How does iPhoto han­dles files larger than it can sup­port? (Un)surprisingly well.

While we’re in this topic, iPhoto is now in the hands of one mil­lion unique users.

I have been silently wish­ing that this day will come.

While I love Instagram as an app/service, I don’t use the cam­era func­tion much. Hipstamatic is my go-to app when it comes to cap­tur­ing pho­tos; for its speed, sta­bil­ity, but mostly its spon­ta­neous nature.

What I’d do — much later — is to post my pick to insta­gram (user: @w1ll) and (option­ally) fed to either Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I’m still using the 3GS, so it isn’t the most effec­tive use of my time wait­ing, it’s slow but it beats post­ing the photo indi­vid­u­ally to each network.

The good news is Hipstamatic had metic­u­lously redesigned its shar­ing inter­face and baked Instagram’s API right in, so not only you can post pho­tos directly from it, but you’ll prop­erly get Hipstamatic-specific tag­ging in a nicely designed inter­face in its own Hipstamatic-style.

It’s just great that when two poten­tially com­pet­ing par­ties can shake hands and make the world a bet­ter place for their users.

On an inter­view about the part­ner­ship, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom reveals that there will be more apps to have such sup­port built-in. I’d be thrilled to see such inte­gra­tion with iPhoto, or bet­ter yet, iOS, the same treat­ment as Vimeo had.

© Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Four years since Martin Scorsese left the project, this poignant doc­u­men­tary on the life and the legacy of Bob Marley is see­ing the light of day. If you have seen The Last King of Scotland and the grip­ping 2010 doc­u­men­tary, Senna, you’d prob­a­bly have an idea what kind of cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence he’s show­ing us this time.

Also see: David Burnett’s Soul Rebel

© Tyler Stableford

Steve House shows the world what he can do while pho­tog­ra­pher Tyler Stableford shows the world how the new EOS 1DX & the Speedlite 600EX-RT see dif­fer­ently. BTS video here.

Shadowed by the main attrac­tion of this month, the new Speedlite from Canon isn’t get­ting the atten­tion they deserve:

The Speedlite 600EX-RT rep­re­sents the next gen­er­a­tion in wire­less flash sys­tems. In addi­tion to tra­di­tional opti­cal wire­less trans­mis­sion, the Speedlite 600EX-RT facil­i­tates radio con­trolled, two-way wire­less trans­mis­sion up to 98.4 feet, among up to 5 groups with a total of 15 indi­vid­ual Speedlites. Communicating on 2.4 GHz fre­quen­cies, the Speedlite 600EX-RT does not have the same direc­tional lim­i­ta­tions of tra­di­tional wire­less opti­cal trans­mit­ters. Where other wire­less sig­nals can be inter­rupted by phys­i­cal obsta­cles, radio con­trolled sys­tems excel. 15 trans­mis­sion chan­nels are avail­able, selec­table man­u­ally or auto­mat­i­cally, and radio trans­mis­sion IDs can be set to pre­vent mis­fir­ing in the event of sig­nal inter­fer­ence on the same channel.

Canon’s Speedlite line was in dire need of a revamp. The IR-based wire­less solu­tion doesn’t work well out­door and con­trol­ling them requires a rocket sci­ence degree. This looks like a viable answer to the users’ cry for help.

Syl Arena, the author of Speedliter’s Handbook, wrote a wish list and have it revis­ited after try­ing out the new toy.

It is very likely that Apple has recy­cled the 5 Mp back illu­mi­nated CMOS image sen­sor from the iPhone 4. [sic] That unit was the Omnivision OV5650. The OV5650 is the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion back illu­mi­na­tion (BSI) tech­nol­ogy from OmniVision. This 5 Mp cam­era fea­tures 1.75 µm pix­els, and is designed to deliver DSC qual­ity in a mobile phone application.

Follow the link for close-up pho­tos and die image for the object(s) in ques­tion. (via iFixit)

On August 2009, I wrote:

The iPhone has changed the rule of the game, uplift the whole thing alto­gether and turn the game into some mature play, they move the indus­try with real inven­tions, they put some smiles in a lot of people’s faces. The bro­ken voice­mail? Fixed. The unnec­es­sary but­tons & clumsy inter­face? Changed for­ever. Technology that we can touch? Done. Copy & Paste? Piece of cake! And not to men­tion how mil­lions of devel­op­ers joined up the ride and develop 3-rd party Apps, help­ing the wheel of inno­va­tion move faster.

[…]

The truth is, the race is not going away. New prod­ucts intro­duced by Nikon will soon get a respond from Canon, while oth­ers will fol­low, this will hap­pen again next year, and the year after that. The cycle that moves the indus­try are being dri­ven by mar­ket demand & com­pe­ti­tion, no longer by pure sci­ence. Hopefully, some­one will make the effort to bring inno­va­tion back to that cycle; fresh ideas on the world wide web and how the images came to life will cer­tainly bring new par­a­digms in the com­ing year, some new play­ers will emerge and are already doing cre­ative things on the mar­ket­ing side for their upcom­ing sur­prises, one could only hope that they do some­thing right this time.

So yeah. I agree with Jean-Louis Gassée, and I like his clos­ing line.

It’s not just sharp; the dis­play also shows great bright col­ors with­out any saturation-gimmickry like you get with OLED dis­plays. Photographs look amaz­ingly good, but also amaz­ingly true-to-life. It’s no coin­ci­dence that iPhoto was cho­sen as the app to demo on stage and debut along­side the device. Photos don’t just look sharp when zoomed out — they look sharp when zoomed in. The iPhone 4/4S can show print-quality pho­tos at small sizes, but the new iPad can show print qual­ity pho­tos at hang-it-on-the-wall sizes.

This is what I’m talk­ing about when I crit­i­cized Lytro for its over-done simplicity.

Any prod­uct, not just cam­era, must be usable the first time a not-so-curious soul picked it up. Most of us today strug­gle even just to turn on many of today’s dig­i­tal camera.

The linked video depicts a first time user uses a Mac OS X desk­top com­puter, but I would love to see one where some­body who never used a cam­era before attempts to cap­ture their first ever pho­to­graph with the most pop­u­lar point-and-shoot, or even a dig­i­tal SLR camera.