Possibly as gears begin to shift towards the Christmas shopping season, headlines are being stolen by mobiles. In the world of photography news is being dominated by the, always, attention grabbing Apple phone with their latest phone to flog, and apps to make handsets better serve their master’s passion for photography.
With all the modesty of a professional footballer Apple released some ‘invitations’ to an event set to be held on 9.9.2014 . Picking a date that both European and American journalists can understand, and therefore promote, Apple go on to clarify the invitation by wishing they could say more.
Logically they could, if they really wanted although what they probably really want is a lot of paragraphs like this one speculating on what is likely to be the new iPhone 6. What it will look like is a mystery beyond some leaked photos posted last month of another rectangular looking device. Inside the new iPhone 6 is also a mystery. Odds are it will be photographer friendly with a savy camera and spec, but this is only speculation.
Instagram, the nemisis of those who treasure traditional methods, released a new app to smooth shaky phone videos into slick timelapses that look like videos. Cool looking and easy to use it’s prooving a hit. In Instagram’s own words the app, Hyperlapse, is explained:
We feed gyroscope samples and frames into the stabilizer and obtain a new set of camera orientations as output. These camera orientations correspond to a smooth “synthetic” camera motion with all the unwanted kinks and bumps removed.
These orientations are then fed into our video filtering pipeline shown below.
The effects of Instagram’s new Hyperlapse do make a big difference in video quality but in taking out the shakey camera effect it creates a gliding quality that is either to your taste or not.
Interested in using either? Will you buy the iPhone 6? Do you need smooth camera phone videos?