Photography

With the launch of the iPro lens system, Schneider Optics has decided it's ready for a piece of the iPhone lens-attachment market. The product centers on a robust aluminum case, to which separate fisheye and wide-angle lenses can be attached, as can a tripod, via the provided adaptor. Read More

So, you don't like the way your head is almost touching the top of the frame in that one photo? Or, perhaps you think that shot of the horse in the field would look more majestic if it were wider. Well, now you can insert a slot of sky above you, or a couple of side columns of extra grassy field, using Adva-Soft's AntiCrop app. As long as the background is fairly homogenous (sky, grass, sand, water, etc.) the software will automatically add more of it, in whichever direction you wish. Read More

Canada's Tamaggo Inc. previewed an egg-shaped photographic device at this year's CES that's claimed to capture navigable high resolution 360-degree panoramas of its surroundings with a single click. Rather than stitch together lots of different photos taken one after the other in quick succession, the Tamaggo 360-Imager would appear to do for photography what lens attachments like the GoPano micro did for iPhone video. I say appear to do because the device on show in Las Vegas was a non-functioning prototype, so we've yet to see what the technology can actually do. Read More

As someone who spends a good deal of time taking photographs of new consumer technology, only to subsequently enjoy hours of tedium touching up my snaps in image manipulation software, I have to admit to being pretty excited by the new 3D PhotoBench 260 from Ortery Technologies. Shown at CES 2012 this week, the desktop photography studio is claimed to be the first system in the world to take product shots or create 360 degree Flash/HTML 5 animations with a pure white background. Read More

Samsung has unveiled its latest DualView compact camera. The range, which kicked-off in 2009 with the release of the TL225 and TL220 models, packs front and rear LCD displays so photographers can get themselves in the picture without the hit and miss framing that results from holding the camera at arm's length. The new DV300F is the first in the DualView line to include Wi-Fi connectivity to allow users to cut out the middleman and email shots or upload them to their social media site of choice directly from the camera. Read More

We've been hearing about trillions in the news so much lately, it's easy to become desensitized to just what a colossal number that is. Recently, a team of brilliant researchers at MIT's Media Lab (ML) built an imaging system capable of making an exposure every picosecond- one trillionth of a second. Just how fast is that? Why, a thousand times faster than a nanosecond, of course. Put another way, one picosecond is to one second as one second is to about 31,700 years. That's fast. So fast, in fact, this system can literally slow down light itself and it does so in a manner unlike any other camera. Read More

Snapheal, to be released on Wednesday, is a photo editing app for Mac which "can do magic", at least according to MacPhun, the app's developer. In addition to the usual tweaks and minor edits allowed by vanilla entry-level photo editing software, Snapheal allows you to erase whole objects - including large ones - from your photographs. Gizmag took an advance copy of Snapheal 1.0 for a spin. Could it be magic? Judge for yourself. Read More

The cameras on most smart phones tend to be rather simple affairs so it's not surprising that savvy inventors have dreamed up numerous add-on attachments such as mini-microscopes and wide/telephoto adapters. They do tend to be rather elaborate and brand-specific, however, not to mention somewhat pricey. Not this one though - the Macro Cell Lens Band is a simple close-up photography solution that has two definite pluses - it works on any camera equipped phone and it's very inexpensive. Read More

After attracting more than three times its funding target on the Kickstarter crowd-sourcing portal, the TriggerTrap universal camera trigger is now speeding towards production. The battery-operated, pocket-sized device has five built-in trigger modes - including firing the flash or shutter release in response to light or sound input - and is compatible with a growing list of camera models. It has a touch-sensitive user interface and an LCD display to help take the guesswork out of choosing settings, and can control hundreds of different cameras via wired or IR trigger systems. It has also been built to allow (if not actively encourage) hacking. Read More