Two years. Thousands of entries. 99ish jaw-dropping winners. Today is our 100th Shooting Challenge. Your assignment? Watch that video of all our past winners. Then, try to be our next. More »
If you have a new enough iPhone or iPad, you can now edit photos on the device. Photo Charlie Sorrel
iOS 5 is here, and with it iCloud. ICloud is the biggest step yet towards cutting the cord with desktop computers, and it arguably does away with the old-fashioned idea of files and folders. One of the best parts of iCloud is Photo Stream which, in combination with the new Photos app, lets you forget about the computer completely. Almost.
Camera
First, and most noticeable, are the new Camera and Photos apps. Any iOS 5 device can now snap a photo using the volume-up hardware switch (which is right next to the lens in the iPad 2 and almost laughably hard to use without photographing your finger). iPhone users can also double-tap the home button on the lock-screen to reveal a shortcut button that launches straight to camera for quick shooting.
You can also call up a grid overlay, lock the exposure and autofocus before recomposing (iPhone 4 and 4S-only), and pinch to zoom as you are shooting. When you have snapped a picture, you can swipe right to enter your camera roll. This won’t work if you accessed the camera through the lock-screen shortcut.
Once you are viewing you photos, you can now edit them. This is done the same way as if you were in the Photos app itself. Open an image, tap edit and you can rotate and crop (with or without constraints), correct for redeye and enhance the image. This last just adds a little pep, tweaking the white balance and contrast.
The edits seem to be non-destructive: You save your image, but if you choose to edit it again later you can still revert to the original.
From here you can also share images (email, Twitter, Messages), assign to a contact, print, copy or choose to use as wallpaper.
Photos
Head over to the Photos app and you can use all of the same editing tricks, only you now have access to all the photos on your iDevice, not just your photo roll. Curiously, when editing photos here, you are prompted to save a copy. Thus, you cannot revert, but you still have the untouched original. Editing won’t work on the iPad 1.
You can also rearrange the photos into albums, although it isn’t obvious at first how you might do this.
First, you need to tap the arrow-in-a-box icon, the one usually used for sharing things. Then you select the images you want to use and tap the “Add To…” button. Then choose to make a new album or add to an existing one. Note — if you cancel here, then all your photos are deselected. This is a pain if you start off adding to an existing album and then decide you want a new one instead. You’ll have to start over.
You can also choose to add images to an album from within it, using the same arrow-in-a-box icon. Oddly, you can re-add the same photos and they’ll show up as duplicates. I assume that this is a bug.
Photo Stream
Finally, there’s Photo Stream. Any photos you snap with the camera, or save from various applications (including screenshots), or import using the camera connection kit. are added to your Photo Stream. And any photos in your Photo Stream are uploaded automatically to iCloud (over Wi-Fi) and then beamed down to any other Photo Stream-enabled devices.
Full resolution files are sent back to your computer for safekeeping, and kept in the cloud for 30 days. Smaller JPGs are sent to the iDevices, which helps speed up downloads. If you regularly use your iPad to import RAW photos from your camera, though, Photo Stream will send the whole files up to iCloud. I spend half a day with unresponsive Internet before I realized what was happening.
Any edits you make on the iOS devices will be mirrored immediately on other devices.
The master library is stored on your Mac or PC. On a Mac you can use Aperture or iPhoto, and this is the only place a computer comes in. The workaround is to save files out of the Photo Stream and to you camera roll to keep permanently. You might be glad you bought the 64GB model after all. One thing to note: Once something is in your stream, it is impossible to remove. This, too, sounds like a bug.
Video
Finally, on a related topic, iMovie on the iPad and iPhone has been updated. It will now work with movie files imported from your camera, which means no more tedious workarounds. It now recognizes Motion JPG video from my Panasonic GF1, although it won’t see AVCHD Lite files. It seems like anything that can be imported via the camera connection kit should work. Give it a try.
Photo Stream really shows what Apple’s strategy is for iOS. Sure, we don’t need a computer now, but neither do we need to worry about our files at all. Our photos and videos are automatically backed up and available wherever we want them. No more thumb drives, no more e-mail attachments. It just works.
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‘Wood,’ ‘root,’ ‘grinding.’ The jokes write themselves
If there’s one name in the camera business that is synonymous with endless special edition hardware in ever more exotic materials, its Sigma. Wait. What?
Yes, Sigma is pulling a Leica with this special edition SD1, only its doing it without Leica’s typically understated taste. In short, if you have any of your lottery winnings left over after buying a yellow Lamborghini, then the Wood Edition SD1 is for you.
The camera comes with a special wooden casing fashioned from Amboyna Burl, the deformed wood of the Southeast Asian Padauk tree. Burl — or burr in British English — is the weird knobbly pattern that appears in trees that are damaged or stressed.
According to Sigma, this casing is the outcome of “over 60 hours of milling, sawing, grinding [and] polishing.” The result is something that looks as if it were partially dipped in chocolate.
Inside, the camera still sports Sigma’s triple-layer, 46 megapixel Foveon sensor.
The price for this limited edition (10 will be made) bling-fest is an astonishing €10,000, or $13,750. That compares to the regular asking price of $6,900 over at B&H Photo.
Sigma SD1 Wood Edition [Photo Scala]
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The iPad’s stills camera might be terrible, but as a video camera it’s pretty good. And combined with iMovie in the big screen, it’s hard to beat. But even the big ol’ iPad is prone to shake, and iMovie has almost no special effects. Which is where Luma comes in.
Luma is a third party video-shooting app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It adds a few filters to your footage, but its main purpose is as an image stabilizer. When engaged (it switches off in low light), the stabilizer will iron out bumps and jiggles in real time as you shoot.
And it works pretty well. I tested it by walking around my apartment with the iPad held out in front of me. The result isn’t steadycam smooth, but it’s way better than you’d get otherwise. The iPhone 5 will have anti-shake tech baked in, but Luma has some other tricks up its sleeve. It corrects the rolling shutter effect, for one. Rolling shutter is the jelly-like look that happens as the shutterless chip scans its way down the frame. It’s ugly, and Luma kills it.
The filters aren’t bad, either. You get B&W, high-contrast B&W, and “grunge,” which is a slightly soft, vignetted look with slightly brighter colors. There’s also a horrible negative effect you’ll want to avoid, and an optical zoom engaged by pinching (avoid this on the iPad’s low-res camera).
I will probably use Luma for all video shooting now, as there are no penalties in terms of speed and resolution, and the stabilized video looks great. What’s more, the app is free.
Luma product page [Midnox via iPhoneography]
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Some graphene, looking thin and strong. Illustration CORE-Materials/Flickr
Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, could end up making a pretty good camera sensor. Researchers at MIT have discovered that graphene can turn light into electricity, but not the way you’d think.
Unlike camera sensors and solar panels which rely on the photovoltaic effect, graphene creates a current because of a temperature difference. When light shines on its surface, it heats the electrons within, but “the lattice of carbon nuclei that forms graphene’s backbone remains cool.” This temperature difference produces the electricity.
Normally, this only occurs with very high energy light sources (lasers!) or very low-temperature materials. Graphene manages it with daylight and at room temperature.
The material surely has many uses (not least as a way to generate solar energy), but it turns out that graphene would make a good camera sensor. It detects infrared light, for example (good for spooky effects), and is also made from cheap, readily available carbon. Research is still young, but perhaps it could lead to a decent camera finally fitting into the supermodel-thin iPod Touch.
Graphene shows unusual thermoelectric response to light [MIT News]
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There are still a few things film cameras do that digital cameras don’t. One of those is double-exposures, something easy with every film SLR, and all but impossible in digital without digging into Photoshop.
Enter the Double Exposure Digicam, a straightforward camera with a straightforward name. The tiny digicam is like a pocket-sized Instagram, and lets you snap two photos in the same frame. Some film cameras had a multiple exposure function. Most had to be hacked by holding the rewind crank tight, pushing in the rewind release button and advancing the film, all at the same time. Add in an autowinder and you had a recipe for frustration.
The Double Exposure Digicam will let you do this at the touch of a button. It also heavily vignettes your shots, and the colors skew to the gaudy, giving it a nice lo-fi appeal.
Images are shot at 3.2MP, video is 640 x 480, the “viewfinder” measures an inch, there’s a self-timer, shutter speeds from 1/8 to 1/5000 sec and everything is recorded on SD cards. The only non-tiny thing is the price, but one look at the resulting pictures makes $130 seem like a good deal. Available now.
Double Exposure Digicam [Photojojo]
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For $100, you get what you see above the knurled knob. Everything else is extra
It seems that movie makers just aren’t happy unless they’re spending the same sky-high sums on gear as they used to before DSLRs shot great, high-quality video. Luckily, companies like LockCircle exist to bleed their money from them, one over-specced accessory at a time.
Joining the LockCircle — a $100 body cap for Canon SLRs — comes the LockPort, a $100 HDMI adapter for the Canon 5D MkII. This adapter consists of a thick plate that screws into the tripod mount, and a “rock-solid” adapter which slides snugly into the HDMI port on the side of the camera, offering a full-sized HDMI socket at 90-degrees to the original. The adapter also clamps down onto a RedRock Micro DSLR Baseplate, should you have one, to integrate with a full RedRock system.
The idea is that the constant plugging and unplugging of cables can harm the poor port, and as the port will cost more than $100 to have repaired, this adapter becomes a bargain.
And this reveals the reason for the high-priced gear used by the pro filmmakers. They need it to work, not to break, and if paying a lot of money guarantees performance, then it probably is a bargain. The 5D MkII version is already available, with a 7D version on its way.
LockPort product page [LockCircle]
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We’ve already sorted through the specs, and laid our hands on its rather sexy frame, now Fujifilm’s offering up a more palatable price tag than we expected for its throwback X10 shooter. Starting sometime in early October, the X100’s more affordable little brother will set nostalgic point-and-shooters back $599.99 — about $100 bones less than the estimated $715 to $860 ballpark we threw out back in September. If you’ll recall, the X10 packs a 12 megapixel EXR CMOS sensor, f/2-2.8, 28-112mm manual zoom lens, up to 12,800 ISO sensitivity, 1080p video, an optical viewfinder, and pop-up flash. No word yet on a final release date. Full PR after the break.
Continue reading Fujifilm’s X10 offers up vintage-style snapping for $599.99 in early November
Fujifilm’s X10 offers up vintage-style snapping for $599.99 in early November originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What does our time look like? Maybe a little like this. A nighttime scene, with ghost images. Lights streaking through the air, and painted across our very own selves. Our time looks like an in-camera photo effect. More »
We can’t say that we were too keen on Sony’s DEV-5 Digital Recording Binoculars at first look — it really is hard to get past that $2,000 price tag. But after Sony finally allowed us to shoot photos and video (albeit for a mere three minutes) at the company’s CEATEC booth, we were pleasantly surprised at the image quality, at least some of the time. The images we shot were in 16:9 format, and were roughly 5.3 megapixels in size (the camera’s maximum resolution is 7.1 megapixels). With only a few minutes to play around, we didn’t have time to switch the menu from Japanese to English (CEATEC is held just outside Tokyo), so we had no choice but to use the default settings.
Still, images shot at f/1.8 appeared crisp, even with moderate shake (it’s difficult to keep a heavy pair of binoculars steady when holding them at eye level), with accurate exposure and white balance. When zooming to 10x, however, still photos appeared very noisy, as you’ll see in the gallery below. So are they worth the sky-high price tag? Well, it’s safe to say that we’re not ready to whip out the credit card, though they did perform better than we expected, based only on what we had initially seen through those dual high-res viewfinders. Jump past the break for an HD sample clip, or click the more coverage link below for the untouched samples.
Continue reading Sony DEV-5 Digital Recording Binoculars sample photos and video
Sony DEV-5 Digital Recording Binoculars sample photos and video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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