Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.
Lily is a new robotic camera drone that aims to shake up not only the drone industry, but the camera industry as a whole. It's the world's first "throw-and-shoot camera" that lets anyone capture cinematic aerial photos and videos without needing to do any piloting.
A Los Angeles-based cloud graphics company called OTOY has announced the world's first spherical light field capture that creates a navigable scene in virtual reality. By capturing light field data with a special Canon and GoPro camera rig, the company created the beginnings of immersive photos you can move around in.
Photographers often use products such as the Lens Skirt when shooting through windows in order to reduce or remove reflections. Thanks to advances in computer algorithms, those physical tricks may soon find themselves alongside suitable software solutions.
Scientists at MIT have created an algorithm that can automatically remove reflections from photos that were taken through windows.
The Grocery Store Project is an unusual and ambitious effort by Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg. After spending 159 afternoons over 20 months shooting 97,000 photos of strangers near a supermarket in Copenhagen, Hoegsberg set out to find brief and hidden connections by analyzing the images.
Triggertrap wants to capitalize on the rise of the smartwatch. The camera remote company today announced a new "Wearables" mode for its Triggertrap Mobile app for iOS devices. It's the first app that lets photographers trigger their camera with their smartwatch through an iOS app.
Want to see how CMOS and CCD image sensors work and how they differ from each other? Photographer and animator Raymond Sirí created a couple of simple animations showing the basic idea of how these two sensor technologies go about capturing light, reading it, and storing the information.
The animation above showing CMOS sensor tech was used in a trial against Canon, Sirí says.
QromaScan is a new photo scanning solution that's the world's first to pair smartphone scanning with voice commands for easy digitizing and tagging. It's simple option for people who want to scan their collection of physical prints without having to spend time and money on high-end scanning solutions or services.
A new challenger has emerged in the consumer camera drone fight to take a slice of the market currently dominated by Chinese manufacturer DJI. It's a company called CyPhy Works, whose CEO Helen Greiner was previously the cofounder of iRobot and its popular Roomba robotic vacuum.
Greiner and her company have been working on robotic drones for some time now, but today they announced their first camera drone geared toward ordinary consumers: the LVL 1.
Olympus researchers have created an innovative new "3D stacked" CMOS image sensor that has both global-shutter and high-speed capturing modes. It is able to capture photos at up to 10000 frames per second.
HTC is doing a lot to beef up the camera in its One M9 smartphone after the initial release was somewhat underwhelming. Less than a month after improving image quality with a software update, the company has released a new version of the phone's camera app that adds RAW functionality.
How Old Do I Look? is a simple demo website created by Microsoft engineers who are working on information management and machine learning. Given any photo showing a face, the system will do its best to guess the age and gender of the people in the shot.
Memory Clock is an interesting new concept design that combines the world of clocks with the world of digital photo frames. It's a clock that helps you relive memories by showing you photos from the past.
Photographer and camera hacker Kevin Kadooka recently built a custom through-the-lens (TTL) light meter add-on for his Canon P rangefinder. Instead of carrying around a light meter with the camera, Kadooka can now get accurate readings straight from his modified camera with his impressively designed system.
Now this is different: Zeiss has just announced a new line of lenses called Batis. The two new lenses -- a 25mm f/2 and an 85mm f/1.8 -- are the world's first full-frame autofocus lenses that feature an OLED display on the lenses for focus distance and depth of field.
One of the technologies that's emerging in the camera world is using sensor-shifting to capture high-resolution photos. It involves shooting a sequence of shots with the sensor slightly shifted for each one, and then combining the photos into a high-res image. The new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II uses it to create 40MP photos using its 16MP sensor.
It turns out Apple has also been dabbling in the technology as well for its cameras, except with optical shifting instead of sensor shifting.
On April 28th, 2015, LG will be unveiling its new flagship smartphone, the G4. From the teasers that have been released by the company so far, it's clear that one of the primary focuses of the new phone is its camera. LG says it will have an f/1.8 lens, excellent color accuracy, and full manual controls for advanced shooting.
There's a stealthy startup in Silicon Valley that's working to revolutionize photography. It's called Light, and one of its goals is putting 52-megapixel cameras in smartphones by next year.
Scientists have created a self-powered camera that can take pictures indefinitely without any external power. Instead, it generates its own power using the light it captures with the sensor.
Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera module company that is trying to revolutionize the mobile photography industry with state-of-the-art cameras that are extremely small yet powerful enough to lead "the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets."
word.camera is a curious new website that can magically transform a photograph into words, sentences, and paragraphs that describe what's seen in your image.
Tired of waiting hours for your camera battery to recharge? A newly developed aluminum battery could one day replace lithium-ion batteries and allow you to charge from empty to full in a matter of minutes.
Live Portrait is a new service that's trying to breathe new life into the standard school portrait. Instead of simply static photographs, the company's idea is to use augmented reality through a smartphone camera to add a video element to every photograph in a yearbook.
In 2012, Olympus launched a new 5-axis sensor-shift image stabilization system in the retro OM-D E-M5 mirrorless camera. If …
Today Microsoft announced that it has released its Office Lens app for iOS and Android. If you've never heard of it before, Office Lens is an advanced camera app that turns your phone into a scanner. Take a picture of a document or a whiteboard, and the app will automatically turn the image into a straight and clear scan.
What's neat is that the app can also be used to quickly and neatly digitize a print instead of putting the photo through an actual scanner.
Want to see how much our ability to photograph space has improved over the past 135 years or so? …
Magic Lantern is announcing that it has passed a new milestone in hacking DSLRs: making Linux run on Canon DSLR cameras.
The news was announced in the group's forums yesterday, and many people believed it to be an April Fools' joke, but it turns out the development was actually real (the joke was making it look like a joke).
Photography jobs may soon be more threatened by breakthroughs in computer generated imagery (CGI) technology. Newly developed light ray simulation algorithms are opening the door to digital images that are so realistic that they are easily mistaken for actual photos.
If you're a photographer who often shoots in very dark environments, would you want night vision eyedrops to help you see better without artificial illumination? It sounds like science fiction, but we're actually getting closer to having it be possible as an item for camera bags.
A team of "biohackers" have announced that they've figured out how to enhance human night vision by dripping a chemical onto eyeballs.
Photographers who are out and about often have thousands of dollars in camera gear kept inside a camera bag, and keeping an eye on your bag at all times can be taxing and sometimes impossible. KitSentry is a new product that's designed to keep an eye on your gear so you don't have to, giving you peace of mind to help you focus on making photos.
The camera on smartphones is one of the main selling points these days, and Apple is working hard to push its iPhone camera ahead of the pack. A newly discovered patent reveals that Apple has created an innovative sensor design that increases quality by using three separate sensors and a prism for splitting light.
Apple's new Macbook features a redesigned pressure-sensitive trackpad called the Force Touch. In addition to being more powerful for inputs from your fingers, the new design allows for the use of a stylus on the touchpad if you'd like to retouch your photographs tablet-style.
Inklet by Ten One Design is the first 3rd party application for Mac that offers this.
Three year old children can make sense of what they see in photos and describe them to us, but even the most advanced computers have historically had difficulties with that same task. That's quickly changing though, as computer scientists are developing powerful new ways to have computers identify what a photograph is showing.
The video above is a new TED talk given by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor who's one of the world's leading experts on computer vision. She talks about her revolutionary ImageNet project that has changed how computers "see."
If you've always dreamed of seeing your cat share photos of its life on Instagram, there's now a camera being developed that may make your dream a reality. It's called Catstacam, and is a wearable collar camera that automatically posts photographs to an Instagram account you set up for your cat.
Impossible launched its first lines of instant film in 2010 after acquiring Polaroid manufacturing machines and leasing an old Polaroid production plant. Although its efforts did bring "Polaroid pictures" back from the dead, its initial offerings suffered from poor image quality and slow development times.
There will soon be a great leap forward, though. Impossible is announcing today that it is launching Generation 2.0 film that promises to be better in speed, sharpness, and tonality.
Tired of having eyeballs with fixed focal lengths? Scientists have developed new telescopic contact lenses and glasses that can give your eyes 2.8x zoom with a simple wink of the eye.
Sapphire glass was used by Apple for the iPhone 5 camera, and more recently it has appeared on the screen of the new Apple Watch. It will soon be available for DSLR camera lenses as well. A new company called Novo is getting ready to launch a new line of camera lens filters for photographers. The lineup will include the world's first filter to use sapphire crystal glass, and other filters will feature Gorilla Glass.
The low light performance in your future camera may be improved thanks to new research in "nano earthquakes." Researchers have found that sound waves can be used to improve the electronic properties of 2D materials, paving the way for things such as camera sensors that can capture better shots in dark environments.
Virtual reality is posed to become one of the next big things in the tech world, and YouTube is preparing itself for that future. The video hosting service announced today that it is starting to support 360-degree video uploads to allow for immersive video experiences.
The SoundBarrel is a concept Bluetooth speaker design that shutterbugs should feel right at home with. Created by South Korean industrial designer SaeJoung Kou, the device looks like a wooden camera lens and features a nifty aperture mechanism that's used to change the volume.
Director of photography Miguel de Olaso, Macgregor and architectural photographer Art Sanchez have been working on a new technique called the "Quicklapse" that allows them to achieve 8K video with cameras such as the Nikon D800, which is normally limited to 1080p. The trick involves capturing 36.3MP still photos in burst mode and then using interpolation in post to turn the images into real-time footage.
The video above shows an example of what a Quicklapse video looks like (it's at a much lower resolution for web viewing, but the original data was shot at 8K).
A camera used on satellites to monitor vegetation from space may soon help save lives in the battle against cancer. The special camera will be capable of peering into human skin to see things that are invisible to the naked eye for the purpose of detecting diseases early.
Google's well-known Street View service is one of several monumental efforts to document the world's travel routes through ground-level photos. These projects generally use fancy camera rigs on cars, backpacks, and even camels to capture their images.
Mapillary is a startup that's trying to do things a little differently. Instead of taking the grunt work of photo-taking upon itself, the service is building a crowdsourced Street View competitor using photos submitted by users.
Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.
Podo is a new wireless and sticky camera that serves as an on-the-go photo booth. Instead of shooting pictures of yourself at arms length, with a selfie stick, or with the help of a stranger, you'll be able to stick the camera to most flat surfaces and trigger the shot with your phone.
Back in January, we reported that a DJ named Chris Holmes had developed a line of "anti-paparazzi clothing" that ruins flash photographs at night by blowing the photos out with excessive reflected light. The idea gained traction, and now the "Flashback" line of apparel will soon be hitting the market.
There's a mysterious and intriguing new website online for a startup camera company called Konost. From the looks of it, the team is trying to build a simple yet powerful digital camera that it claims will be "the world's first true digital rangefinder."
Remember that Taiwanese machine that can print a photo of your face onto the foam of a latte? Here's something along the same lines that's just as quirky: there's a new printer that can cook a photo of your face into a pancake.
Light projectors have been used in recent years for crazy 3D projections on buildings and other large surfaces. A Japanese company is using a similar concept to bring static 2D photos to life.
Adobe celebrated Photoshop's 25th birthday yesterday with great fanfare. Since the original Photoshop version 1.0 was launched back on February 19th, 1990, there have been 15 major versions released that have advanced the way we work with (and look at) photographs.
To see how far post-processing has come over the past two-and-a-half decades, here's a closer look at what it was like to use the very first version of Photoshop.