photography - page 30

Apple is making a big deal about the jazzed-up photo book capabilities in iLife ’11, and for good reason — being able to cradle a vibrant, printed image still trumps the digital alternative. But iPhoto isn’t the only way to transform pixels into ink.

Simply Postcards lets users grab any photo off their iPhone and snail-mail it to an address in the U.S. or elsewhere. Postcards ship the day after ordering them, and prices range from $1-$2 for a stateside address to double that for international cards.

The app is free, and so is the first postcard; the Cult is going to use its free credits to brighten the Microsoft HQ mailbox with images of our new MacBook Airs!

Photo effects apps are two-a-penny on the App Store now, so if your photography app is going to make a splash it needs to offer something more than just whimsical visual effects and a selection of fake-Polaroid borders.

Pinhole Camera claims to turn your iPhone into a digital pinhole camera. It’s quite fun to use, mocked up like a home-made pinhole cam made of sticky tape and cardboard.

But what sets it apart isn’t the basic photos – it’s the double exposure feature that lets you merge two photos into one.

Despite a massive lion lurking in the background of the press invite for today’s event, the big news didn’t have much to do with OS X 10.7 (now officially “Lion”); instead, the big news was about the new MacBook Air pair, the Mac App Store, FaceTime for Mac — and iLife ’11

In fact, iLife almost stole the thunder from the later “one more thing” MacBook Air announcement. And for good reason: There’re some really impressive features included in this round of what is quite possibly the best software suite to ever come standard on a manufacturer’s entire product line.

You’ve always wanted to paint your face up like a singer at the Beijing opera, right?

No? You sure?

There’s no other way of saying this: Camera Camouflage is sneaky.

It’s a camera app that goes out of its way to avoid looking like a camera. It disguises itself as an incoming phone call. You can even instruct it to activate your phone’s ringtone, so you can pretend to take the call and hold the phone to your ear.

At which point, things get even sneakier.

iOS 4.1’s ability to take high-dynamic range photos has been a much buzzed about new feature particularly to amateur photogs looking to maximize the quality of their casual smartphone snaps, but Apple does not appear to have gone it alone: according to some excellent research done by MacRumors’ Eric Slivka, it appears that Apple acquired a small, Cambridge-based company called Imsense to bring the feature to an iPhone near you.

Before being bought by Apple, Imsense did business in a technology called “eye-fidelity” which used software algorithms to remap image tons in order to produce nearly instantaneous Dynamic Range Correction in both standard and HDR photos. While the iOS 4.1 implementation of HDR is done in the classical fashion of blending three separate exposures into a single image, Imsense’s Eye-Fidelity algorithms appear to be used in iOS 4.1 to further spruce the resulting image up and make the colors pop.

It seems surprising that Apple could make any move to buy a company and not immediately be found out, but it appears that the acquisition went down under everyone’s nose back in July, with three Cupertino officers named directors of Imsense on July 15th, 2010. Could Apple once again be getting a tight grip on the secrecy they’ve lost handle of over the past year?

The iPhone 4 brought changes in shape, function, features, and so on, but to the joy of many cell phone photographers, the device now includes a rear facing 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash and a forward facing VGA-quality camera. Apple enhanced the cameras via software improvements like FaceTime, zoom, etc. linked to the hardware changes above. These changes will probably calm the complaints about the camera that I heard about on the previous iPhone models. However, regardless of the issues users have developed exciting ways to use the camera and there are innovative third-party applications to help along the way.

One such app is Camera+, which is a joint effort between Taptaptap and Canadian photographer Lisa Bettany. I figured it was worth taking a look at it since it was on sale Sunday for $1.99 (regular price is $4.99).