automatically backs up your smartphone's photographs by uploading them to Facebook as they're shot, tucking them away inside a private "Synced from Phone" tab on your photos page that isn't visible to anyone but you. You can then later choose which photos you'd like to make private and which you'd simply like for Facebook to hold on to.

Nokia’s Lumia 920 Shows that PureView Isn’t About the Megapixels

After Nokia unleashed its 41-megapixel 808 PureView phone back in February, most people thought that it would set the bar for future phones branded with the PureView monkier. "PureView" came to mean, "a ridiculous number of megapixels in a phone camera." Turns out that's not the case.

The company unveiled its new Lumia 920 phone today, which also carries the PureView name. It features a much more modest 8-megapixel camera, showing that PureView isn't about the megapixels after all.

Find a $1 Macro Lens for Your Phone Inside a Cheap Laser Pointer

If you want to take Lensbaby-style selective focus macro shots using your phone, go buy a cheap laser pointer. Photographer Zaheer Mohiuddin writes that the lens inside laser pointers (the one that focuses the laser) works well as a macro lens for the tiny cameras found on smartphones. After taking the device apart and finding the small gem-like lens, simply attach it to your camera with some tape to start shooting close-up pictures.

BlackBerry 10 Camera Features “Timeline Lens” that Captures Moments You Miss

The new BlackBerry 10 operating system was unveiled BlackBerry World 2012 today, and one of the amazing new features that wowed the crowd was the camera app. It features a seemingly-magical "timeline" lens that lets you rewind sections of photographs in order to recover moments that your fingers weren't fast enough to capture. Did your subject blink in the photo? No worries... simply rewind their face and you're good to go! Basically, the camera is constantly capturing frames as soon as the app is loaded, so there's always a small buffer of previous moments stored for you to recover.

Skydiving Fashion Shoot at 126MPH

To promote its new One X phone (and the camera on it), HTC came up with the bizarre idea of doing a skydiving fashion shoot with photography student Nick Jojola and model (and professional skydiver) Roberta Mancino. During the photoshoot above the Arizona desert, Jojola plummeted to Earth at 126MPH while Mancino whizzed by at 181MPH, giving the photographer a tiny window of 0.8 seconds to squeeze off the shot.

Nokia Unleashes a Game-Changing 41-Megapixel “PureView” Camera Phone

Nokia dropped a bomb on the cameraphone market today by introducing its new 808 PureView phone -- a phone that is capable of capturing 41-megapixel photos. The native resolution of the phone (16:9) produces 38-megapixel images measuring 7152x5368. The phone also allows you to capture 5-megapixel images by condensing every seven pixels into one, which dramatically reduces noise and improves image quality. Other features include a 4-inch screen, 16GB of built-in storage, a Carl Zeiss f/2.4 lens, lossless digital zoom (i.e. cropping a photo out of the giant image), and HD video recording. It'll hit store shelves in May at a price of €450 (~$600).