Snapchat is no more. Long live Snap Inc. Snapchat pulled a double whammy today by announcing both the new name of their company and their first foray in camera hardware with the connected sunglasses they're calling Spectacles.
Adobe has announced the 2.5 update to their popular Lightroom Mobile app. The new update adds the ability to shoot directly to Adobe's open source raw file format, DNG, avoiding the compression and data loss inherent in standard JPEG files. To capture in DNG, users will need a device running iOS 10 that has a 12 MP sensor, such as the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, and iPad Pro 9.7. When available, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will also support capturing in DNG format. The latest update is available in the App Store at the time of this writing.
Apple just finished their keynote announcing the new iPhone 7. The new 7 and 7 Plus include some pretty awesome (sounding) camera upgrades that should be another step forward for mobile photographers and videographers.
We're live now, come humor me as I mock the company that takes all of my money!
Lomography, makers of fun film cameras and cool vintage lenses, has just launched a Kickstarter for their latest instant camera, the Lomo'Instant Automat. The Automat is the second generation of the Lomo'Instant camera and offers updates and improvements over the company's original instant camera that they successfully Kickstarted over two years ago.
ORCA is the maker of a wide range of photo and video accessories: primarily bags and other protective gear. They sent me their new rolling camera bag to try out, and I was eager to give it a go. As you'll see below, I've been using a $50 suitcase from Target as a camera bag for the last four years, so I was excited to see how an actual camera bag would hold up.
The original Game Boy is one of the most iconic gaming systems of all time and as such, continues to inspire the internet to utilize both its aesthetic and its hardware in new and creative ways. There's just something about it, the weight, the feel of the buttons, watching the Nintendo logo scroll down that screen when you first boot up a game, that can't quite be described if you weren't able to experience it as a kid. That same nostalgia is what led Gautier Hattenberger to give his old Game Boy a breath of fresh air.
CheeringTech, the China-based company behind the original CASE Remote and CASE Remote Plus, are back again with another CASE Remote update and this time they're hoping to drastically improve performance while reducing the physical size of the unit. All this while offering the same features as the industry leader CamRanger. To achieve this, they're launching the CASE Remote Air.
Everything about this short video by Russian designer Misha Petrick fills me with desperate nostalgia for the 90's. Some people will mock Windows 95, but for me it was a coming-of-age operating system. The first computers I built myself ran Windows 95. Windows 95 is how I discovered Weezer. Windows 95 gave me Hover, the greatest built-in OS game until Space Cadet Pinball rolled out with Windows 2000. All that to say, I think that Instagram on Windows 95 would have been amazing.
Have you ever gone out to a restaurant and seen a chef slaving away in the back for hour after hour, producing one delicious dish after another, and asked yourself, “Do they even enjoy cooking once they get home?” Well the answer to that is “Yes!” and photographer Ben Sassani takes viewers behind the scenes (and refrigerator doors) of some of the top chefs around with his personal project Shoot My Chef.
I am going to be completely up front with you: this is an expensive camera bag. It is, in fact, the most expensive camera bag I have ever owned, and I have owned many. Instead of buying this bag, you could easily purchase a very solid prime lens. But you know the old saying "you get what you pay for"? Well sometimes that turns out to be 100 percent true.
The guys over at Cooridor-Digital just released this sweet video using a combination of drones and visual effects to create an awesome dogfight between an X-wing Starfighter and several TIE Fighters. Drones + Star Wars = Nerd Love.
JP Sears is one of two accounts that I actually subscribe to on YouTube (the other is TJ Townsend). There's a good chance that you've seen his videos shared on Facebook before, most likely his one making fun of essential oils or his more recent one titled "If Meat Eaters Acted Like Vegans." This video, however, might be my new favorite as he takes us through some best practices for photographing your yoga poses for Instagram.
Google's Cultural Institute was founded in 2011 with the goal of having "important cultural material available and accessible to everyone and to digitally preserve it to educate and inspire future generations." In their pursuit of said goal, Google has just announced their new Art Camera; a robotically controlled gigapixel camera specifically designed for photographing some of the finest works of art in existence.
Quick synopsis for the non-gamers out there: Uncharted 4 is a brand new game available on the Playstation 4. It is, according to most reviews I've seen, an excellent game. I can't vouch for this personally, as I sold my PS4 last year and got an Xbox, but I do know that the first three Uncharted games were pretty stellar. Uncharted 4 follows in the footsteps of recent games such as The Last Of Us: Remastered and Grand Theft Auto V with the inclusion of an in-game photo mode: a tool that lets players go above and beyond a standard screenshot and capture images that they would not be capable of recording within the game's standard mode of play.
This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to thank you in advance for indulging me. There seems to be a rampant misunderstanding in certain levels of the photo community as to what editing presets are, and what they actually accomplish. I (like many of you I would assume) am a member of various photo-centric groups on Facebook. In particular, I am a member of groups for people who have purchased Lightroom and ACR preset packs from a variety of creators. Almost daily I see posts in these groups that go something like this: "I thought my photos were beyond hope, but then I applied "WHIMSICAL PRESET NAME" and they were saved! These presets are amazing!!!1!111!!!" Sound familiar?
I’ve attended plenty of workshops in my time as a photographer. I’ve attended classes taught by Joe McNally, David Hobby, Joel Grimes, and more. I’ve assisted some of the best photographers in a variety of fields, and watched dozens of tutorials put out by some really top-tier shooters. It’s pretty safe to safe to say that I have had a solid amount of training through a variety of sources, but no amount of classes or YouTube videos will ever compare to the five months I spent interning at a large newspaper.
Impossible Project, the awesome folks that have been bringing you film for your Polaroid 600 instant cameras and even the ability to make Polaroid prints out of your camera phone images, have just announced their all-new instant film camera and it sounds awesome.
Human beings have rendered images of themselves in one form or another since the beginning of our species. The desire to try and capture the human essence in something that will outlast the physical body is universal; the need to encapsulate our understandings of “self” and “others” is found in every culture throughout the world. But have digital cameras, selfie sticks, iPhones, and Snapchat made such a pursuit so mind numbingly easy, that it has now completely lost it’s value?
With our current sports-focused Critique the Community, now seems like a great time to share some tips and best practices to help you improve your sports and action photography in 2016. Read on for 11 solid suggestions to help you become a better shooter.
