Smartphone News

During the coming year, the means we’ll use to capture photographs may change but not the motivation to share our view of the world with others. To accomplish this goal we need tools to change the way we see that world and interact with it. Imagine handing an iPhone to Alexander Graham Bell. What would he think of it? The future of imaging includes many paradigm-shifting technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence but in the short run, we’ll deal with trends.

Stephen Shore fondly recalls his Polaroid SX-70. Shore, known for color images of everyday America, in books like Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, loved the immediacy of the SX-70. “Whatever you observed and chose to picture was right there,” he says of that ingenious little device.

Even though his first smartphone camera wasn’t very good by his standards—he is a professional photographer, after all—he liked being able to take quick, casual, spur-of-the-moment pictures when his DSLR wasn’t at hand, or when he didn’t feel like hauling it out.

Want to take better and more interesting photos with your smartphone? COOPH (The Cooperative of Photography) recently partnered with photographer Richard Schabetsberger to create a great new how-to video for fantastic smartphone photography.

DxO, the Paris, France-based company known mostly for software, introduced an intriguing new piece of imaging hardware this morning: a 20.2-megapixel camera with a 1-inch sensor and an f/1.8 lens that fits in your pocket and attaches to an iPhone. Called the DxO One, the 3.8-ounce, 2.65-inch tall camera, connects to an iPhone via the phone’s Lightning port, creating what the company hopes will be a photographic one-two punch to conquer the smartphone conundrum: that is, how do you shoot DSLR-quality images from a slender, inherently limited phone.

On a Sunday morning not long ago I turned on the radio and by chance heard the legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly say that his iPhone had made him a better photographer.
 

We make a lot of selfie stick-related jokes here at Shutterbug but we’ve never seen anything as hilariously depressing as the Selfie Arm. The invention, which we hope is meant as a satirical joke, is a fake arm that you can attach a smartphone or camera to take a self-portrait.