If you've been wishing and hoping for Lytro-like 'take now, focus later" technology to appear in smartphones, it looks like a couple of different companies are planning on making that wish come true. Not only did Toshiba announce its own refocusing module just a couple of weeks ago, it seems OPPO will be putting similar tech into their future camera phones too.
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.
Media outlets may need to start considering the possible psychological effects of difficult assignments on their photojournalists in the wake of an Australian photographer's claim of crippling post-traumatic stress.
We've heard a lot about the one-of-a-kind Jonathan Ive-designed Leica M as rumors turned to official word that the camera would be auctioned off at a (RED) auction in November, but until now, we had no clue what the thing actually looked like.
Those who loved the D600 (and why wouldn't you, it's a great camera) will have no reason to dislike the D610, but Nikon might not have given you enough reason to upgrade either. The new shooter, which was unveiled at midnight last night, is a marginal improvement on the D600 that adds just a few new or improved features.
The K-3 webpage leaked yesterday (and along with it much of the information we now have) but now we're done with leaks and rumors: Ricoh Imaging's Pentax K-3 is official. A beastly APS-C shooter with a stacked spec sheet, the camera is sure to please serious photographers.
An educational project in India is encouraging Muslim women to take up photography, in defiance of a controversial fatwa issued earlier this year that said the practice was "unIslamic."
Woman's advocacy group Aawaaz-e-Niswaan -- which is based in the Mumbai suburb of Kurla -- has trained more than a dozen women in photography skills, going against of regional customs and, now, this particular fatwa.
Samsung seems to be hard at work making sure that smartphone camera quality continues to improve in leaps and bounds. In addition to debuting ISOCELL technology a couple of weeks ago, the company has now announced a new smartphone camera module that will offer twice the optical image stabilization of anything on the market, while also capturing better photos in low light.
ZEISS announced that it was working on a new line of ultra-high-quality lenses last year. These lenses were being designed from the ground up to provide unmatched optical performance for high-resolution full-frame cameras like Nikon's D800.
Well, the first fruits of all that labor have finally arrived on digital shelves in the form of the Distagon 55mm f/1.4 Otus: a lens ZEISS promises will perform better for you than anything else on the market... assuming you can afford it.
We've said it before and we'll say it again, October is looking to be a big month for camera announcements. And of course, along with announcements come leaks. Case in point: the upcoming Pentax K-3 isn't supposed to be announced for another 24 hours or so, but someone at Ricoh accidentally let the webpage go live briefly.
A couple of days ago we ran across this strange article online. Very short on details, what we know is that a man was seen taking photos of children in a suburb of Toronto a few days ago, and is now being sought after by police.
Young people love to take selfies and don't really care about printing photos and putting them in albums. That might not be the biggest shocker of the year, but a new British survey at least puts some numbers to this amateur photography trend that's leaving us with a lot fewer prints and a lot more digital clutter.
Memoto, the company behind the wearable camera that automatically documents the user's life by taking a photo every 30 seconds, has a new name, $3 million in fresh capital, and plans to start shipping product next month.
We knew that it was only a matter of time before Instagram bit the bullet and started adding advertisements to the app, and now the news is official. The Facebook-owned company itself has confirmed that ads will indeed be showing up in US users' feeds "in the next couple of months."
Adobe users who have purchased a product or signed up for Creative Cloud recently beware. According to Adobe's website, the company's servers were hacked "very recently," and the attackers made away with customer information from 2.9 million Adobe accounts, as well as source code for a few Adobe products.
Having already racked up more than 3 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is ready to spread some photographic love soon with a full-on Instagram presence, according to Vatican sources.
Mystery semi-solved. Singer and recently-infamous celebrity Miley Cyrus' baffling sale of a used Nikon N80 SLR on eBay last week might have been part of her plan to consolidate into a digital, Canon-based workflow.
At least we can surmise as much from a recent Rolling Stone interview in which the former teen queen revealed that she considered going to photography school as part of a career reboot after her smash run on Disney's "Hannah Montana" show ended in 2011.
Medium-format, questionable build and instant prints? Lomography has hit yet another trifecta with the new Diana F+ Instant Film, a low-fi shooter that adds instant printing capability to one of the company's most popular models.
Since it first burst onto the scene, Snapchat has become a major player in the social fabric of today. Once, the self-destructing photo messaging model was considered a fad, but no more. As Snapchat surges towards the possibility of a billion dollar valuation and usage statistics continue to climb, that "fad" is clearly more than just that.
But that doesn't mean the Snapchat team has been sitting in the office twiddling their thumbs, they've been hard at work creating an exciting update that was finally announced today called Stories.
In light of the heated debate over post-processing sparked by the winner of World Press Photo of the Year 2012 award, the Amsterdam-based organization has chosen to implement some rule changes before it asks for this year's entries in a couple of months time.
Now that we're a few days into October, it's time to start getting ready for some serious camera announcement mania. And, if your comments are to be trusted, the camera that will make the biggest splash will be Sony's NEX full-frame (or rather full-frames). So here's a rumor roundup that brings together everything we know so far.
Just a couple of weeks before his award-winning work is supposed to appear in a major Netherlands-Russia bilateral year exhibition, Dutch photojournalist Rob Hornstra has had his application for a Russian visa denied.
Hornstra, whose "Sochi Project" with writer/filmmaker Arnold Van Bruggen paints the host country of the 2014 Winter Olympics in a less-than-favorable light, believes that this move is a result of that project.
With all of these upcoming digital camera announcements rumored for October, nobody was paying particular attention to GoPro until today, when the company unveiled the followup to its popular Hero3, the Hero3+ -- a smaller, lighter and more capable new offering for adventure junkies everywhere.
Normally, we wouldn't give much attention to the thoughts of an editor/publisher for a small community newspaper. But the response to photographer Kristen Pierson's notice of copyright infringement and invoice for payment is such a classic compendium of bad thinking on intellectual property that it would be a disservice not to share it ... just so you know what you're up against.
As a veteran wedding photographer, Sarah Roshan knows how tough it is to make everything come together and how devastating it can be when plans fall apart at the last minute -- even if the culprit is something as seemingly intractable as the worst flooding your state has experienced in recent history.
Prestigious agency Magnum Photos says it is about to roll out a paid membership system in hopes of turning illegal downloaders into paying customers. The move comes a little more than a year after the agency did away with watermarks on its main site, reasoning that they did little to discourage determined downloaders.
The big camera companies get criticized fairly often for failing to innovate, but Nikon at least has been giving us a lot to write about recently in the patent department. Case in point: the Japanese company has just filed a patent for a camera that will allow you to swap out, not lenses, but sensors.
With Google+ constantly working on making things better for photographers -- most recently by incorporating better RAW-to-JPEG conversion -- the other social networks are trying to do their part to entice the photo community as well. For Twitter, that means revamping embedded tweets so that photos are more prominent.
I suppose we all owe a small cultural debt to this anonymous older lady at a recent Colorado Rockies game. Thanks to her, we now know what the exact opposite of a photobomb looks like.
That would be having a cranky grandma type show up in the money shot of your carefully arranged proposal, flipping the bird at the camera to show exactly how she felt about the interruption.
It's been 10 months since Toshiba was said to have been developing a tiny camera module that would bring Lytro-style refocusing to smartphones and tablets, but the company only just announced something official.
Some would say that the Olympus accounting scandal is officially over, insofar as jail sentences (or, rather, the lack thereof) have been doled out by the Japanese justice system. Even the company's stock has rebounded and is currently sitting about 25% higher than it was before the dive it took when the company's seedy business dealings came to light.
But stocks rebounding and executives getting off almost scott free aside, Olympus' battle against the backlash from the scandal is far from over, as both Japanese and overseas entities continue to pursue legal action.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
British photographer Jason Sheldon has won a settlement of £20,000 (about $32,300 US) over a stolen image of his (seen above), after initially being offered less than one percent of that.
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.
Each year, the WestLicht Photographica auction house puts some incredible historic cameras on the block and lets us mere mortals "oh" and "ah" at them before some collector with deep pockets plunks down hundreds of thousands of dollars to take them home (where they will, of course, be used daily right?...).
Wedding photography can be a rough business. And although the photographers have plenty to worry about (i.e. irate ministers and getting your gear stolen), clients would do well to be careful too, lest they get duped by con artists like New Jersey's Michael De Rubeis.
Few people without PhDs ever set foot inside CERN's (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) lab in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. And although we have had the opportunity to share some stunning pics of the world's largest particle accelerator before, Google is one-upping us (go figure) by letting you take a virtual stroll with Street View.
We hate to contribute in any small way to the Miley Cyrus hoopla/shenanigans/ruckus (pick your poison) but when an old 35mm SLR that would normally go for about $60 starts bidding at almost $100,000 we can't help but take notice.
The camera in question is an old 35mm Nikon N80 SLR, and as you might have already guessed, the reason it's going for so ridiculously much is that ... well ... Miley is selling it.
Too many of our recent posts regarding photography competitions have been about fraud or controversy, so here's to an international photography competition with some honest to goodness winners that will absolutely blow your mind.
The competition in question is the Astronomy Photographer of Year 2013 contest, and we have seven outstanding winners from different categories to share with you.
It's hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.
But get ready, because Google isn't done yet. Another update has been pushed Google+'s way, and this time it concerns your RAW photos. Or, more specifically, how good they look when they're automatically converted to JPEGs for viewing.
Now that Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy woes are over and the company has switched its focus primarily to commercial printing, its name probably won't show up here as often as it once did. But that doesn't mean that the Kodak photographic legacy is dead.
One of the steps Eastman Kodak took to get out of bankruptcy was to sell its personalized and document imaging businesses to the UK Kodak Pension Plan (KPP), and that has birthed a company that plans to keep that legacy alive: Kodak Alaris.
There are many reasons why "photographer" and "photojournalist" ranked so low on last year's "best and worst jobs" list, but according to a paper released by The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at Oxford University, the threat of computerization isn't one of them.
Back in July, Chinese electronics company OPPO confirmed that it was working on an "N-Lens" line of camera-centric devices that would be the "most important flagship series for OPPO going forward."
Well, the first of these devices has officially arrived, and although it is still more of a smartphone with a camera than a camera that can make calls, the phone packs some interesting features, including (according to OPPO) the world's first rotating smartphone camera.
Boy, is Kanye West going to feel like a wuss when he hears about this. Turns out that if you're really serious about putting paparazzi in their place, nothing short of homicide will do anymore.
At least that seems to be the way it works in Costa Rica, where three former bodyguards for supermodel Gisele Bundchen are on trial for attempted murder after they opened fire on a couple of uncooperative photographers.
Although the pixel war probably isn't ending anytime soon, a new sensor technology from Samsung shows how yet another company is focusing on improving the tech instead of stacking the spec sheet.
We've seen amazing low-light sensors and dual-pixel AF tech from Canon, organic sensors with insane dynamic range from Fuji and Panasonic, and now new ISOCELL technology from Samsung, which promises substantial increases in color and light sensitivity.
It's one thing to swipe a photo and slap it on your website, and quite another to enter that stolen image into a high-profile photo contest passed off as your own work.
That is exactly what Mark Joseph Solis, a graduate student at the University of the Philippines, is discovering as he becomes a subject of international ridicule for winning several thousand dollars worth of prizes with a purloined portrait.
Be careful when photographing sculptures for commercial purposes -- you could quickly find yourself on the losing end of a copyright infringement case and being forced to pay a lot of money.
This happened back in 2011, when photographer Mike Hipple was forced to pay up after shooting stock photos of a public art installation in Seattle. Now it has happened again: a court has ordered the United States Postal Service to pay a whopping $684,844 to sculptor Frank Gaylord for using a photograph of the Korean War Veterans Memorial on a stamp.
Love photo sharing but wish you could tell more of the story behind each photo as you share it? Shadow Puppet is a new app that's designed to help you do just that. Rather than simply sharing photos by themselves or with text captions, the app lets you share sets of photographs while narrating what the recipient is seeing.
Stock photography heavyweight Getty Images is in some hot water after being sued by a model over the use of her portrait in an HIV-positive advertisement.
Last month, we reported on a rumor that Nikon's upcoming D610 DSLR will simply be a D600 clone that fixes the sensor speck issue that some owners grumbled about a while back. Now, a newly leaked set of camera specs seems to confirm that initial report.