When imaging company Kogeto created Dot -- a clever little system that gave the iPhone 4 360º panoramic video -- little did the general public know that this was merely a stepping stone towards what they really wanted to create. Three years later, they’ve finally let the panoramic cat out of the bag.
It’s called Joey, and it’s a professional-grade 360° 4K video capture device with a seemingly endless list uses.
What does your ideal self actually look like? That's the question that photographer Scott Chasserot seeks to answer with his experiment, Original Ideal. By using portrait photography, Photoshop and brainwave scanners, he thinks he can pinpoint the version of your portrait that you find most appealing.
What's the difference between the results of a $300 consumer lens and a $3,000 top-of-the-line lens? If piccure is to be believed, one answer is "post-processing."
Today, the German computational photography company is releasing a new version of its software called piccure+ that can effortlessly correct the flaws of cheap glass, allowing photographers to obtain high image quality without having to spend a fortune on gear.
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.
Mimicking animal and bug vision to create unique and interesting cameras is nothing new. Bug vision cameras with, for example, infinite depth of field, have been made in the lab before. But researchers at University of Queensland in Australia are developing a camera that can do something pretty unique: it can see cancer.
The idea came after the scientists discovered that mantis shrimp have this incredibly useful ability.
If the idea of a wearable camera drone seems downright strange to you, you're probably not alone, but a new wrist-mounted flying concept camera called the Nixie makes this strange idea seem both possible and completely logical.
Here's a new reason you might want to consider picking up a Google Glass if you're a photographer: it can be used as a light meter.
A new app called Google Glass Light Meter is trying to pioneer a new way of metering light -- with a device strapped to your face instead of held in your hand.
Over the past 24 hours, the Earth has been experiencing its autumnal equinox. That is, the length of day and night across the globe was the same due to the sun hitting the earth at just the right angle to align its shade perfectly with the Earth’s spin axis.
And thanks to the photographic work of Russian satellite Elektro-L, we get an awesome (albeit quick) view of this bi-annual occurrence from a pretty spectacular vantage point: space.
Cynthia Breazeal envisions a world in which every family has its own personal robot helping out at home -- one that can help out around the house, and even help take photographs when needed. To turn this idea into a reality, the MIT robotics professor has created a robot called JIBO.
The robot has already become a top 5 most funded campaign on Indiegogo after raising over $2.2 million from over 5,500 supporters.
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.
Say hello to 4K video recording with the iPhone... but first you'll need a 5S model and a cool $999. That's how much you'll need to pay in the App Store to purchase Vizzywig 4K, which touts itself as the world's first mobile app that lets you capture, edit, and distribute 4K video.
The "Internet of Things" is likely what the future holds, but it's a future that has it share of security concerns. As more and more devices are making their way online, hackers will have newer points of entry into our lives.
Case in point: a security researcher has shown that Canon Pixma printers can be hacked to run custom code. As an example, he loaded the game Doom onto the printer.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have created software that automatically averages hundreds or thousands of similar images to create the pinnacle of amalgamations.
Unveiled last month, AverageExplorer lets users see the average image that represents whatever collection of images they’re looking at. The idea is to break down the overwhelming amount of images given when searching through Google Images, Flickr or Bing and combining it into one visual summary of the result.
The idea that 4K+ resolution video will soon become a big thing in still photography is one rooted in convenience. While it doesn’t seem video will overtake still photography for good anytime soon, Amateur Photographer wanted to dip their toes in the water.
In a recent experiment, the Amateur Photographer team decided that the September 20th issue of their magazine would feature a cover that uses a still image extracted from video shot at 4K.
DigitalGlobe really wants people to get behind their super-high res public imaging satellite, the WorldView-3, and understand just how useful it could be. To that end, they're showing off the satellite's capabilities once again, this time using the onboard infrared sensor to see beneath the smoke of a California forest fire and capture some incredibly detailed images of the inferno.
Image stabilization is a tricky business. There are a plethora of ways to do it: optical image stabilization, algorithmic stabilization and, more recently, hybrid options that combine the best of analogue and digital input.
A great example is Instagram’s new Hyperlapse app, which gathers data from the accelerometer built into your iPhone and uses that data to digitally correct for camera shake and give you smooth footage.
And now, an upcoming product called SteadXP wants to do the same thing for your DSLR or GoPro.
Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.
But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.
We’ve seen low-light photography before, but what about no light photography. While it seems borderline impossible, researchers have combined a number of techniques to produce photographs in almost complete darkness, where the resulting images are using less than one photon of light per pixel!
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.
This photo isn't actually a photo. From the furniture to the beautiful light falling on the countertops and wood floors, what you're looking at is a CGI rendering that has replaced 75% of the 'photos' in the IKEA catalogs the college kids, divorced men and NYC residents in your life have lying around.
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.
Using photographs released by the militant group ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and satellite imagery openly available to everybody, a group of crowd-funded citizen journalists believe they have pinned down the location of an ISIS training camp.
A Belgian company called SpaceBooth is planning to launch its own little -- and we mean really little -- satellite photo both before 2015. Its mission? To give you the chance to have your photo taken with the Earth, Moon or stars as the backdrop... for free.
Outdoor brand Mammut recently teamed up with avid climbers Dani Arnold and Stephan Siegrist to document and create an incredible interactive 360º climb up the side of Eiger: a 13,000-foot tall mountain in the Alps.
Make-up can be a pain on photo shoots, can’t it? Well, imagine if you didn’t need make-up on a shoot to alter the look of a model’s skin. Now stop imagining, because it’s a reality, thanks to this interesting real-time face tracking and projection mapping technology.
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.
The European Space Agency has designed a disposable piece of equipment affectionately referred to as the Break Up Camera. As you could expect from the name, the sole purpose of the camera is to capture it’s own death.
How will it capture its own death though? With the help of a dedicated Infrared camera, hooked up to a storage device that will be contained in a ceramic-shielded Reentry SatCom.
As medium format and full-frame cameras get more affordable and file sizes cross the line from massive to outrageous, any increase in transfer and backup speeds is greatly appreciated. Which is why the new USB Type C standard should have photographers as excited as any other tech nerd out there.
As part of a joint venture between the University of Tokyo and Keio University, researchers have developed a new type of high-speed camera technology called Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography (STAMP). And it’s about to blow any and all previous high-speed photography out of the water.
Researchers at Microsoft just changed the POV video game -- there's no doubt about that. Using a newly developed algorithm, they transform long, boring first person videos shot with helmet cams into super smooth hyperlapses that look like they were shot with a Steadicam.
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.
Researchers at Brown University have created an intriguing little algorithm that allows you to alter the weather, time of day and even season in your outdoor photographs.
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.
By the end of September, NASA engineer Jason Budinoff is hoping to finish the first imaging telescopes to be created almost completely out of 3D-printed aluminum.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are blowing minds with
This is a geek article. Many of you don’t understand the term ‘geek’ properly, so perhaps this will help. As the graph below shows, if you aren’t both intelligent and obsessed with photo gear, you won’t enjoy this article.
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.
Well, here’s your strange patent of the month. According to the latest patent …
A team from Berkeley, in collaboration with MIT and Microsoft, have developed a super exciting display technology that should have glasses and contact-wearing photographers jumping for joy. Due to be showed off at SIGGRAPH this coming week, the prototype they've developed automatically adjusts to suit your less-than-perfect eyesight so you can ditch your contacts and/or glasses when you're using it.
Drone photography is the next time-lapse (which, incidentally, was the next HDR), but it presents a challenge that the previous two styles never did: safety. In this particular case we don't mean safety of the people around (or rather below) you, but rather the safety of your gear itself.
As we've seen time and again, drones drop from the sky on occasion, and when they do, they rarely survive the journey south... Until now. A new product called DJI DropSafe aims to change all that.
With each passing day, it seems as though light field photography (and its imitators) is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Patents here, rumors there, it’s a conglomeration of what is very likely the next frontier in photography.
And this past week, Pelican Images published a collection of online 3D viewer images captured with its thin light field camera that might be making its way into mobile devices soon.
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.
Sick of wiping and blowing dust off your lens filter? Check out Hoya's new line of EVO Antistatic lens filters, which actively repel dust particles to keep them from sticking to the glass.
Just a few years ago, Flash websites were all the rage. Now, Flash is a dying technology due to its inefficiency across the board. But, despite being less relevant than ever and incompatible amongst a plethora of devices and platforms, some photographers still insist on having a flash website to show off their work.
Thus, in an effort to ensure that the use of outdated technologies is diminished, Google is now passive-aggressively calling out Flash websites before visitors even click on the link.
The consumer end of underwater photography is tricky. The pros have expensive underwater housings for their expensive DSLRs, but consumers are stuck with semi-affordable compacts that suffer from some glaring limitations, among them the ability to zoom.
Canon, it seems, is keen to fix this limitation with a newly-patented zoom lens for an underwater camera that will offer an impressive 45x optical zoom.
Phantom, the company behind some insane high-speed cameras has announced their new flagship camera, the Phantom v2511. Bumping up the specs across the board from their current flagship device, this beast manages to pack in up to 25,600 frames per second at 1280 x 800 resolution (just over 720p).
The possibilities for photography are endless. That's the thought that crossed our minds earlier today when we stumbled across Vantablack, the new 'darkest material on the planet.'
Created by UK-based Surrey NanoSystems, this nanotube material is designed to reflect back as little radiation as possible... and it's darn good at its job. According to Surrey, the material absorbs 99.96% of all the light that touches it.
The folks over at Constant Contact recently put together a handy little infographic that will help you better manage and properly 'dress up' your the growing collection of social media accounts.
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.
With the advent of wearable technology, it was inevitable the devices would soon start to integrate into mobile photographers' workflow. And thanks to Google's latest update, its Camera app looks to be the first to the punch.