It might not be the most useful website ever designed, but Flickr's new Park or Bird microsite serves a purpose: namely, it's the Flickr Vision team's response to a challenge by the popular webcomic XKCD.
Sony today announced the new IMX224MQV 1/3-inch 1.27MP CMOS sensor, which is said to have the world’s highest level of sensitivity for any sensor in its class. But before you get excited about that night vision point-and-shoot you've been wanting, you should know something: it was designed specifically for use in automobile cameras.
At the Adobe MAX 2014 conference this past week, Adobe showed off some of the crazy technology current brewing in the company's labs. Two of them offer a glimpse at what may soon be available to photographers in Photoshop: changing the time of day (i.e. lighting) in photographs with a simple slider and removing haze from a scene automatically.
Ever wonder how the tech packed inside of your new Nikon lens actually works? How does Vibration Reduction provide 4.5 stops of stabilization? And what about the silent motors, how do those work?
In a video released earlier today, Nikon Asia decided to peel away the outer shell of its glass and show you, revealing the technology that makes a Nikkor Lens a Nikkor.
The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.
It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened.
What's the use of an image sensor that's 12 times more color sensitive than the human eye? We're not entirely sure, but thanks to a team of researchers at Universities of Granada, Spain and Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy you may someday get to try it out and find out for yourself.
Researchers at those two universities are using "Transverse Field Detector" technology to distinguish 36 individual color channels without any need for a filter, making it 12-times more color sensitive than standard Red/Green/Blue sensors and the human eye both.
Smartphone cameras have improved exponentially since their introduction to the world, but one company still believes there's plenty of room for improvement. That company is DynaOptics and their latest tech is promising to pack optical zoom into more smartphones without adding any bulk to the phones at all.
At Photokina 2014, Sony is a showing off its new autofocus technology called "4D Focus." It's an AF system that blankets the scene with a wide coverage area and can rapidly focus on subjects while predicting their movements over time.
There are a lot of great, fun, and interesting things people can do with an iPhone and that FLIR 'predator vision' infrared camera case we told you about at the beginning of this year. But, as it turns out, there is also a very bad thing people can do.
Using just an iPhone and the Thermal camera case, people can actually steal your PIN codes, be that for an ATM or that keypad on your car or garage door.
Instagram only just released Hyperlapse earlier this week, and already it’s amassed a cult-like following thanks to its dead-simple interface and amazing results.
But, as simple as the interface may be and as impressive as the results are, what happens between when the app is opened and the final hyperlapse actually involves a lot of incredibly technology at work.
In an interesting development in the world of batteries, researchers have discovered and demonstrated a way to make extremely efficient carbon electrodes by heating up the fibers of hemp in a two-step method.
The resulting carbon electrodes hold as much energy as the super-material graphene, are more durable in extreme temperatures, and come at a much lower cost -- pretty much the ideal material to make batteries out of.
A month ago, the US Government lifted restrictions on high-detail satellite images. Previously, these restrictions prohibited the capture of anything under 1.64 feet in size; now that they're gone, a number of companies are anxious to launch their latest and greatest satellites and bring high res satellite imagery to the public for the very first time.
And the first to finish line is Lockheed Martin, whose DigitalGlobe‘s high-res WorldView-3 satellite is set to take off in August.
Earlier this week it came out that Google turned over a man whose emails had contained an unstated amount of child pornography. And while the world as a whole seemed glad to have the perpetrator caught, there was some concern as to how whether Google dug through his emails to find these images, effectively killing the privacy of email.
However, it’s through a dedicated software that uses unique hashtags of sorts that drew Google to outing this individual. It's called PhotoDNA and is developed by none other than Microsoft.
Here's something that will blow your mind: scientists have figured out how to extract audio from images captured with a camera. By looking at the extremely small vibrations captured by a high speed camera, researchers have been able to recreate music and speech from nothing but visual information.
With each passing week it seems as though a new piece of information is coming out about Sony’s latest curved sensor technology. First it was the rumor, then the specs for a 2/3” sensor, then the first image captured with said sensor. Finally, the leaks and patterns are starting to align to form the constellation that will likely be the advent of Sony’s curved sensor tech in consumer products.
The world of photography is filled with true artists, astounding technology, and experts who can help you become the photographer you want to be. There are photographers who just make you shake your head at the brilliance of their imagery, teachers who give back endlessly to the profession they love, and manufacturers who create tools that help us all produce the pictures we want to make.
A group of researchers from MIT want your next lighting rig to be autonomous and airborne. Set to be on display this August at the Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging, they've actually developed a drone that automatically and dynamically lights a subject (living or otherwise) for a photographer while he or she focuses on getting the shot.
“we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause [...]” – David Foster Wallace
Over the past few years, iPhoneography has created a new form of photography that has and will continue to re-structure how we interface with technology, gather and generate data, and how we create narratives. iPhone (and similar smartphone) users employ mobile photography to disseminate mass amounts of information, to subvert cultural institutions, and for political rallying. These behaviors parallel the same strategies of the radical Avant-Garde art movements of the 20th century.
In the third and final article in this series I will expose the hidden contradiction that exist between mobile photography and the Avant-Garde described in Wallace’s quote through the use of Collage.
Remember the advent of multi-blade shaving razors? Single blades gave way to two blades and then three, four and five. There are even a six+ blade razors out there in case you want a REALLY close shave. Well, a fresh Canon sensor patent has us wondering if the same thing isn't happening to digital sensors.
Canon has patented a Foveon-like sensor before -- a type of sensor, initially implemented by Sigma, that uses individual layers for detecting red, green and blue -- but the company's newest multi-layer sensor patent shows not three, but five layers.
I will start off by saying I am partial to SanDisk memory cards, but I recently found a great write up on their website that is pretty much universal, explaining the difference between SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards. I wanted to share this information with everyone because sometimes it can be confusing trying to figure out which SD Card is best for you.
As smartphones have gotten smaller and smaller, the need for the cameras inside of them to shrink has become more pressing. One area where there's a lot of room for improvement is in the traditional mechanical aperture.
As we begin to hit the physical limit of the overlapping blades, researchers at the University of Kaiserslautern have designed an exciting new ‘micro iris’ that uses small chemical rings rather than a physical blades, dramatically shrinking the size of the aperture components in the camera.
According to a newly-published patent from Apple, the tech giant is looking to flex its muscles in the world of smartphone camera technology... quite literally.
Lytro came into the photography world not only to create a novelty product, but to fundamentally change how we approach image capture. Because despite light field photography being around for over a century, it’s only with the latest technology that the company is able to exploit what it is a camera is truly capable of doing.
We recently spoke with Lytro about its upcoming Illum camera a bit, diving into the technology behind the specs and revealing how Lytro's approach is allowing the company to not only step, but leap into the future.
A slew of new technologies are making it possible (even easy) to document everything around you without much effort or input. Wearable, automated cameras represent the most extreme end of this spectrum - devices like Autographer and the Narrative Clip record your daily life with a mind of their own.
If there's one aspect of technology that seems to ignore Moore's law at least a little, it's batteries. Granted, the recent switch to Lithium-Ion improved some aspects, but batteries are still far from where we would like them to be. Hopefully here to help solve that problem is an Israeli start-up called StoreDot.
The intersection of Science, Technology and Art, at least according to renowned filmmaker and time-lapse photographer Louie Schwartzberg, is curiosity and wonder. And in the TED talk above, he makes the case for how few things pique that curiosity and inspire that wonder like the "hidden miracles of the natural world" that time-lapse, slow motion and microscopic imagery reveal.
“The avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those in 1917. We are experiencing the end of …
Ready for your close-up? Well, I hope so, because this little guy is going to get a closer look at you than any other sensor before it. Created by scientist F. Levent Degertekin, this 1.5mm donut-shaped camera is small enough to make itself comfortable inside your arteries with some help from a catheter.
Earlier this week, Egami came across an Olympus patent that (as far as we can tell) is truly one-of-a-kind, utilizing a unique feature that would allow you to get the best exposure possible in any scenario.
There's no rule against having a little fun while proving a technological point, even if you're Microsoft.
So when the software giant's research arm wanted to flex some image-editing muscle by creating a 20-gigapixel panorama of Seattle, they decided to bring local artists into the picture (literally) and encourage them to do creative stuff while the camera was clicking away.
One of the things you kind of take for granted with a digital camera sensor is that every pixel is the same size, but Fujifilm may turn that idea on its head with a new RGBW sensor design that uses bigger pixels for white and green frequencies.
I'm a big fan of the UK car show TopGear, but I never thought I'd see the day when the worlds of TopGear and photography would intersect. Fortunately, I have been proven wrong. So sit back and enjoy as TopGear's Captain Slow James May goes into detail about how digital cameras actually work.
Unfortunately, what with major changes at the helm and making sure that we hit 2014 running, we weren't able to make it to Vegas for CES this year. And I say unfortunately because, not only does it mean we'll have to wait a minute to get hands on with some of the new releases, but it also meant missing cool demonstrations like the ones you see above.
About 88,000 people in the U.S. are missing all or part of an arm, and among the things that are difficult or impossible for them to do is use an full-size camera. Smaller point-and-shoots and phones allow simultaneous holding and operation, but anything bigger is out of the question without a tripod.
Throwable camera balls and their ilk might be all shiny and cool, but what if you want to grab high-quality 360-degree images with the camera you already have in your bag?
Enter Eye Mirror, a startup launched by U.K. inventors Dan Burton and Thomas Seidl, whose namesake product attaches to just about any camera and allows it to shoot 360-degree panoramas and videos.
Rest easy, future astronauts. If occasional filmmaker and full-time tinkerer Mark Rober and his pals are any indication, NASA engineers can MacGyver their way into or out of any situation.
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.
Students at a British university may have hit upon the basis for the next generation of image sensors -- a living module based on bio-engineered, light-sensitive bacteria.
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.