Digital Photography

Sony QX smart lens

Sony announced a new series of lens cameras, designed specifically as smartphone attachments. Each QX lens has no screen and no body. The camera smarts are inside the lens housing, communicating with the smartphone via Bluetooth. There’s an attachment that connects the lens to your phone, though that is not strictly necessary. The QX app converts your smartphone screen into a realtime viewfinder. When you press the shutter release on the lens, a compressed version of the image is sent to your phone’s image library. The full-size images are stored in a memory card on the lens.

I really like this idea, though it is hard to imagine mounting the lens on my phone every time I want to take a picture. Something you might get used to, I suspect, and worth it if the images are significantly better than any I can capture with my phone’s built-in camera.

One aspect that I find most intriguing is the fact that the app can control the lens remotely, with the ability to release the shutter, start/stop movie recordings, and adjust common photographic settings like shooting mode, zoom, Auto Focus area and more. This means I can mount the lens on a tripod, move to a comfortable position, make all my adjustments, then take my shot, all remotely. In addition, this lets me take my shot without touching the lens, avoiding vibrations that might affect focus.

Two Eight

A new photography blog with a clear vision on what they want to provide the reader. It seems like a great idea.

Flickr offers free Pro accounts

Flickr is offering all users a free 3 month Pro account upgrade. Just go to the site and sign-in and the offer will be waiting for you. I haven’t used my Flickr account in years, but I decided to give it another try. My username is jdalrymple if you’re interested.

iPhone photography festival

iPhoneArt.com and the Santa Monica Art Studios presents the LA MOBILE ARTS FESTIVAL. Los Angeles celebrates pioneers of iPhoneography and the underground mobile arts movement with nine days of interactive digital art–iPhone imagery, sound- and video-based works, sculptural and performance art installations at the historic Santa Monica airplane hangar turned cutting-edge arts community.

I wish I was in LA, I’d definitely stop in to this festival.

Camera+ tops 6 million in sales, $5.1 million revenue

We’ve just hit our 6 millionth sale for everyone’s favorite iPhone photo app, Camera+. It’s been a while since I’ve done a sales figures post with all the number/charts/etc. But after taking a look at Camera+ sales over time, I found it interesting to see how much they’ve increased over the past several months, with the bulk of this being attributed to the success of the iPhone 4S.The app has earned us a grand total of $5,125,844 to date.

Impressive.

Telephoto lens for iPhone

Photojojo:

Simply put, our sheepishness turned to sheer addiction (the good kind, not the itchy-skinned paranoid kind) — and we started taking our iPhone Telephoto Lens with us everywhere.

Yeah, it may look funny, but if it takes great pics, it would be worth the investment.

30 high speed photographs

High speed photography is a technique in which a camera is set up to take pictures of objects in motion that would normally be too fast to be seen by the naked eye. It usually involves a tremendous amount of … Continued

∞ The photography of Joshua L. Smith

I mentioned last night that I didn’t get why the world’s most expensive photograph sold for so much, so I thought I’d show you so photos that I do like. These are shots from self-taught photographer Joshua L. Smith.

∞ World's most expensive photograph

Michael Zhang:

Titled “Rhein II”, it’s a 1999 photograph by Andreas Gursky showing the Rhine river. Last night it sold for a whopping $4,338,500 at Christie’s.

Shawn King sent this to me tonight. I have to say, I just don’t get it.