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.
A team of researchers at Harvard are trying to revolutionize the world of optical lenses. Instead of traditional curved lenses that suffer from various optical flaws, they are working on a completely flat and ultra-thin lens that overcomes age-old problems and pushes optical quality to the limits of the laws of nature.
A recent patent filing by Apple suggests that the company is working on a new periscope-style camera module design that offers better optical stabilization with the use of mirrors.
Hanging a picture frame up on a wall often isn't the simplest of tasks, at least if you're a perfectionist, but a new product has arrived to change that. Called the Beehive Picture Hanger, it's a new hanging system that makes hanging a frame perfectly a breeze and something that only takes a few moments without any measurements.
Want to make sure a photograph survives your lifetime? Print it out. That's the warning Internet pioneer Vint Cerf gave at a talk recently, saying that vast amounts of digital information may soon be lost in a new digital "dark age."
Google is hard at work on Project Ara, a modular smartphone that will allow users to swap critical components in and out, including the onboard camera. One of the third party companies working on modules is Toshiba, which is offering a look into its progress in creating the first swappable camera modules for the ecosystem.
One of the main innovations found in the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II is its ability to shoot massive 40MP photos with its 16MP sensor by doing "sensor shifting" and combining multiple shots. The main downside, however, is that you need a tripod to make sure the camera doesn't move between shots.
That may soon change: Olympus says its working on making the sensor shift technology work even when the photographer is shooting handheld without stabilization.
Google is partnering with Mattel to reboot the iconic View-Master stereoscopic 3D photo viewing device. Instead of static photos with circular film reels, however, the new View-Master offers an immersive digital experience that puts people inside 360° "photospheres."
There's an innovative new light technology that's trying to shake up the way people think about "artificial light." In Italian company called CoeLux has developed a new light source that recreates the look of sunlight through a skylight so well that it can trick both human brains and cameras.
Wundershine is a new Dutch company that's trying to revolutionize how we view and interact with wall-mounted picture frames. They're working on an ecosystem based around a product known as the Makerframe, a wooden picture frame that can print and frame your photos using its built-in thermal printer.
Microsoft Research has announced version 2.0 of its Image Composite Editor (ICE) software, a free program that offers advanced panoramic photo stitching technology. If you're on a Windows machine and need a way to combine multiple photos into single shots, ICE is a download you may want to look into.
Want a portable generator for recharging your devices that you can literally fill up in just seconds? It'll soon be available... but you'll need to be comfortable carrying a gas-powered power plant around in your bag.
The kraftwerk is the world's first fuel cell power generator that's operated on standard gas. It takes just 3 seconds to refill.
Want to ensure sunshine for bright and happy outdoor wedding photographs? All you need is $150,000.
A UK-based company has begun offering a "cloud bursting" service that can 100% guarantee fair weather for your wedding day and photographs.
The world's largest camera is now one step closer to becoming a reality. The 3.2-gigapixel camera being built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile has secured the funding it needs to ensure it will go into operation according to schedule.
Project Ara is an ongoing effort by Google to create a modular smartphone for which you can swap critical components in and out, allowing users to build the perfect phone for their specific needs.
If its modular design takes over the consumer market in the future, we could be seeing a whole new approach to how smartphone cameras work.
If you're ever in a situation in which you need to understand some text in a foreign language, getting a translation is now as free and easy as loading up your phone's camera app. Google has updated its Translate app to include real-time on-screen translations of text you point your camera at.
Weighing just 1.66 pounds, Nikon's newly announced 300mm f/4 is the world's lightest 300mm full frame prime autofocus lens. It's also the first Nikon DSLR lens to feature the company's new Phase Fresnel (PF) technology, which is the main reason the lens can be so small and lightweight.
At the end of 2014, we reported that Los Angeles will be the first major city in the US to equip every officer on the street with a body camera. Now the city is announcing that it's going one step further towards making sure its cops are held accountable by the devices: newly issued Tasers will trigger the cameras when fired.
In the past several years, there have been quite a few mentions of modular camera designs that split sensors, screens, and bodies of cameras into separate, replaceable parts. Today is the first time we've heard of a completely modular lens system.
A recently published Nikon patent appears to show just that: a lens that is assembled by connecting a number of circular pieces to form a complete barrel.
The Nikkor 400mm f/2.8E FL ED VR is a new $12,000 lens for sports and wildlife photographers. One of the new features to appear in the lens is a vibration reduction mode called VR Sport. The video above offers a look at how VR Sport compares to VR Normal and no stabilization.
Want to cut down on the size and weight of your photo storage system when shooting on the go? You may want to check out the new Seagate Seven external hard drive. It's the world's thinnest -- and arguably most beautiful -- external hard drive.
3D projections are often used nowadays to create eye-popping visuals on flat surfaces such as the sides of buildings or on basketball courts, but could the same concept be done out in the wild where things aren't flat and orderly? Photographer Tarek Mawad and animator Friedrich van Schoor recently decided to try it out.
What resulted is the video above, titled "Projections in the Forest". The two artists spent six weeks illuminating various things in nature with a powerful projector and then capturing the results on camera.
Cornell offers a course on designing with microcontrollers, and this year's final project submissions featured a couple of groups who decided to build robotic photographers that help capture selfies.