Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Computational Photography & AI: Where Do We Go From Here?

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As we watch algorithms and AI do their thing, we’re all wondering where they will take photography. Back in the early days of DSLRs (and still today, if we’re being honest), many professional photographers lamented the rise of the technology that took the high bar of access to the profession down in cost for both the purchase and the practice. Gone were the days of film and the time and skill to develop that film. With the DSLR, anyone with a memory card could now have instant feedback on whether the exposure at hand was good or bad.

Of course, this lower bar brought its own set of problems and challenges that we’re still sorting out. I’ve heard photographers hand-wringing over the glory days of film and how soccer moms with a Canon Rebel ruined the wedding industry. The difference between good enough and great is a tough standard to sell a photography customer and maybe that’s what the grumpy photographer is talking about there.

But we’re past all of that now – for the better, I think. While I love my old film cameras, I’m not grabbing a film camera on most days when the convenience of digital allows me to increase the volume of images with virtually no additional cost.

Smartphones changed the photography game again in the post-iPhone era. We still have this lower bar of quality to answer at the industry level for digital photography. Quick editing apps on a phone took some timesuck away from editing and made casual photos look better with little effort.

And now computational photography and AI are driving photography to a different place again. But is that okay for the art of photography? Is this another film-to-digital transition? Is it like the death of the compact camera in the 2008-2012 era? Or is it a whole new thing? [Read more…]

 

Long Live Disc Media: The Case for a Digital Media Platform Standard

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I want to stop using CDs and DVDs but the lack of a standardized digital media platform is keeping disc-based content delivery around. While the 40-and-under crowd could probably live without discs, we have two generations of people ahead of us that just won’t get there. Of course, that means we’ll probably be burning discs for the next 15-20 years and keeping a should-be-legacy format alive. [Read more…]

SDXC Cards – What the New Format Means to Photographers

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The SDXC card specification has been announced for more than a year now.  However, it’s only now that we are starting to see products supporting this new specification.  There are a few important things to note about SDXC cards and how they fit into photographers’ gear bags.

The SDXC specification comes from the SD Association, which is an industry standards organization founded by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba in 2000.   If a manufacturer is going to use SD technology in product, they have to license the right to use that technology from the SD Association. Most, if not all, of the major camera manufacturers are members of the SD Association and license the patents and other intellectual property necessary for developing SD-compatible cameras and memory cards.

There are a number of different specifications that the SD Association has developed over the past decade, including SD, miniSD, microSD, SDHC, miniSDHC, microSDHC and SDXC, among others.  Each specification has its own limitations or capabilities.  For instance, the original SD specification offered storage only up to 2GB.  When SDHC came along, it took the capacity up to 32GB.  The latest specification, SDXC, offers storage capacities up to 2TB. [Read more…]

Point-and-Shoots to Suit Your Personality

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Maria Sharapova and her Canon Powershot Diamond Collection

Camera manufacturers design point-and-shoot cameras for the specific needs and wants of consumers the same way that they target their DSLRs to different professional markets. While we as photographers will always sing the praises of how awesome our DSLRs are, the general population will opt for a “nice” point-and-shoot. We know many of these people and they make come to us asking camera questions. Here’s a round up of cameras for the different personalities in your life. If they’re a student, link them over to my post on Back-To-School digital cameras.

Author’s Note: The camera’s above are a special series of Canon Powershots that Maria Sharapova designed with Canon. They were available in a contest.

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Is the Nokia Booklet 3G Good for Photographers?

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We’ve blogged before about laptops for photographers, but the announcement of the Nokia Booklet 3G has me excited as a photographer. You can read more about the netbook at Gizmodo and check out the intro video below. There are lots of reasons and features that this laptop has that could be useful to us photographers, although we are being promised more specs soon at Nokia World next week. Here are a couple of reasons why this laptop has me excited.

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When Image Noise/Grain Can be Useful

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Inglourious Basterds

Despite us photographers always wanting cleaner images like in the example of the recently announced Canon G11, there are times when image noise can be useful to us. A while back, I wrote about how it can be used in your advantage to satisfy your clients. With the closer merger of video and stills these days and in honor of Grindhouse-style movies like the upcoming Inglourious Basterds here is when image noise and grain can be useful to you.

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Changing Camera Systems: The Pros and Cons – Part I

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Canon 5D Mark II

With camera manufacturers in stiff competition with one another, if you pay attention to what features they work hardest on you’ll begin to realize that they also tailor their products to certain segments of the buyers and that many of them pride some features well over others in order to get sales. Recently, I was in search of a new camera system and if you are too, check out this brief list of the pros and cons of each system. This list includes the most popular systems: Nikon, Canon and Sony. The next list will include the rest (which in some ways give the top three a run for their money.) [Read more…]

Could Olympus DSLR’s be Getting a New “PMOS” Sensor?

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Advanced Imaging Pro has an interesting article on Kodak’s latest developments in sensor manufacturing. This was found via Flickr, which alludes to the possibility of a PMOS sensor.

The new PMOS apparently a new take on CMOS pixels and how they work on a camera sensor. In the Kodak PMOS the underlying polarity of the silicon is reversed, so the absence of electrons is used to detect a signal. This works the opposite way that normal pixels work: which instead detects electrons that are generated when light interacts with the sensor surface.

In addition to this, a new CCD sensor is being developed that, according to Samsung (as noted in the article), only uses 1/10th of the power that a regular CCD sensor uses: which means an insanely long battery life.

For current Olympus (and Panasonic) users, you can be glad to hear that the new sensors are focused on low-light photography, speed and HD video capabilities. However, we can still only just wait to see the results. When the Live MOS sensor was released it promised better low-light capabilities. In truth, it couldn’t match the capabilities of Canon or Nikon. Further, that isn’t a totally fair statement because of the fact that the sensor is smaller in size.

The new PMOS sensor could be what we see in the higher end pro camera models.