Category Archives: Photography

OnePlus Lights Up London with a Moonbow

Photography,

OnePlus‘ partnership with Hasselblad and the recent launch of the OnePlus 9 series of smartphones have been greeted with almost universal acclaim. To celebrate this and the open sale of the 9 Pro, OnePlus’ latest crazy publicity stunt has been to generate a “moonbow” in London and capture it with the OnePlus 9 Pro.

What’s a moonbow? Officially, it’s much like a rainbow but with moonlight rather than sunlight creating the bow. In this case, OnePlus have cheated a little and put the rainbow round the moon by generating a cloud of mist and a high-powered light. Regardless, it’s still pretty impressive.

Naturally occurring moonbows are very rare, mainly because the light from the moon isn’t anywhere near as bright as sunlight, so it’s extremely hard for the human eye to spot the spectral colours in the dark. OnePlus helped out to make it a bit easier to spot – “Using high-powered light projections beamed through a wall of mist set under the perfect light conditions of the full moon, OnePlus created London’s very own first-ever man-made Moonbow in front of Tower Bridge, shot on the OnePlus 9 Series. The man-made Moonbow took 12 hours of on-site build time, used 60 tonnes of environmentally friendly recirculated water an hour and was created by a high power 20,000-lumen light projector.”

Of course, the moonbow had to be captured using a OnePlus 9 Series camera, co-developed with Hasselblad. Their emphasis is on natural colour calibration and while I wasn’t actually there to take the photo, it seems pretty realistic and I’d be happy with the photo if I’d just taken it on my smartphone.

At the moment, OnePlus is running a series of photo competitions based on a number of weekly themes – True Attitude, True Love, True Freedom and True You. Each week Hasselblad photographer Julius Hirtzberger will choose a winner from photos tagged with #TrueColors on Instagram. The winning photographers will receive a OnePlus 9 Series handset and other goodies. Visit @oneplusunitedkingdom for more details.

Nikon Announces D780 DSLR and More at CES 2020

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Nikon announced several cameras at CES 2020. They include the Nikon D780 DSLR, AF-S NIKKOR 120 300mm f/2.8E FL ED SR VR Lens, NIKKOR Z 70-200mm f/2.8 Lens and COOLPIX P950 Camera. This is a stunning showing at CES 2020 and a wide range of photographers will be able to find something to like in this release.

DSLRs are far from dead, and the release of the D780 shows it. This is a solid mid-range full-frame offering with a 24.5MP CMOS sensor and the EXPEED 6 image processor. Sensitivity ranges of ISO 100-51200 and an extended range of ISO 50-204800 make it a versatile pick while a 180k-pixel RGB sensor with Advanced Scene Recognition make shooting a more pleasant experience.

The system also offers two AF systems, depending on whether you use the optical finder or live view. The optical system features a 51-point phase-detect AF system sensitive depending on whether you use the optical finder or live view. The optical system features a 51-point phase-detect AF system sensitive to -3 EV and advanced tracking.

In live view, the D780 uses a 278-point hybrid setup with a standard sensitivity of -4 EV and a Low-Light AF mode capable of working down to -6 EV. It also supports Eye AF. To go along with a speed AF system, the camera can reach continuous shooting rates of 7 fps with the mechanical shutter, or 12 fps when using electronic.

Completing the D780’s package is a well-designed body with a familiar, reliable form factor. It features a 0.70x optical viewfinder with 100% coverage and 2.36M-dot tilting touching. And, for video aficionados, the D780 has UHD 4K at up to 30 fps with N-Log and HLG profiles. Other features include time-lapse video, 2MP stills at up to 120 fps, and built-in wireless connectivity.

Visit Nikon at LVCC, Central Hall Booth #14018 at CES 2020 to check out the D780 DSLR and several other Nikon products.

Google Stops Syncing Between Photos and Drive

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How stupid is this? Google has announced that from July, photographs will no longer sync between Google Drive and Google Photos citing “the connection between these services is confusing”. What?

Sorry, but how is this confusing? Images are synchronised between Google Drive and Google Photos. If you do something in one, it’s also done in the other. How hard is that to understand? Seems straightforward to me.

And let’s not forget that you have to turn the syncing feature on. It’s not as if Google forces you to sync. Surely if someone finds “the connection between these services is confusing” they could turn it off? Drive goes out of its way to make sure that you understand the impact of, say, deleting a file.

I like this feature because it makes working with photographs as files so much easier, and apps only have to be compatible with Drive to work effectively. They don’t need to know about Photos explicitly. As long as you can navigate to the Googe Photos folder in Drive, there are all your photographs carefully arranged by year and month.

Perhaps they’re telling the truth but I’m a suspicious old dog and I think this is more about Google trying to stop people getting their photographs out of the service by making it as inconvenient as possible. And what really annoys me is that I pay extra for additional Google storage.

Maybe Google should remember that Microsoft’s Office 365 Personal is GB£5.99 per month, comes with 1 TB OneDrive storage and Office apps for PC and mobile. That’s much better value than £2.49 per month for 200 GB and copycat apps.

Ciao Google.

Nixplay Seed Wave Adds Sound at CES

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I always think of digital photo frames as cinderella gadgets that don’t get the attention they deserve. I’m a fan, especially when the frame can connect into services like Google Photos meaning there’s no need to copying photos about the place on memory cards. Smartphones are great for taking photos but all too often the photos stay on the phone.

Nixplay, the global market leader in connected photo frames, is introducing its all-new Seed Wave at CES, adding a new dimension in sound and music to its best-selling smart connected photo and video frames. The Wave gives Nixplay users the ability to add music and sound to their photos and videos, so the images don’t just look good, they sound good too.

Building on the best-selling design of the Seed line, Nixplay is adding two new premium 5-watt Bluetooth speakers with a dedicated bass and audio amplifier, to allow Nixplay users to stream music from their Bluetooth-enabled devices by simply pairing a phone, tablet or PC to their Seed Wave. The improved functionality also gives Nixplay users enhanced audio performance to watch their video memories, all on the popular, crisp widescreen frame. So much family fun.

“Nixplay owners can now entertain friends and family by sharing their precious memories paired to their favorite tunes from any room in their home,” said Nixplay CEO, Mark Palfreeman. “We know the mantelpiece is still considered the focal point of the home and the backdrop of our family photos so that’s why we created the Seed Wave to have a sleek, minimalist design that makes it the perfect addition to your mantelpiece.”

With the Nixplay mobile app, users enjoy on-the-go functionality and creativity. The app allows them to easily share photos and videos directly from the app to their Nixplay frame anywhere in the world over Wi-Fi. Note that currently the iOS and Android apps are not equal, and there are some limitations around video.

Other features include
– Dynamic Google Photos connectivity gives users Live Albums on their frame.
– 10GB of secure and free online cloud storage.
– Connects albums from all social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Verizon Cloud, and Google Photos.
– Works with Amazon Alexa.

The 13-inch Widescreen Seed Wave is available for $249.99 on Nixplay.com and Amazon.com now.

National Geographic Best 100 Photos of 2018

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As the planet twirls to the winter solstice, the “Best of 2018” starts to emerge. Most of these are worthless click-bait, but National Geographic’s Best 100 Photos of 2018 presents truly amazing photography from the world around us.

NatGeo’s great photos aren’t just well composed shots of still life.  For us, they show 2018 through a temporal lens, from the joy of humanity to the tragedy of life; the incredible diversity of our species saddled by the divisions within. For the other inhabitants of the world – the animals, the fish, the birds, the reptiles – appreciate their beauty in increasingly rare natural environments. For some of these, it really is last chance to see.

Take the time to look and take in every single one. It’ll be worth it.

Flickr sheds the Yahoo login requirement

Photography

Flickr has become one of the top photo sharing services online since its founding in 2004. It’s extremely popular with pro photographers and bloggers. The company was sold to Yahoo and began requiring a Yahoo account to log in, but since April of this year, it has been owned by Smug Mug.

There was a problem there — many people don’t have a Yahoo account, especially the younger ones. More importantly, many didn’t want one.

Now that Flickr is out from under that umbrella, it is doing away that requirement. The photo-sharing service says it had many complaints about the proprietary login even stating the CEO had been locked out during some confusion.

“Here at Flickr, we’ve long wanted a simpler login solution that would allow each member to use the email address of their choice. And since SmugMug bought Flickr from Yahoo, we’ve been working toward this goal,” says Flickr

This won’t roll out until early 2019 and it will work Amazon AWS to add an extra layer of security to your account.

Google’s Live Albums Keeps Families In Touch

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Google’s Pixel 3 event today didn’t bring too many surprises on the hardware front: most had been leaked well in advance of the presentation. What caught my eye was not a device but a new a new software feature called “Live Albums”.

Dave Loxton, Google Photo Product Manager, explains, “Many of us share the same photos with the same people over and over, whether it’s photos of your children to their grandparents, or cute pics of your pup to your best friend. Every time, we have to find the photos, select the ones we want to share and send them to the right people. And that’s if we even remember to share them at all.

Live albums start out as ordinary albums – you select the special photos of friends, family and pets. Here’s the clever bit…once tagged as a live album, freshly taken photos will be scanned by Google’s AI smarts and if they include people in the live album, they’ll be added into the album automatically.

This is fantastic for those families wanting to share photos with far-flung relatives. Instead of constantly having to remember to send photos to granny in Edinburgh, create a live album of the grandchildren and share it with her. New photos of the children will be added in as they’re taken, and granny gets to see the photos straightaway.

Google touts its Home Hub as being the ideal picture frame to display live album, though it’s only 7″, which I think is a little small for a photo frame. Priced at US$149 or UK£139, the Home Hub is competitively priced against wireless photo frames from the likes of Nixplay. I can see the Home Hub taking market share this Christmas.

The updated version of Photos with live album support will be rolling out shortly, so wait for it to appear on your smartphone.