'Gulp' is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman, depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics. The film has broken a world record for the 'largest stop-motion animation set', with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet.
For more than ten years, Swedish phone camera software company Scalado has been spearheading imaging innovations — but few people outside of the mobile industry realize how much of an impact the company has had.
Scalado’s technology, which includes advanced software for taking, viewing, and editing pictures on your phone, has been placed in over 900 million mobile devices so far, the company announced last month. Its software landed on over 350 million devices last year, and is set to be included on 500 million more in 2011.
Soon enough, Scalado’s software will be featured on a billion devices — something few software companies can boast. Scalado is a prime example of how a small international company — it only has around 110 employees — can become a major force in the global app economy.
The company’s early innovations include Random Access JPEG, a patented technology that made it easy for 2002-era phones to deal with photos; CAPS, a software development kit that made managing multi-megapixel pictures more CPU and memory efficient; and SpeedTags, technology that made JPEG optimization on mobile phones near-instant. Many of Scalado’s more recent technologies, including zero shutter lag shooting (pictures get taken as soon as you hit the shutter button), burst shot, and high-definition range shooting, are built upon SpeedTags and are included in the company’s Camera SDK.
Scalado has been able to get its technology on nearly a billion devices because it works across pretty much any platform, including iOS, Android and Symbian. The company’s partners and customers include Motorola, Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, HTC and Qualcomm. And now with tablets on the rise, Scalado’s tech has yet another group of devices to invade. The company recently showed off an iPad demo album for viewing 10,000 photos.
We built the hardware inside our developer platform, Snapdragon, to take pictures at high speeds and compress them into the perfect shot. Scalado then built their application to complements our hardware. The app allows the user to choose a face from those high speed-taken photos and layers it smoothly on your end picture. It’s a total solution for mobile picture taking.
The feature Talluri’s referring to is called Rewind, and as you can see in the video below it could be useful for touching up photos without actually retaking them. Scalado also recently showed off Multi-Angle (see video below), a feature that allows you to sweep your phone around an object to create a semi-3D image that’s viewable on 2D screens. Recipients of Multi-Angle photos can pan around the image simply by tilting their phone.
Scalado will continue to play a big part in the future of mobile imaging. Another recent video from the company demonstrates futuristic editing capabilities like the ability to fill in missing elements from a photos (for a full 360 degrees), even more robust 3D capturing, and the ability to take “intelligent pictures”, or photos that you can explore like a typical Web page.
The iPhone is now officially the most-used camera in the world, according to Flickr, and it’s camera gets better in every version. Entire subcultures of “iPhoneographers” have formed, and now there are people who shoot professional-quality images with their iPhones, and those who are obsessed with vintage photography who use the popular Hipstamatic and Instagram apps. There are now even iPhone-only photography competitions and clubs!
Here are fantastic iPhone photos to get your mind going about all the crazy things that are possible when you focus on the art, not on the equipment. (credit appears below photos)
By ZeHak
By Justin Lowery
By Sarah
By Greg Schmigel
By Ian Bramham
By Catastrophic Plan on Flickr
By D. Ingraham
By Doctor Popular on Flickr
By Marianne S. on Flickr
By Joshua Ewing on Flickr
By Ryan Tastad
All of these photographers have managed to utilize the great photography apps on the iPhone, paired with it’s always-present nature, to make great images. It’s so true that, as they say, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”
The term bird's-eye view has never been more appropriate.
A video has emerged of a seagull supposedly 'stealing' a video camera and carrying it off through the skies.
With the camera recording at the moment of lift off, the feathered directer accidentally records a video of its flight over Cannes in the south of France, home of arguably the world's most famous film festival.
Steven Seagull: This feathered film star stole a video camera and inadvertently shot a video of its flight over Cannes in the South of France
Shot from above: The seagull recorded its flight to the top of Cannes Castle, capturing images of the roads and streets below
The video begins with an unseen cameraman creeping through the garden of a large house at night, and then placing the camera on the ground.
An inquisitive seagull walks up to the camera and seemingly lifts it up with its beak, before flying off.
The cameraman can be heard making his protests with a rather feeble 'Hey. HEY!' but is not glimpsed as the gull files up above the streets and houses, with cars visible on the roads below.
After a short flight - punctuated by some rather amusing honks and squawks from the seagull - our star comes in to land on top of a building.
The gull pokes around at the camera with it's beak, turning it over a few times, before it settles on a view of another building with a fellow seagull visible - perhaps the leading lady in seagull circles.
The pair have a brief squawking session before the camera fades to black.
I'm ready for my close up: The seagull casts a beady eye over its shiny electronic booty, while in the background is a tower on which he soon finds a friends
'Seagull stole my video camera in Cannes France. I found it on the castle wall, where I had to climb,' wrote opica1983, the YouTube user who posted the video online.
The question of quite how opica1983 knew where there camera had come to rest is unanswered.
One also has to wonder what the original cameraman was doing prowling around in the garden of a large house at night in the first place.
The video is entitled 'Seagull stole GoPro', which refers to the brand of camera.
GoPro make small cameras that are often used by sports people, sometimes mounted on helmets or even attached to surfboards to capture video from unusual angles.
The company has previously marketed its cameras with viral videos, including a snowboarding and surfing short that has so far been watched more than 3million times on YouTube.
In fact, GoPro has made something of a name for itself in that area and has previously been praised for its viral video advertising by the likes of Mashable, the internet and social media news website.
Perhaps after seeing the success it has enjoyed in viral videos the company has decided to spread its wings into viral video advertising.
Or perhaps there actually is a seagull out there with a desire to be in the movies...
Flickr's Camera Finder has officially confirmed Apple CEO Steve Jobs' claims at WWDC that the iPhone 4 was the most popular camera. The smartphone just edged past the Nikon D90 to get the largest percentage of members and 4,800 photos uploaded per day. It had been threatening an upset for the past several weeks.
The current iPhone was also the unambiguous leader among phone cameras in recent memory, having long since passed the iPhone 3G in frequency. It still had to overcome lifetime usage, though, as just nine million photos were on the photo hosting service where the iPhone 3G accounted for 36 million. The only non-Apple device on the chart was the HTC Evo 4G, which was tied with the iPod touch.
Much of the rapid rise has been attributed to Apple's emphasis on image quality over raw resolution as well as the popularity of the iPhone 4 as the single most successful smartphone model, even though Android outnumbers it through the sheer variety of manufacturers.
Flickr also hinted that the iPhone might have taken over sooner if its data was more complete. Phones are often "under-represented" since the metadata and other camera traits only carry through about two thirds of the time. The graphs are still relative to the volume of those joining Flickr and mirrors a sustained interest even as Flickr's overall member base grows.
Computational rephotography is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The “computational” part is when software helps out.
I’m a sucker for photos of old street scenes. Seeing familiar parts of your city as they were many decades ago is fascinating, and if people are good enough to snap a new version, you can enjoy the differences of places you have never seen. At Flickr and a site called Historypin, you can see the old shots lined up over the new, like a window into the past.
Researchers at MIT have found a way to automate the process. Currently, they use a laptop to do the heavy lifting, but the software could just as easily sit inside a camera. In fact, that’s the plan. The system compares the scene in front of the camera with a historical photograph. It then works out the difference between the two and gives the photographer instructions along the lines of “up a bit, left a bit more.”
According to an abstract on rephotography, it is a lot more complicated than it seems. In lining up the images you must consider “six degrees of freedom of 3-D translation and rotation, and the confounding similarity between the effects of camera zoom and dolly.”
Gimmick? Sure, but then so are all manner of the features in the modern digicam, from smile-detection to facial-recognition to fancy sepia modes. Today’s camera is essentially a computer with a sensor and a lens, so why not pack in everything you can? And if it means getting to see more old-time streets scenes, I’m totally in.
The iPhone 4 has landed in the hands of a Czech who has managed a test of the phone and its camera, including HD video. Swenak explained that the phone feels good in the hand, isn't prone to slipping, and is relatively fast both in wide use and in getting a GPS lock-on. His only misgivings expressed to Jablíčkář are around the plastic frame between the metal and the glass, which he believed could get minor scratches over time.
The phone's thinner profile is much easier to fit in a pocket, Swenak added.
In testing the camera, still photos appear to have the quality of a typical point-and-shoot camera, though with relatively little visible noise or fringing artifacts. Video at 720p is sharp at its native size and has audio quality similar to an iPhone's with a comparatively quiet scene.
The iPad doesn't have a built-in camera, but you can give it something better. By putting an app onto each an iPad and an iPhone, you can connect the two via bluetooth and have a wireless camera for your iPad.
All you need to do is download the Camera A and Camera B apps onto your iPad and iPhone respectively—note that Camera A will set you back a buck while Camera B is free. Once you've got the apps on your devices, make sure bluetooth is switched on, and open the apps. Ta da! You'll see everything your iPhone's lens sees on your iPad.
To take a picture you'll tap the camera icon at the bottom of your iPad's screen. A pop up prompt will ask you if you really want to save the photo and that's it, you're done. Oh, and if you want photos to save to both your iPhone and your iPad each time, then you can flip the little toggle switch in the lower right of the screen:
How does this witchcraft work? Based on the fact that I just saw my iPhone lock screen twice moments ago, I'd say that the apps are allowing your iPad to mirror your iPhone's display. I guess that means that you could also use this app setup to truly turn your iPad into a gigantic iPhone. [Camera A and Camera B]
Update: Keep in mind that this app will only work with an iPhone 3Gs and not other models.
Send an email to Rosa Golijan, the author of this post, at rgolijan@gizmodo.com.
Apple has enabled owners of its older 2G and 3G handsets to record video by admitting the new iVideoCamera app to the iTunes store. [as well as the UStream Broadcaster app for 3G handsets - update at foot of post]
Users can now legitimately record, share and save videos without having to ‘jailbreak‘ their handsets.
As reported on the Apple Blog, the app comes in at only 99 cents in the US store, and has similar entry-level pricing in other iTunes stores around the world.
Adding this third party application to an iPhone 2G or 3G handset means that there is even less incentive to move up to the 3GS model and may prompt those coming up to the end of their contracts to wait and see what iPhone news Apple has to announce in the spring before committing to an upgrade path.
Beware though, there are some significant limits to the app, and it is not helped by the camera installed in 2G and 3G iPhones. The app itself can only capture video at a maximum of three frames per second… far behind the 30 frames per second capacity of the 3GS. Quality is, therefore, limited as is the resolution which comes in at 160 x 213, compared to 640 x 480 on the 3GS.
On the upside, whilst there is no opportunity to share on Twitter yet, videos can be quickly uploaded to YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo from within the app itself.
Development team Laan Labs, creators of the iVideoCamera app, promise improved frame rates and quality in forthcoming releases.
UPDATE: The UStream Broadcaster app is another newcomer to the store and is available free. The app enables live streaming of video from 3G handsets or better over 3G and WiFi. Sadly, there’s no support for 2G iPhones, but 3G owners can enjoy live chat whilst broadcasting, as well as the ability to share on Twitter when going live.
It’s no secret; cell phone use has become an obnoxious interrupter in the most unseemly of locations: in the car, at dinner, even at church or temple or in the mosque. It seems nowhere is too holy for the almighty digital age – not even the barrel. Or so thinks Sterling Spencer.
Last week a shot of the Gulf Coaster filtered through the SURFER offices that takes cell phone usage to a new level. In it, Spencer is fully shacked in Mexico while locked into a conversation on his new waterproof cell phone. The image bore some explanation.
“I was talking to my woman at home,” said Spencer. “She didn’t believe me at first; I actually hung up on her cause it was barreling so hard I didn’t want to fall and lose the phone...All we talked about was that we couldn’t believe I’m in Mexico, on a phone, talking while surfing. Bizarre...the reception was good actually, other than crashing waves in the background.”
By Jason Chen The Gadget: Samsung Memoir, which is the 8-megapixel upgraded version of the Samsung Behold—both of which have Samsung's TouchWiz-based touchscreen interface. It's also got a Xenon flash that works quite well.
The Price: $250 with two-year contract, $50 rebate and qualifying data plan
The Verdict: A pretty damn good cameraphone. The TouchWiz UI is pretty much the same as the version on the Samsung Behold. In short, it's more usable as a touchscreen phone (keyboard is fairly decent) than Windows Mobile phones, but not quite as good as say, Android or the iPhone. It does have haptic feedback, meaning there's a slight rumble as you press down on the screen. And yes, that implies that the Memoir doesn't have capacitive touch. You still have to press down when you want to click things. Let it be known that Jesús Diaz does not like some Samsung touchscreen UIs.
The front of the phone looks like a Samsung touchscreen phone, but the back actually looks a lot like a Samsung camera. Which is kind of the point. The 8-megapixel camera is very good. So good, in fact, that it's (give or take) about as good as my Samsung NV3 point and shoot from a few years ago. The gallery below has comparison shots.
And here's how well the Memoir's Xenon flash works in complete darkness. Spoiler: Pretty damn well.
I haven't had enough experience with Nokia's high end N-series cameraphones to say whether or not the Memoir is better. We've already established that more megapixels isn't always better, but if the Memoir can take photos that are just about as good as Samsung's NV3 (which doesn't take FANTASTIC images, we have to admit), it's a great alternative for a point and shoot camera.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
![Apple Enables Video on iPhone 2G and 3G [updated]](http://thenextweb.com/files/2009/12/ivideorecorder.JPG "ivideorecorder")
The Gadget: 
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