Compared to DSLR cameras, smartphone cameras have smaller sensors, which limits their spatial resolution; smaller apertures, which limits their light gathering ability; and smaller pixels, which reduces their signal-to-noise ratio. The use of color filter arrays (CFAs) requires demosaicing, which further degrades resolution. In this paper, we supplant the use of traditional demosaicing in single-frame and burst photography pipelines with a multi-frame super-resolution algorithm that creates a complete RGB image directly from a burst of CFA raw images. We harness natural hand tremor, typical in handheld photography, to acquire a burst of raw frames with small offsets. These frames are then aligned and merged to form a single image with red, green, and blue values at every pixel site. This approach, which includes no explicit demosaicing step, serves to both increase image resolution and boost signal to noise ratio.

Further indications that mobile photography is disrupting the digital imaging industry thanks to a tighter integration of hardware and software.

via sites.google.com

The future of photography is computational, not optical. This is a massive shift in paradigm and one that every company that makes or uses cameras is currently grappling with. There will be repercussions in traditional cameras like SLRs (rapidly giving way to mirrorless systems), in phones, in embedded devices and everywhere that light is captured and turned into images.

Sometimes this means that the cameras we hear about will be much the same as last year’s, as far as megapixel counts, ISO ranges, f-numbers and so on. That’s okay. With some exceptions these have gotten as good as we can reasonably expect them to be: Glass isn’t getting any clearer, and our vision isn’t getting any more acute. The way light moves through our devices and eyeballs isn’t likely to change much.

What those devices do with that light, however, is changing at an incredible rate. This will produce features that sound ridiculous, or pseudoscience babble on stage, or drained batteries. That’s okay, too. Just as we have experimented with other parts of the camera for the last century and brought them to varying levels of perfection, we have moved onto a new, non-physical “part” which nonetheless has a very important effect on the quality and even possibility of the images we take.

The present of photography is already computational, it’s always been, since the advent of the digital camera: from the very moment an imaging sensor’s output signal is digitized, billions of operations are performed to turn a stream of electrical levels into a colorless bitmap, then reconstructing colors by means of interpolation, correcting gamma, white balance, lens aberrations, reducing noise, compressing the image by discarding information not visible by the human eye, etc., just to name a few basic operations performed by a typical image processing pipeline. There is no such thing as #nofilter.

What we are seeing now is an unprecedented rate of innovation in image processing enabled by huge advancements in computing power and integration, bound to marginalize the traditional photographic industry.

via techcrunch.com

I look at my Instagram feed and it’s a network; I’m seeing through the eyes of people around the world,” says the image-sharing app’s Teru Kuwayama. Following two decades as a noted photojournalist, covering war and humanitarian crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir, the TED Senior Fellow now works on the community team at Instagram, specifically with photojournalists and the wider photo community. “So many eyes and so many minds are coming online and being harnessed to this grid,” he says. For Kuwayama, this collective network and its unprecedented audience serves as the greatest draw for his involvement. “It’s unlocked a totally different spectrum of reporting,” he says.

So far, Instagram has succeeded where Twitter has failed. They say a picture is worth more than 140 characters, isn’t it?

via artsy.net

Naming artworks has always been important, not only because it’s useful to have a way to refer to the piece, but also, and much more importantly, to present a window to the creator’s vision and ideas, to clarify his intentions when creating the piece and to provide additional content to the visual. In ‘artistic’ photography it seems that the situation is similar, and an image’s title sometimes holds much more than can be seen in the image itself, insinuate as to the photographer’s motives and feelings and hint at things which can be missed otherwise. Even ‘Untitled’ images are often left untitled for a good reason. The title, or lack thereof, is a critical part of the art.

via dpreview.com