photography

Bored with Instagram? Tired of Hipstamatic? Then perhaps your iPhone photography hobby should enter its color-splash period. Color splash photography creates arresting images, adding a dash of color to black-and-white photos. There are a number of color-splash apps (such as ColorSplash) for iOS, and MacPhun earlier this month brought its Color Splash Studio app from the Mac to the iPhone. Here's how it works:… Read more

Updated 6/12/12 after a chat with Apple.

It didn't make the stage during the Apple WWDC keynote, but Apple rolled out a stealth upgrade to its Aperture 3 professional photo organization and editing software. Aperture 3.3 includes a variety of stability and performance updates as well as interface tweaks, most notably to support the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display; the biggest news for more general users is that the application now supports AVCHD video files.

Some of the changes sound like they're designed to make Aperture a little more consumer friendly. For instance, it … Read more

As a replacement for the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro that a lot of pro video and photo editors use, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display may sound mighty tasty. Faster innards, with a high-resolution, high-contrast 15.4-inch display and all the essential ports -- as long as you're willing to possibly have to waste one of the two essential Thunderbolt ports with dongles for FireWire and Ethernet -- at a lighter 4.5 pounds is a potentially winning combination if you've been schlepping around one of the older, heavier models. On the downside, still a glossy screen, though Apple claims less glare.… Read more

Consumer gadgets can be very addictive. Almost as addictive as french fries, onion rings, and anything else you can cook in hot oil. Even the gadgets themselves.

Photographer Henry Hargreaves has captured our insatiable hunger for new technology with a series of startling images of deep-fried electronics. We already knew we were digital junkies, but these images don't go down so easily. … Read more

HDR, or high dynamic range, can add clarity and depth to your iPhone photos. The iPhone's native camera app has an HDR option (see Sharon's post about it and HDR photography), and it does an admirable job of filling in the highs and lows of a photo. I found that I was able to achieve even better results with TrueHDR, a $1.99 app.

When you launch TrueHDR, you're given four options for creating an HDR image: Auto Capture, Semi-Auto Capture, Manual Capture, and Choose Pictures.

With Auto Capture, you simply tap the camera button and hold … Read more

The iPhone 4S' camera does an admirable job in a variety of lighting conditions, particularly when you remember that the device is a phone first, and a camera second. Still, if you find yourself shooting in low-light situations, you probably have noticed that your photos look blurry or grainy. Cortex Camera is a $2.99 app that can reduce this graininess or noise when shooting in low light. Here's how it works:

Instead of taking a single, still photo, Cortex Camera actually captures a short video when you hit the shutter button. Thus, you will need to hold your … Read more

Adobe Systems released Lightroom 4.1 last night, supporting new cameras and lenses, squashing some bugs, adding a couple of notable features -- and in at least one high-profile case, contributing to the angst of a customer of Apple's rival Aperture software.

Aperture beat Lightroom to market and leapfrogged it with lower pricing in this category for higher-end photo editing and cataloging software. But this market is Adobe's bread and butter, and the company is working hard to turn the crank for improvements as fast as it can. More on that competition and customer angst later, but first, … Read more

As the saying goes: "The best camera is the one you have with you." More often than not, for me, that camera is my iPhone. I always have it on me, it's ready to take a photo in a matter of seconds, it takes amazing photos, and I can edit and share those photos all from the same device.

With the iPhone's camera continuing to be used more and more, there are plenty of accessories available to aid iPhone photographers in getting the best shot possible.

Here are five tools you should have in your bag:… Read more

How does Google and its high-tech-specs effort top company VP Sebastian Thrun's viral photo of a dad's-eye view of Thrun swinging his boy round in circles?

Easy. It puts the Project Glass spectacles on someone, puts that someone on a trampoline, then puts the setting on "video" and lets that someone start jumping and filming.… Read more