An interesting new video-based interface technology developed in Hong Kong promises to make stop-motion animation more accessible to beginners, while making it that much easier for the pros as well.
It doesn't have an official name, but when used in combination with traditional techniques, the new interface could help take your stop-motion animation to the next level.
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.
Panasonic is claiming a major breakthrough in the world of camera sensors, saying that it has doubled the color sensitivity with a new technology called 'Micro Color Splitters.'
Scientists at the University of Utah are using what's called the Multi Angle Snowflake Camera (MASC) to shoot stereoscopic photographs of snowflakes as they fall to Earth.
Reikan Technology, the company behind the FoCal automatic lens calibration tool, tells us that it has released a new web-based tool for researching the performance of camera and lens combinations.
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.
When consumer electronic products have photographs leaked to the world prior to their official announcements, they're often blurry shots that appear to have been taken with a quick snap of a smartphone camera by some not-so-loyal employee or factory worker. Blackberry maker RIM wants to help companies who value privacy plug up these leaks, and has created a smartphone feature that is meant to make snapping stealthy shots a much more difficult thing to do.
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.
Lytro is currently the only camera on the market that lets you refocus photographs after they're shot, thanks to its fancy schmancy (and proprietary) light field technology, but it won't be the only one for long. Toshiba is reportedly developing its own Lytro-style camera that will target a different segment of the photography market: smartphone and tablet photographers.
Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium are embarking on an interesting mission, and they need the help of willing photographers. What they're attempting to do is create a database of photos based on how they make the viewer feel. The project and website, dubbed Pictures With Feelings, can then be used to further our knowledge about human emotion and how specific moods come about. Where you folks come is in providing the most emotionally stimulating images buried in your archives.
Whoa... Big news on the camera patent scouting front today: Nikon appears to be tinkering with the idea with creating a special 35mm SLR replacement back that would turn a film camera into a digital camera!
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.
We've all used a little bit of Photoshop magic to take care of a blemish or two when taking portraits, but Sony's newly announced Smart Skin Evaluation Program (SSKEP) is taking on blemishes in a whole new way. The sensor technology, which was announced just a few days ago, can actually go beyond skin-deep and take a peek at blemishes that haven't even surfaced yet.
Auroras are quite popular as a photo subject these days, especially for time-lapse photography, but a team of researchers in Norway recently snapped pictures of one in a way that hasn't been done before: with a hyperspectral camera. The special device can simultaneously capture multiple spectral bands of light. The composite photograph above was created by combining three such bands of light, with each one assigned a different RGB color.
An interesting photographic first has been announced by a scientist at the University of Genoa in Italy. Enzo di Fabrizio revealed the world's very first true photograph that shows the double helix structure of DNA, shown above.
If you have two similar photos of two different people, Photoshopping one face onto the other isn't very difficult. Change that to two video clips of two people talking, and you have a much more challenging task on your hands. That's the problem Harvard University computational photography graduate student Kevin Dale decided to tackle. His research project, titled "Video Face Replacement," introduces a way of doing this "digital face transplant" in a relatively automated way. The demonstration video above shows how effective his technique is at doing the 'shop seamlessly.
For his project titled "Momentum", London/Madrid-based photographer Alejandro Guijarro spent three years visiting a number of the leading quantum mechanic research institutions of the world and photographed the chalkboards there exactly as he found them. The resulting photographs look like intelligent graffiti drawn by some of the brightest minds in science.
Remember those weird floating "precog" psychics in the movie Minority Report? They could foresee crimes before they even happened, allowing law enforcement to prevent them from ever becoming a reality. While that kind of sci-fi foreknowledge will almost certainly never exist, scientists are working on an eerily similar system that uses cameras and artificial intelligence -- a system that they hope will be able to "see" crimes before they even occur.
Is "camera toss" photography ready to go from fad to feature? Apparently Nikon thinks so. A recently published patent (No. 2012-189859) shows that the company has been thinking about building specific features into its compact and mirrorless cameras that would assist in using the technique.
What if there were a disposable digital camera that you could eat after using? Sounds bizarre, but it already exists. Scientists in the US are working on uber-thin electronics that can be dissolved inside the human body once their job is done. Among the many possible uses being explored is photography.
With the advent of Internet-connectivity and apps in cameraphones and digital cameras, images can now be shared with others in ways never before seen in the history of photography. Unfortunately, not all of the ways are positive. Some are downright creepy.
Take PlaceRaider, for example. It's a malicious Android app that hijacks your smartphone's camera, secretly takes photos of your life, and uses those images to reconstruct 3D virtual spaces of private locations.
Japanese camera blog Egami found an interesting just-published patent by Epson that was first filed last year. The goal of the technology appears to be to make older vintage lenses more useable on newer cameras. Basically, it seems that the company wants to add a small camera/mirror/lens component to the front of camera that's designed to track the settings on old manual lenses. The photos in the patent show what appears to be Epson R-D1 cameras enhanced with special arms that are dedicated to spying on the lens' settings.
When tourists visit famous landmarks, they commonly pull out their own cameras to snap some photographs as mementos, even if they themselves aren't in the picture. Despite the fact that there's almost always guaranteed to be an identical photograph taken by someone else, somewhere online, there's something about capturing the moment for oneself that makes redundant photos special.
That's why a new patent filed by Google is a bit puzzling. It's called "Image zooming using pre-existing imaging information" and, as the title suggests, revolves around using other people's photographs to "boost" a digital camera's zoom.
Over the past decade, many airports around the world have adopted special thermal cameras that can determine whether or not a passenger has a fever. The goal of these cameras is to prevent infectious diseases from spreading and causing an epidemic (or pandemic). Greek scientists Georgia Koukiou and Vassilis Anastassopoulos recently came up with a similar concept, except their thermal camera is used to detect drunk people instead of contagious people.
If you think male and female photographers sometimes have very different styles, the reason might go beyond their tastes and approaches to shooting. Men and women see the world differently -- literally. A new study by vision researchers have found that the two genders have different ways of collecting visual information.
According to the findings, men are more sensitive to moving objects and seeing small details, while women tend to be sharper in seeing color changes.
As people snap more and more digital photos, being able to organize those photos into useful sets is becoming …
Photos and details of Nokia's upcoming Lumia 920 smartphone leaked earlier this week, revealing that the new flagship Windows phone will feature a 8-megapixel sensor, a 4.5-inch display, 32GB of storage, and wireless charging via a special pad.
Although the camera specs seem rather pedestrian compared to the 41MP 808 PureView, patents published last month reveal that the company is working on some special sensor tech for future devices. More specifically, Nokia is working on developing camera sensors that use layers of graphene -- one-atom-thick layers of carbon -- for big performance advantages over existing sensors.