Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
So Canon has announced a weird but fascinating new RF 5.2mm f/2.8 fisheye lens for the Canon EOS R mirrorless system. It’s weird (but fascinating) because it’s not your typical camera lens. It’s not even your typical fisheye lens. Oh no, this one’s a dual fisheye lens for shooting 3D 180° VR video and photos.
At $2,000, though, it’s not inexpensive, by any means, but I guess now we know why the EOS R5 shoots 8K!
Ok, this is pretty impressive and also extremely cool. Industrial and interaction designers, Rob Englert and Meyer Giordano have created a very unique lens for, in this case, Nikon F mount that lets you get a full 360° field of view and 180° vertically in a single shot with no stitching required.
The pair founded Sphere Optics (aka “(sphere)”). Their first lens is called the (sphere) Pro1, which they describe as “the world’s first and only single-lens 360° full-spherical capture solution”. It has a focal length of 1mm with a fixed f/8 aperture and it sure does look pretty crazy on the camera. Its design, though, is a thing of beauty and has a level of obviousness that it’s amazing nobody ever did it before.
Since we can’t really visit many places nowadays, there are solutions that let us experience them at least virtually. And now, you can even do it through Instagram. The platform has added exhibitions from the Smithsonian Museum and two other museums to its AR effects lineup, so you can “visit” exhibitions from your phone.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, and I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st, but French artist, designer and programmer, Cyril Diagne has figured out how to use augmented reality to literally copy and paste the world around you straight into a Photoshop document. Yeah, for real. And he’s even released the source code on GitHub!
Diagne announced his creation to the world via Twitter this week, and it really looks like some kind of After Effects fakery. If he hadn’t released the source code, then you probably wouldn’t even believe it was real at all. But it shows him clearly snapping objects around him, which are then cut out from their backgrounds and then pasted right into the current Photoshop document.
This is an awfully frustrating time for wildlife photographers right now. And anybody who has kids. You’re stuck at home, can’t go anywhere, can’t do anything, can’t see anything interesting. Well, Google has the answer – augmented reality.
Google’s mobile search has a feature which allows you to search for an animal which can then be placed into your environment using your smartphone’s camera and augmented reality. It even appears to pick up on the ambient lighting and be able to apply it in realtime, too.
We’ve met a camera that lets you take photos in virtual reality, but there’s now an app that took things a step further. Augmented Reality Photo Studio lets you go to real-life locations and shoot virtual portraits. It’s certainly an interesting concept and it can be great for location scouting and trying out lighting setups.
This is a very cool piece of tech. Swedish developer Peder Norrby has done something pretty amazing with the iPhone X. He’s created a 3D optical illusion completely “in-camera”… well, in-phone, really, although it does use the phone’s front camera to achieve the effect. It’s very cool and doesn’t require any special viewing glasses. It holds all kinds of potential for the future as 3D cameras and 3D scanning start to become more advanced.
Augmented reality has mostly been a bit of a gimmick so far. To put dinosaurs on your desk, or help guide you around a city. It’s very cool, but still mostly just a gimmick. Now that the hype of augmented reality has started to die down a little, though, things are looking up. It has made some pretty great strides over the last couple of years. Particularly in fields such as healthcare.
Now, though, filmmakers are starting to see some benefit from augmented reality, too. A new app, Blocker allows you to block out your scenes based on what the camera sees, enhanced by 3D models. The app, in real time, tracks the models to the scene, allowing you to work out your angles and shots, while at a location, in advance of the shoot.
With sports in-stadium income on the decline, stadiums are trying to figure out new revenue streams. But this is a photography blog, so there is a photography angle (no pun intended) involved.
Canon is developing a new “camera system” that will enable viewers to “fly” in the stadium and view the game via any vantage point that they choose.
Google seems to heavily turning into an AI company above all else right now. AI is a necessary part of Google’s search in order to provide the most suitable results. But it’s gone far beyond that now. At Google’s I/O developer conference, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Lens.
It’s a new technology designed to leverage Google’s computer vision and AI technology. The goal is to make your phone’s camera “smarter”. Now your camera won’t only see what you’ll see, but it’ll understand what it is, in real time. This data can then be used in a multitude of ways, including search.
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