© Apple

What if, suddenly the world go around, and people start to think that our camera should be capable of playing music, albeit from the memory card, or stream your iTunes from your iPods?

What if, suddenly, camera engineers finally figure out how to integrate a multi-touch full body display at the back of your camera and design a highly usable camera interface, just like your iPhones/iPod Touch, and — for god’s sake — reasonable enough to open the cookbook and let people develop apps on it — just like your iPhones/iPod Touch?

The problem is, the other side is doing such a great job at those, and have already accomplish all that, at the same time, slowly implementing highly useful camera technology and features into their cam… (oops, I mean) iPhones & iPod Touches.

That other side if of course none other than Mr. Steve Jobs & The Apple Design & Engineering team, and our side is none other than the obscure anonymous folks with no names and no faces to credit too.

In just a few months time after they first revealed their next generation, 5-megapixel, backlit sensor iPhone 4 camera system, they announced today that their next version of the iOS software 4.1 will include an HDR feature, directly built into their camera app.

Now, let’s savor this moment and allow us to think, what, in recent time that our dear Canon, Nikon, Leica, Olympus & many other imaging giants have done even so much as a built-in HDR feature? Let alone the multi-touch display thing, I’d settle for just an easy-to-use button layout & software operation interface. If they really think they can’t do it, they might as well consider making an iOS app and an iPhone/iPod Touch dock interface at the back of the camera and let us just enjoy taking pictures again.

Right now, my iPhone is practically a better camera than my EOS. I’d like to see it change.

Photokina, the photographers and the imaging industry’s State of the Union is near and looks like there’s going to be some shift in how the game is going to be played next.

Canon’s S90 & the G11 have attested to the image-quality-is-everything theory, and once again have reaffirm Canon’s commitment with their new gears, the S95, G12 and the next king to their 1Ds Kinghood, the Mark IV and the 1D Mark V.

Interestingly, “something hybrid” is expected to make some big splash at the September opening of the show; with the increasing interest in HD-DSLR filmmaking and innovation, I wouldn’t be surprised if movie recording will be a standard feature on every SLR just like how cameras are on your mobile phones.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if nothing interesting will come, though, it is only a camera, after all.

Follow focus is to Hollywood, for HD-DSLR is to filmmaking, Intuitfocus HF-IF1 is the 5D of HD-DSLR follow focusing:

The IF system can be used on all DSLR cameras with lenses from 14mm to 600mm, including shooting with Zeiss still or compact prime lenses. The IF system is easy to mount and is compatible with most lenses, and enables one to focus or to zoom precisely and quickly without any camera shake.

This thing about focusing will go away if camera makers solve the root problem. SLR cameras are designed to capture still photograph; our current focusing technology was based on a two-decade auto-focus problem, now that most DSLRs can also be used to shoot videos, a new auto-focus system is needed to solve this new problem.

Abstract: Detecting an object from the viewfinder, instead of snapping to a focused position, the system would identify movements, and from the distance, direction, speed and sets of moving patterns; calculate and predict a focusing point that would be maintained, and/or gradually shifted according to the position of the object and the camera’s film plane. Add to it, the existing image stabilizing technology, super-sensitive image sensor capable of high-ISO & wide dynamic range light capture — filmmaking will never be the same again.

Okay, that sounds like crazy sci-fi sensation, but remember a few decades ago when auto-focus, auto-exposure, hypersonic-wave focusing motor, were nothing but a dream? As many optimists would say, everything is possible as long as we can imagine it.

Postscript: Now that we’re talking sci-fi, has someone devised a non-linear digital image sensor that has “memory”? A sensor that not capture a single linear moment of image, but record a non-linear memory of the light itself? This would result in a truly RAW state so that the photography can be done entirely post-capture — think of a darkroom enlarger but with multiple negative films with infinite combinations of ƒ stops.

It would completely ruin the beauty of photography, but it’s no crime to image, no?

update: link to video & behind-the-scenes gallery added.

Bali, the quintessence of a rich spiritual & cultural community is empirically known throughout her history as the land where people come as tourists, but often leaving as artists. Some of the world’s most well known painters, musicians, photographers — artists — have spent time and at some point of their lives, lived on the island. There’s that quality about Bali that attracts souls of any kind.

John Stanmeyer, a member of the VII photo agency spent five years living there, during which, through the lens of his holga, he captured the enchanting life & spirits of the island’s living, breathing & invisible souls, and produced this exciting new title:

Spirits are everywhere in Bali. Trees, temples, mountains, stones, water appear sacred to the Balinese, all serving as a hand reaching out and into the otherworld of ancestors and gods and the maelstrom of good and evil. [...] This body of work stresses the historicity of spiritual life of Bali, consisting of deeply layered imagery that is witnessed, understood and explained in full by few, yet practiced by millions.

The book will come in regular & special limited edition (pricing to be announced) and the first edition is currently wrapping up production in Jakarta where an exclusive behind-the-scene gallery has been published, also up is a short video feature on VII Multimedia.