Over at The Next Web, Nancy Messieh wrote a piece titled ‘Did Apple rede­fine pho­tog­ra­phy with the iPhone?’. In it, she raised the ques­tion and laid out her argu­ments to sup­port her hypoth­e­sis on Apple’s increas­ing invest­ment in iPhone’s pho­to­graphic capa­bil­ity, and the dis­rup­tive effect it had on the way we deal with photography:

Some might say that the iPhone has cer­tainly rein­vented pho­tog­ra­phy but not for the bet­ter. With the rise of apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic, PicPlz and count­less oth­ers, fil­tered smart­phone pho­tog­ra­phy has dom­i­nated social net­works much in the same way that the iPhone has dom­i­nated Flickr. The prob­lem with apps like Instagram is that some peo­ple take pho­tographs of things they nor­mally wouldn’t, slap a fil­ter on it, and think it’s fit for shar­ing. Whether this is Instagram’s fault or not really comes down to opin­ion. Would those peo­ple be just as likely to share pho­tos taken in front of the bath­room mir­ror, pho­tos of their break­fast, pets, and more? […] Instagram’s power is in the fact that it cre­ates a com­mu­nal expe­ri­ence. Part of the allure is the fil­ters, which are pos­si­bly among the very best avail­able in any smart­phone app, but what good are shared pho­tos if no one is look­ing at them. Apps like Instagram cre­ate an oppor­tu­nity to share images, but when we take a closer, more pro­fes­sional look at them, do they still meet the grade?

The thing that makes the iPhone a com­pelling tool for pho­tog­ra­phy is its straight­for­ward­ness. You shoot, you tin­ker, you share, and peo­ple can see it imme­di­ately. Technicalities dis­ap­pear behind the final image’s effects & fil­ters; the moment becomes the indis­putable story with­out sec­ond guess­ing the shut­ter speed and the aper­ture value.

Camera mak­ers have long fought for tech­ni­cal edge and spent ridicu­lous amount of money mar­ket­ing their prod­ucts that way. It turned the table around and made the cam­eras, lenses the star of the show with the pho­tog­ra­pher as the side­kick. Did some­one know what kind of can­vas, brush and paint Da Vinci used for the Mona Lisa? Does it matter?

What mat­ters to me now is that what­ever the rea­son iPhones are the most pop­u­lar dig­i­tal cam­era in Flickr, it puts a smile to its users and the friends & fam­ily sur­rounds him/her. It made pho­tog­ra­phy fun again.

© Jason McCarthy

Lovely per­sona behind the mil­i­tary uniform.

© 1949 Stanley Kubrick/LIFE

Take a closer look at those pair of eyes. He sees beyond his, or the subject’s points of view, some­how man­aged to raise the view­ing field to that of the spectator’s and infuse a lit­tle touch of his magic. He was a com­plex soul fight­ing his free­dom off it, encap­su­lat­ing the com­plex nature of human ten­den­cies into a frames after frames of golden moments.

From the curators:

Images in this col­lec­tion show the drama—both human and artistic—that infuse Kubrick’s work. Included are: the pho­to­graph used on the cover of the Kubrick book, Drama & Shadows, of a young woman mak­ing her way down a steep set of stairs while car­ry­ing a pile of books pre­car­i­ously tilt­ing books; show­girl Rosemary Williams intently apply­ing makeup as the equally intent young Kubrick pho­tographs her. His sub­jects are as var­ied as the city he worked in: he catches Broadway actress Betsy Von Furstenberg study­ing her lines; prize­fighter Walter Cartier in the cor­ner between rounds; Dwight Eisenhower, also between rounds—after World War II, before he became President of the United States—when he was Columbia University’s pres­i­dent, and per­form­ers from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Also by Kubrick: Chicago, 1949. (via DF)

Michael Reichmann threw a first-look on the Fujifilm X10:

… the laws of physics get in the way of our fan­tasies. The major cam­era mak­ers are doing a fine job of push­ing the bound­aries of what’s pos­si­ble, but there are still fun­da­men­tal lim­its. Ultimate low noise requires large sen­sors with large pix­els. Large sen­sors require large lenses. Fast lenses for large sen­sors are inher­ently big and heavy.

And yet:

The cam­era has a 12 Megapixel 2/3 inch EXR-CMOS sen­sor. This means that the sen­sor is 8.8 X 6.6mm (typo cor­rected) in size, about dou­ble the sur­face area of most pocket digi­cams. The lens has a 7.1 to 28.4mm focal range, which trans­lates to 28 – 112mm in full frame 35mm terms. This means a 4X mul­ti­pli­ca­tion fac­tor com­pared to stan­dard FF 35mm. By com­par­i­son a Micro Four Thirds cam­era has a 2X fac­tor sen­sor, while a typ­i­cal digi­cam sen­sor might have a fac­tor of 5X to 7X.

Another thing — the zoom ring:

One of the X-10’s sin­gu­lar fea­tures, which will appeal to many pho­tog­ra­phers, is that the lens zooms via a twist ring on the lens bar­rel. This ring is also the camera’s On / Off switch. To oper­ate, sim­ply turn the ring, which switches the cam­era on with the lens at first at its widest focal length. Then, if you wish, con­tinue to rotate the ring until you have the fram­ing that you want. This is a very appeal­ing fea­ture com­pared to the stepped elec­tric zoom func­tion of most other cam­eras in this class. The OFF detent is nicely firm and the zoom feel is very lin­ear, with a smooth heli­cal gear mov­ing the lens from 28mm to 112mm in less than 45 degrees. It didn’t take more than a cou­ple of days of shoot­ing to deter­mine that hav­ing a man­ual zoom ring on the lens, com­bined with the On / Off switch, is one of the clever­est new cam­era designs in ages. Kudos to Fuji for com­ing up with some­thing that is not only unique but really pho­tog­ra­pher friendly and useful.

Design turns prob­lems into solu­tions, obsta­cle into advan­tage, but most impor­tantly breed­ing imag­i­na­tion through lim­i­ta­tion — in Fuji’s case: phys­i­cal size vs. opti­cal excel­lence. As I have said repeat­edly on the excel­lence of Fuji’s new X-series team, they seem to have nur­tured some great design virtues and approach in their X prod­ucts, and the results are pay­ing off.

© SyFy

Katie Sackhoff:

“It’s inter­est­ing that every­one thinks there is some­thing hid­den in that Last Supper photo, like if you look hard enough, you can find a hid­den mes­sage in it. To be hon­est, I think we would have had to be in on it to cre­ate a hid­den mes­sage, and we were all just there hav­ing a photo shoot.”

Da Vinci was a genius. (via @Shanghaidaddy)

Down at AdobeMax 2011, Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs (ATL) group mem­ber, Jue Wang, stunned audi­ence with its Image Deblurring tech­nol­ogy sneak peak. DPreview:

Adobe has released videos from its AdobeMAX event, includ­ing cov­er­age of the image deblur fea­ture for remov­ing cam­era shake that has gen­er­ated so much excite­ment. The company’s video shows fea­ture in much bet­ter detail than the audience-shot ver­sion cur­rently on the web. Shown as a pro­to­type of a tech­nol­ogy that is being con­sid­ered for future ver­sions of Photoshop, the func­tion analy­ses the move­ment of the cam­era dur­ing an expo­sure and then cor­rects for it.

One of the image depicts an Adobe employee sit­ting onstage which Adobe admits was syn­thet­i­cally blurred ‘to be enter­tain­ing and rel­e­vant to the audience’:

The image of Kevin Lynch was syn­thet­i­cally blurred from a sharp image taken from the web. What do we mean by syn­thetic blur? A syn­thetic blur was cre­ated by extract­ing the cam­era shake infor­ma­tion from another real blurry image and apply­ing it to the Kevin Lynch image to cre­ate a real­is­tic sim­u­la­tion. This kind of blur is cre­ated with our research tool. Because the cam­era shake data is real, it is much more com­pli­cated than any­thing we can sim­u­late using Photoshop’s blur capa­bil­i­ties. When this new image was loaded as a JPEG into the deblur plug-in, the soft­ware has no idea it was syn­thet­i­cally generated.

The thing about syn­thet­i­cally processed exam­ple is that it rarely rep­re­sents real world sit­u­a­tion. Common blur­ri­ness doesn’t have pat­terns but organ­i­cally pro­duced defects caused by mus­cle move­ments, cam­era shake and all sorts of nat­ural ele­ments, in which alto­gether cre­ates a unique shake pat­tern beyond syn­thetic reproduction.

If you look closely on how Jue Wang did the demo, you’d notice that the deblur­ring tech­nique involves ana­lyz­ing the image and load­ing a cer­tain pre-medicated deblur­ring recipe. It is an impres­sive feat, I won’t deny that. But until I try the tech­nol­ogy on my own, with my own image with­out any inter­ven­tion from the lab, I’ll stick to my breath­ing tech­nique and increase my arm’s mus­cle strenght.

© Diane Walker

© Apple

The iPhone 4 is the world’s most pop­u­lar dig­i­tal cam­era accord­ing to flickr. Coming to the new iPhone 4S is an all-new cam­era system:

Great pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t just about megapix­els — it’s about light, too. The all-new, advanced optics in this cam­era work together to make sure what­ever light you have gives you the best image pos­si­ble. The cus­tom lens uses five pre­ci­sion ele­ments to shape incom­ing light, which makes the entire image sharper. The larger f/2.4 aper­ture lets in more light, so pho­tos look brighter and bet­ter. And the advanced hybrid infrared fil­ter keeps out harm­ful IR light, so you’ll see more accu­rate and uni­form colors.

What it means plainly is that the iPhone 4S is a seri­ous image-making tool; they under­stand what makes a cam­era great, what fea­ture is rel­e­vant and use­ful to take great pho­tographs and they aren’t shy to invest and inno­vate beyond the realm of the mar­ket today.

I never heard a cam­era man­u­fac­turer that says ‘more megapix­els doesn’t make a cam­era great, they make it worst’. Apple did, and they’re also right about one thing: “It just might be the only cam­era you’ll ever need.”

After teas­ing Carousel a few weeks ago, Adobe seems to have more than just a photo library sync­ing plat­form up on its sleeves, dubbed the Adobe® Creative Cloud, is a membership-based cre­ative tools built upon Carousel’s base:

The ini­tial intro­duc­tion of Adobe Creative Cloud is cen­tered around an inno­v­a­tive col­lec­tion of Adobe Touch Apps that re-imagine cre­ative soft­ware for the mobile age and enable tablet devices to be an inte­gral part of the cre­ative process. Adobe Creative Cloud will become the hub for view­ing, shar­ing and sync­ing of files cre­ated by Adobe Touch Apps and Adobe Creative Suite, and includes 20GB of cloud stor­age. It will quickly develop into a ser­vice that will deliver access to Adobe’s flag­ship cre­ative appli­ca­tions and ser­vices and become an essen­tial resource for any­one inter­ested in creativity

No pric­ing scheme it being intro­duced now, but it is clear that Adobe is reimag­in­ing its future — in a big and bold way.

Remember the say­ing about ‘skat­ing to where the puck is going’ (Wayne Gretzky)? This is Adobe lay­ing its bricks of the past, for a future in the web of clouds.

© Terje Hellesö

Swedish Nature Photographer of the Year, Terje Hellesö, on a radio debate accus­ing him of doc­tor­ing a num­ber of his images, par­tic­u­larly the one fea­tured above:

“No no no, of course not. Not under any cir­cum­stances,” he said.

Four days later:

“Not all the pic­tures are manip­u­lated, just a few of the lynx pictures.”

A week after that:

“The jury believes that there are likely to have been images manip­u­lated even before 2011, mean­ing that he can not retain the title,” the agency explained in a state­ment on Monday.

Sacha Goldberger on his Before and after jog­ging series:

“Then I stopped peo­ple who were run­ning who were totally anony­mous and asked them if they could sprint, because I didn’t want that they were only hot and wet, I wanted that they were breath­less. So this is what you see in the pic­ture; the mouth is nearly open because they are try­ing to get their breath. I told them to run run run and when they were very tired and couldn’t run more, come back and I would take the pic­ture. It pro­duced some totally crazy pictures.”

The series isn’t titled ‘Before and After Sprinting’, no?