research

Selfies... for better or worse, they've become a staple of the society we live in. But where exactly lies the epicenter of this movement so many of us love to hate (or just maybe hate to love)?

Led by Captain Robert Scott, a team of scientists and their journey photographer, Herbert Ponting, made a polar expedition to Antarctica in 1911. Currently, The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge (a sub-division of Cambridge) holds all of Ponting's resulting negatives from this journey, as well as a collection of photographic work from the other scientists along for the exploration.

There is still, however, a piece (or pieces, rather) of the collection missing. That piece includes 113 'lost' images taken by expedition leader Captain Scott, with a little bit of camera help from Ponting.

Living smack in the middle of the information age, we're well acquainted with the incredible amount of data and statistics gathered and thrown around on a daily basis. And with the advent of social networking, the amount of publicly available data about society has only increased.

These networks are a treasure trove of information for better understanding the underlying trends and habits of people. Trends that would otherwise go unseen. One research project in particular, called Phototrails, is trying to spot these trends by gathering insights from that photography-oriented social media site many of us love to hate: Instagram.

A super-fast, affordable new camera currently under development at MIT could improve everything from video game experiences to driving safety, researchers reported at a recent tech convention.

After experiencing one too many embarrassing, high-profile Photoshop disasters, China is turning its research focus on image-editing software, although not in the way you might think.

Mmmm -- monkey brains haven't looked this good since the banquet scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

That would be thanks to the StyleShoots fashion photography rig that researchers at the Netherlands-based Primate Brain Bank used to capture detailed, perfectly posed images of the grey matter of everything from gorillas to tiny lemurs.

Good news, camera weenies -- not only does photography make you attractive and rich, it helps your brain stay sharp as you age. That's the conclusion of a new University of Texas study that evaluated a number of different types of activities to see how they affected cognitive skills -- particularly memory -- in the elderly.

Believing the world cares what you had for lunch may still be a symptom of narcissism, but a recent study seems to indicate that it could at least be a useful form of narcissism.

The study, which was conducted by marketing researchers at Brigham Young University, found that the more time people spend looking at pictures of food, the less interested they become in actually eating that same foods. Results were published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

There are many reason high-quality lenses cost as much as they do (and in some cases that is quite a lot), and one of them is that high-end lenses use many specially-designed elements that are perfectly-positioned to counteract aberrations and distortions.

But what if you could correct for all of that in post? Automatically? With just the click of a button? You could theoretically use a crappy lens and generate high-end results. Well, that's what researchers at the University of British Columbia are working on, and so far their results are very promising.

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are fine-tuning some new tiny camera technology that could dramatically boost the detail and field of view of smartphone cameras. Joseph Ford, a professor in the university's Jacob School of Engineering, describes the system in a paper to be presented next week at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting.

According to Ford, his team will soon have the system -- seen above next to a Canon 5D Mark III setup -- refined to a camera assembly with 85-megapixel resolution, 120-degree field of view and f/2 aperture, all in a package about the size of a walnut.

Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.

You probably already know this if you have older siblings, but a new British study has confirmed it: the first child gets all the camera attention from Mom and Dad.

Researchers at Cornell University recently developed a new piece of software in conjunction with Adobe that could some day help amateurs and professionals alike exert more control over how exactly certain static scenes are lit.

In all art forms; music, writing, architecture, photography, whatever; originality and innovation are the things that produce the best works from the best artists. A lot of advice on how to improve your art focusses on technical and technological aspects; often with a cursory “develop your own style” thrown in somewhere. It’s a difficult thing to explain or teach: how do you develop your vision or style? And how do you know if you’ve found it?

Researchers at a California company specializing in high-speed imaging equipment have developed a camera add-on capable of freezing objects traveling at up to 7,500 miles per hour -- that's almost 10 times the speed of sound.

For a while now, researchers have been trying to remove two things from 3D photos and video: the glasses and the second lens. Some companies have made headway in the area -- think of Samsung's single-lens 3D technology and Panasonic's special single-lens 3D sensor -- but some new research out of Harvard offers a software-based alternative.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have come up with an inexpensive way to boost the resolution of common microscopes by a factor of 100, allowing medical clinics in developing countries to conduct complex tests with existing equipment.

3D modeling for movies and video games is often done using lasers. The modeler scans whatever it is they are trying to reconstruct using a laser and then ends up spending a good bit of time cleaning up the results in post. In contrast, a new method developed by the folks at Disney Zurich promises to generate much more accurate results by replacing the lasers with photos.

Here's yet another example of how technology used in space can help us earthlings in other ways. A partnership between scientists at Cardiff University and the UK Astronomy Technology Center has yielded a prototype device that can help detect Age-Related Macular Degeneration (otherwise known as AMD) -- a common form of sight loss -- using camera technology designed originally for use on space telescopes.

Can you trust camera reviews submitted by customers of online retailers? Not entirely, suggests a new academic study, and not for the reasons you might think.

Wildlife researchers now have a much clearer idea of how bats fly, thanks to the wicked-looking X-Ray video above that shows the animal's skeleton at work.

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.

You might remember the photo above from last year. For a while, it circulated the web like mad, claiming to show Hurricane Sandy bearing down menacingly on the Statue of Liberty. But if you've read our previous coverage on the photo, you'll know that it is, in fact, a fake -- a composite of a Statue of Liberty picture and a well-known photo by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.

Photo fakes like this wind up going viral online all the time, often helped along by Twitter where retweet upon retweet puts it in front of thousands of unsuspecting people. Having had enough, a group of researchers from the University of Maryland, IBM Research Labs and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology are trying to do something about it.

Why is it that some photographs go viral online while others are left by the digital wayside? Are there certain elements in photos that make them more "sharable" to Internet users?

Curalate, a company that creates social media analytics software, decided to tackle this question by analyzing the photographs published by brands to Pinterest.

There's no doubt about the fact that using the camera on your shiny smartphone is killing your battery life. But up until now, it seems like the only proposed solutions have been to work on the battery itself instead of looking at the camera.

Researchers at both Microsoft and Rice University think they've come up with a solution that will make your gadget's camera far more energy efficient by focusing on the camera's sensor and the power it uses.

Think subject tracking in camera is impressive? Future Canon digital cameras may have image stabilization systems that can track stars. At least, that's what a recently published Canon patent seems to suggest. The company may also be working on technology that can produce higher resolution photographs by shifting the camera sensor.

Back in 2010, Nokia created "the world's smallest stop-motion video" using its new N8 smartphone and a tiny 9mm-tall figure of a girl. If you think 9mm is tiny, try 1/25,000,000th of a inch!

Today, IBM scientists announced that they have created the world's smallest movie. Unlike the previous record holder, this one will be extremely difficult to beat. The stop-motion movie was made using individual atoms.

A team of researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh have developed a new laser camera system that can take extremely precise 3D depth scan images from up to a kilometer away (0.62 miles). An impressive advancement in laser imaging, the camera uses a low power infrared laser beam to create 3D images precise to the millimeter.

Recently published patent applications filed by Nikon offer a glimpse into what the company may be working on for future DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. The three technologies spotted are: illuminated lens mounts, dual lens contacts, and a hybrid viewfinder.

New cameras are like new computers. Both of them depreciate quite quickly as new technologies and new models are churned out year after year. This presents a perpetual problem for photographers, as many constantly grapple with the question of whether to upgrade their camera to a more recent model, or whether to purchase a higher-end model so that it keeps its value longer.

Market research software company Terapeak recently did a study that looks at depreciation in Canon EOS DSLRs. The results are pretty interesting.