Man can fly, but he can’t yet levitate. Maybe that’s why these 98 photos of levitation—using Photoshop only to remove the strings—are so striking. More »
We’ve spent quite a bit not nearly enough time with Fujifilm’s fixed-lens Finepix X100, and while it felt that March would never actually come during Photokina 2010, it’s actually just a few weeks away. The outfit has today confirmed that its 12.3 megapixel shooter will be shipping to America next month, with a wallet-burning $1,199.95 netting you a 23mm F2 prime lens, a standard ISO range of 200 to 6400 (with a boost to 12800), built-in ND filter, Hybrid Viewfinder and a magnesium alloy chassis. Feel free to peek back at our hands-on sessions to get a better idea if this is the retro body you’ve been yearning for, and hop on past the break if you’d care to see the official verbiage.
Continue reading Fujifilm confirms Finepix X100 ship date, price and accessory line for US market
Fujifilm confirms Finepix X100 ship date, price and accessory line for US market originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Christian Stoll‘s wide-angle photographs, fittingly used in print campaigns for IBM and Microsoft, may look like scenes from Minority Report, but they’re actually views of our little old planet as seen in some of its craziest, most futuristic looking places right now. Go check out the rest of the set, titled “Epic,” at Stoll’s site and perhaps feel a fleeting appreciation for trees and squirrels and stuff like that. [Christian Stoll] More »
Another big name is jumping headfirst into the increasingly popular Micro Four Thirds waters with the announcement from Olympus today that Carl Zeiss has signed up as a member of the MFT System Standard Group. What that basically entails is that the folks responsible for some of the finest optics in the world will start making lenses directly compatible with Olympus and Panasonic’s camera standard. You could, of course, have tracked down adapters to get Distagon glass working with your GF2 before, but it sure is nice to see the big boys producing hardware designed specifically for this relatively new category of camera. Full press release after the break.
[Thanks, Ken]
Continue reading Carl Zeiss joins the Micro Four Thirds revolution
Carl Zeiss joins the Micro Four Thirds revolution originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Feb 2011 05:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Bokeh is the ephemeral essence of blur, something you can see yet remains completely intangible. Other times, it can be shaped into a mold, controlled and specific. The 306 entries from this week’s Shooting Challenge capture bokeh at both extremes. More »
The 175 photos that follow look like they might have been taken during the day. But it’s not day. It’s night. The photos are lying, thanks to long exposures that soak in the colorful nightlife. More »
Hyperfocal. The word sounds so…intense. Maybe it is. By taking your lens and aperture into account while focusing at just the right spot, you can milk every bit of sharpness scientifically possible out of a scene. More »
Twitter officially arrived when Captain Sullenberger sent US Airways flight 1549 splashing down into the Hudson. Instagram’s moment was last week, when forty-nine states—fully ninety-eight percent of American states—were doused with snow. More »
We couldn’t be more impressed with the way the Gizmodo community has pushed their photography skills with Shooting Challenges. So today, we’re expanding the idea with a once-a-month expansion called the Video Challenge. Our first topic: time lapse. More »
PiRAWnha is a RAW photo developer app for the iPad and, while it gets the job done, its a little rough (raw?) around the edges.
The app scans your photo albums for RAW images and presents them as thumbnails. Tap one and you are dropped into some simple editing controls, above which sits your unprocessed RAW image. From here you can tweak exposure, saturation, white balance, and contrast, along with several other basic adjustments. You can also add noise reduction and sharpening, and a histogram is displayed at all times to help out.
So how does it do? Not so well. First, the RAW rendering – which converts the soup of data in a RAW file into a viewable picture – is rather poor. An indoor shot, taken at a ISO 1600, shows a lot more noise than it does on either my Mac or in-camera (using the camera’s self-generated JPEG preview). It also has a lot of red speckles sprinkled over the picture. These spots disappear when you export the processed photo to a JPEG, though.
The app is also very slow. This is thanks to the iPad itself, which has barely enough RAM to do something as hard as RAW image processing. In fact, I got a low-memory warning with every button press when I first launched PiRAWnha. You’ll need to restart before you use it.
And you might want to make some coffee, too. Each edit causes the image to re-render, and it’s slow. A button push can cause a wait of around ten seconds, making editing painful.
PiRAWnha claims to be the first RAW editor for the iPad, but there are plenty of other non-RAW editors which do the job better. The only reason to edit RAW photos on the iPad is to email them, or to make a quick slideshow before you get back to your proper computer. Given that every photo-editing app will handle the JPEGs that come tucked inside your RAW images, and handle them better and faster, there seems little point in PiRAWnha.
As a proof-of-concept I like it, but as a day-to-day app I don’t. Add to this the interface design – you can only edit in portrait mode, for example, and if you tilt it into landscape orientation when viewing thumbnails, they don’t reflow to fill the screen – and you have something that is fun, but not yet fully baked. $10.
PiRAWnha [iTunes]
PiRAWnha for iPad [PiRAWnha]
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