Smartphone News

We’ve all been there: You’re in a scenic spot about to take a selfie of you and a companion, when a passerby offers to take the shot for you. So you accept the kind gesture and hand the person your phone. Unfortunately, if you forget to turn off the phone’s selfie mode and wait until later to look at the results, the photograph may not be what you expected.

Tony Sweet says that smartphone photography “isn’t officially part of the show” at his photography workshops, but the subject does come up with increasing frequency. “They’ll do their big camera work first,” Sweet says of the students, “then they’ll pull out the phones and shoot a few things, discuss among themselves, and ask me some questions.”

Some trends just won’t go away: Billboard magazine notes that U.S. vinyl album sales are up 53 percent, generating $416 million in sales. Stereophile, our sister publication, reviews new analog audio equipment and you can purchase new Nikon F6 or Leica M-A film cameras from Shutterbug advertisers. Ferrania is back making film and the Japan Camera Hunter website is making their own film, a discontinued Agfa emulsion they’re calling JCH StreetPan 400. Amazon’s top-selling photo item is Fuji’s Instax Mini Instant Film. There’s even a new twin-lens instant camera, Mint’s InstantFlex TL70, and yes, I gotta get me one of those.

While many if not most of our readers shoot images in Raw format most of the time, there are times when you want to shoot a JPEG file. For instance, when you shoot in Raw+JPEG mode. :-)

About five years ago, travel photographer Jack Hollingsworth was on a resort shoot in the Caribbean. There’d be stills and video, lots of locations, and the client keeping an eye on everything. Nine cases of gear loaded on the plane.

Google has unveiled their next-generation smartphone, the Google “Pixel,” and early test results indicate the camera on this sophisticated new wonder may be the best smartphone camera ever. According to a comprehensive review by DxOMark Mobile, the Pixel earned a score of 89—three points higher than highly acclaimed Apple iPhone 7 Plus, and the highest DXO rating ever given to a smartphone.

Google’s powerful Snapseed app is popular among mobile photographers looking for robust image-editing tools for their iOS or Android mobile devices. Last month the app was updated to include image-resizing tools and an advanced text filter on both platforms, and now iOS version 2.9 just received Raw support and a new Face tool.