The early pioneers of photography, the ones who nearly choked to death inhaling toxic chemicals needed for making prints, would probably faint if they could see there is a smartphone case with a built-in photo printer.
The Prynt Case, a smash hit on Kickstarter earlier this year, is now shipping to the nearly 9,000 people who backed the campaign. For the rest of us, the campaign raised enough money for a huge production run to make it available for order in time for Christmas.
Tech accessories tend to solve a single problem really well. The SELFLASH, a small ring light you attach to your smartphone for selfies, is not just around to make you look pretty.
In offering a flattering wink of light in a variety of colors and intensities, the SELFLASH also provides up to 128 GB of storage for file transfers, can serve as a backup battery for your phone and has a Bluetooth tracker. Not satisfied with your smartphone’s camera? A pro model of the SELFLASH also comes with a 15.1-megapixel camera.
Nobody likes a blurry picture. And while smartphone snappers might think they don’t miss a viewfinder, holding an old-school camera close to the face allowed photographers to use their arms against their torsos to steady things.
With a smartphone, which is held out in front of our bodies, there’s far more risk of shake and blur. Luckily, the Grip&Shoot is a simple solution that will steady the hand.
Give Aaron Johnson the chance to give you his elevator pitch and he just might convince you that you need a tabletop photo studio.
But even if you accept his points, you probably don’t have studio know-how or the room for the lights, the tripod, backdrops and a ladder.
Johnson answers with the SHOTBOX, a collapsable tabletop studio with seamless diffused lighting with a setup that can have you camera-ready in seconds. The SHOTBOX is designed for iPhone and other smartphone users who want to make simple product pictures, digitize family photos and copy documents.
There is a slight soapbox on which I stand sometimes when I write about photography. Nothing too high-minded, but when the topic allows, I will gently remind people to print out their pictures from their iPhones and computers.
Today, I stand before you, not on a soapbox, but on a short stack of photo books. The books are designed with iPad apps from pictures I made on my smartphone. I chose three companies I liked for ease of design and the final product.
All three – Cleen, Mosaic and ZOOMBOOK – have apps that allow you to quickly design a 20-page book from your mobile device and have a tracking number for shipping all within 10 minutes. In four to 10 business days, a hardcover book arrives in the mail that you can neatly shelve.
Some restaurants take pride in offering perfect food and wine pairings. Others think more in terms of food and phone pairings.
Yes, you can blame Instagram if your restaurant is a little brighter and the presentation of the food is a bit fussier. Restauranteurs are trying to cash in on our obsession with photographing our meals by giving Instagram users better lighting and compositional conditions to make more appetizing shots.
Instagram continues to play with the color wheel, introducing three new filters Monday the company says get inspiration from weekend outdoor adventures.
In addition to the filters, named Lark, Reyes and Juno, Instagram now allows users to include emoji on hashtags.
Since surpassing more than 300 million users in December, Instagram has added several new features to the photo-sharing app. It added five filters in December and last month, rolled out a new app called Layout, which allows users to combine multiple images in a single post.
