Following the Google+ updates last week at Google I/O that overall improved the photo experience for its users, Mountain View-based Google is now making that very updated experience for users of its Google+ Android application.
Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.
The iPhone has evolved in leaps and bounds since the smartphone first burst onto the scene in 2007, and one of the most impressive ways it has evolved is in its capability to take pictures. In the original iPhone, a camera was something of an afterthought; the current model has entire commercials dedicated to the camera.
Waterproofing is one specialization that compact cameras have had that smartphones (and their cameras) haven't, but that's about to change. Sony has launched a new phone called the Xperia ZR that will help smartphones further erode the point-and-shoot market by opening the door to underwater smartphone photography.
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.
We’ve been managing our photos together for almost a decade now. Things were nice and simple at the start and we both knew what to expect from each other--I pulled my photos off my camera on the computer, imported them into iPhoto and arranged them. Life was good.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 hasn't even made it into the hands of everyone who wants it, and yet there's already a rumor going around that the company is working on a different version geared more towards smartphone photographers with an eye for quality.
While it is true that photo apps are in high demand and, therefore, a dime a dozen, we were still surprised to find out that rapper Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dogg) decided to branch into the market himself. In partnership with Upper Playground, 99centbrains and Cashmere Agency, the rapper has officially broken into the smartphone photography game with his new app Snoopify.
For 20 years, 52-year-old photojournalist Mark Hirsch drove by the lonely old Bur Oak two miles from his home in southwest Wisconsin without thinking to take its picture even once. Then, one evening, he took a particularly beautiful photo of the tree at sunset using his newly purchased iPhone.
Late last year, Google one-upped Apple's iOS 6 Panorama feature by bringing a special street view-style panorama app called "Photo Sphere" to Android 4.2. With the app, users can create 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed as both flat images and explorable street-view "spheres." …
CyanogenMod is sort of like Magic Lantern for Android phones. It's an open source, replacement firmware option for people who want to get more out of certain Android devices. And the most recent update targets the photographic community -- in a hands-free sort of way.
Lytro is seeing more and more competition these days, as more and more companies are jumping into the "snap now, focus later" game. There are now apps that mimic the technology, and companies like Toshiba are working on building Lytro-style smartphone camera modules.
If you're interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.
Here's a new iPhone commercial Apple just released today on its website and on YouTube. It's a 1-minute-long spot that focuses on how the iPhone has shaken up the world of casual photography by becoming the world's most popular camera.
Earlier today, brothers-in-law Daniel Fujikake and Mac Nguyen of HI Resolution Enterprises announced a new product for the photography enthusiast community that they're trying to get some help funding. Launched via Kickstarter campaign, the Snapzoom is a universal adapter that can attach a slew of optical scopes (i.e. binoculars, telescopes, etc.) to your smartphone in lieu of a telephoto lens.
Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it's a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.
FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.
Lytro introduced refocus-able photos to the public when it unveiled the world's first consumer light field camera back in October 2011. Since then, a number of people and companies have been brainstorming refocus-able photo technology of their own.
As a photographer, it would be nice if you could always have your portfolio in your pocket so that you can show prospective customers your work right away. And even though there are portfolio websites that will allow you to display your work on your phone, you're not always around a solid data connection; and keeping your work on your phone isn't a good idea either, since high-res photos fill up a 16GB iPhone hard drive before you know it.
Over 100 million people around the world snap photos with Instagram on their phones now. If you like the look of Instagram filters but would rather not broadcast the photographs to the world every time you snap a picture, there's actually a (semi-old) trick you can use to save the pics without sharing them (for iPhone users, at least): all you have to do is turn on "Airplane Mode."
Apple's next iPhone release may come with enticing upgrades to the phone's camera, including a 12-megapixel sensor, improved low-light capabilities, and HDR photography.
The Android operating system has been expanding beyond the world of smartphones and into the realm of "smartcameras" as of late, but did you know that by doing so it has simply gone full circle? That's right: Android was originally intended for digital cameras rather than for phones.
Hey Canon: get ready to have your toes stepped on. Nokia is reportedly prepping two new flagship smartphones for launch, and the two devices are rumored to have 'EOS' branding and a huge focus on high-quality photography.
Samsung only has a couple of weeks before the rumored "sometime between January and April 2013" timeframe for an NX2000 "smart" ILC release runs out, and just on schedule, a FCC filing with a top and front schematic of the camera has come to light.
Samsung is a pioneering the smartcamera market with its Android-powered Galaxy Camera, and the company may soon be introducing the "smart" concept to its mirrorless cameras.
In November of 2010, The New York Times made headlines of their own when they chose four Hipstamatic photos to grace their front page. And now, Instagram is getting in on the action as well. For Sunday's paper, the NYT decided to use a photo of Alex Rodriguez taken by photographer Nick Laham in a locker room bathroom using an iPhone and edited in Instagram.
Most smartphone photography apps are all about three things: taking, editing and sharing. ThrowBack, however, isn't about any of them. Instead of focusing on taking your photos and enjoying them now, the ThrowBack app wants you to "forget your memories so they can be remembered again."
If you want a taste of how fast technology progresses in the world of digital photography, just look at the consumer camera industry through the lens of a company that continues to make a big splash: Apple.
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 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.
In this post, I will share some of my techniques and experiences of backing up photos using a tablet while traveling.
About a year ago, we shared an app called 645 Pro that saves photos shot with the iPhone (and other iOS devices) as TIFF files. Now there's a new app that's even more "raw". Digital Negative, a new app by a company called Cypress Innovations, claims to be the first app that captures uncompressed images that retain 100% of the information captured by the camera sensor.
Printic is a new service that mixes two popular cultural movements. The first is that nostalgic pull back towards the days when we actually got to hold our pictures in hand; the second, the square crop, retro, lo-fi movement.
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.
French photographer Philippe Echaroux is known, among other things, as a great portrait photographer. You might remember his work taking studio quality "celebrity" portraits of random strangers on the street.
According to a recent tip received by Phone Arena, Nikon may be getting more serious about the smartphone game. The tip references Google's upcoming Nexus 5 which, according to the site's source, will feature a Nikon branded "triple camera sensor" as its key selling point.
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.
Facebook is preparing to launch a new smartphone through HTC, and Instagram will be one of the beneficiaries of the partnership. Unwired View has published a leaked list of specs for the "HTC Myst", as it will reportedly be called, which reveals that the photo sharing app will come preinstalled on the phone.
Dustin McLean of DustFilms creates extremely low-budget remakes of Hollywood trailers and movie scenes using items and equipment that you may already have lying around at home. The above is a shot-for-shot remake of the Iron Man 3 trailer that was created at home without any computer-generated visual effects added in. McLean simply used good ol' fashioned creativity to remake shots that cost Hollywood millions of dollars to create.
As more and more consumers use their smartphones as their primary camera, camera gear manufacturers have been brainstorming new products designed to mount phones to camera tripods. Universal mounts to this point have largely been focused on ways of gripping the phone securely. The JackPod is a new stupidly simple answer to how to get phones mounted to tripods: it uses the standard headphone jack found on pretty much every smartphone on the market.
"How's the image quality on the TriPod 5?" That's a question you would perhaps be hearing these days if certain decisions had been made differently years ago over in Apple HQ. When the Cupertino-based company was brainstorming names for the smartphone that would eventually be called the "iPhone," one of the names that was being considered was "TriPod."
No official version of Instagram exists for BlackBerry 10; so while users might be able to adjust their photos to get the perfect shot, they haven't been able to share those shots with the 100M+ member Instagram community.
We've shown you the snowflake photos you can achieve using a DSLR and a macro lens and also a point-and-shoot and a macro rig. Now, here's what you can achieve using a smartphone.
When Malik Bendjelloul -- director of the Academy Award-winning documentary 'Searching for Sugar Man' -- ran out of money just a few necessary shots away from completing his film, he wasn't sure what he was going to do. He had decided to shoot the film on a Super 8 film camera, but the cost of film had taken a larger toll on his budget than he had expected.
In February 2012, Adobe launched a photo editing app for Android and iOS tablets called Photoshop Touch. The software price priced at $10, and offers many of Photoshop's core features in a touch-based interface.
Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered into a patent licensing agreement with Nikon for Nikon's Android-powered digital cameras. While the details of the agreement were not revealed, Microsoft did say that it will begin collecting royalties from Nikon for certain camera models.
Back in March 2011, we featured an iPhone app that lets you use your iPhone as a makeshift light meter. The app apparently works pretty well, but if you've been looking for a fancier solution involving your iPhone, one has finally arrived.
Sony's latest addition to their Xperia line of smartphones isn't known for its camera as is, for example, the new HTC One. But even though it doesn't feature "Ultrapixels" or 41 or the regular type like the PureView, it can capture 999 photos in just 68 seconds.
The "ultrapixels" that were rumored earlier this month have arrived. HTC announced its new flagship smartphone today. Called the HTC One, it features new camera tech that aims to shake up the world of smartphone photo snapping.
HTC has been teasing the release of the rumored HTC One smartphone for the past few weeks by tweeting out cryptic photos that supposedly hint at features that will be officially announced at their press event on February 19th.
