The wonderful site for tricks to make your life easier, Lifehacker, has a great recap of thier useful tips, tools, and downright tricky tricks to make a better foto from 2009.

What’s covered? Check out these direct links:

Position Your Tongue Properly to Look Good in Photos

Take Better Pictures by Treating Your Still Camera Like It’s Video

Avoid Mediocre Portraits with These Tricks

Set Up a High Speed Photography Studio in Your Garage

Create Abstract Light Art by Snapping a Camera-Toss Photo

Be A Better Photographer On Vacation

Take Better Self-Portraits

DIY Tennis Ball Photography Stabilization Unit

Shoot Better Nighttime Pictures

Be More Photogenic by Forgetting About the Camera

Breathe Like a Sniper to Take Better Photos in Low Light

Create a Basic Ring Flash

Use Composition Rules to Take Better Photos

DIY Beauty Dish Enhances Your Portraits

Create Stunning High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photos

Create Studio Quality Photos Using Natural Light

Make a DIY Photography Light Box with K’Nex

Take Great Panoramic Pictures with Any Camera

Take Better Pictures by Studying Studio Layouts

DIY Tilt-Shift Photography Lens

Take Awesome Sunset Photographs

Create a Flash Diffuser Using An Empty Cigarette Packet

Make a DIY Macro Lens from Old Binoculars

Not everyone can rattle off the wide world of tech that comes with carrying a camera. Equally, many keep thier camera fixed on ‘Auto’, since they rarely keep learning texts on hand when out shooting fotos.

Salvation is at hand (literally), as Nikon have released the Learn & Explore app for the iPhone/iPod touch. This free app contains tons of  foto fundamentals and shooting techniques, and covers nearly all you’ll need to know about getting the shot right.

Best off (after the ‘free’ price tag) is that all info applies to all cameras, not just Nikon.

Yet another app to make me drool over the iPhone…

[Nikon Learn & Explore App] via [Lifehacker]

With that, my famous and/or generally shy readers should like this…

Adam Harvey designed this flash-equipped purse which, when the pre-flash of an intruding camera goes off, will fire off it´s own series of flashes, effectively drowning out the intruding shooter´s own camera.

An example via Adam´s project page:

Anti Paparazzi Purse by Adam Harvey (foto via www.ahprojects.com)

The shy subject would need to point the purse towards the offending fotog’, so presuming you’re not too wasted coming out of that so-hip-it-hurts club, shouldn’t be too much hassle. Adam’s also working on accessory-sized pieces, so perhaps soon you’ll be able to combine a broach and earrings with the bag, covering every angle.

Equally of interest is the Blur Anti-paparazzi facial spray, which contain ultra reflective nano-particles, or shiny little bits of dust. Developed by Troika and Kok-Chian Lelong, this unreleased spray will (it seems) lay a fine coating of that shiny dust where applied, and reflect the camera flash as to blank out the captured image.

The effect? See for yourself:

Image via www.We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com

What about cooler, less bulky or (possibly) skin-affecting  technology you say? This Times Online article from 2004 mentions that HP developed an electronic badge that, if the camera plays nice by having the software to support, will use face-scanning tech to simply fuzz out the shy subjects’ face. Further research into if this will ever come to market produced no answers, so wait and see on that I suppose.

I also came across a mention of a cape that would also fuzz out visual recordings, sadly re-finding that link has been Monday’d into not happening. Grrr…

A quick flip side for those celebs who actively want to be surrounded by cameras; Nokia has been long rumoured to be working on a ‘Celebrity Mode’ feature that, via WiFi, sends out a signal to anyone interested that they’d in fact love to have their foto taken at this time. And here I was thinking todays’ cries for attention couldn’t get louder.

As a foto guy who isn’t pap scum (for this is how I consider them), I have absolutely no problem with this field of research. In fact, as I live in a highly-touristed town and happen to own a recumbent bicycle, I don’t exactly love it when people start furiously snapping at your truly trying to relax on a ride through town.

In today’s lens saturated times, someone having a problem with thier shot taken (famous or not) should have an easy way to stop this. It’s called the right of privacy, a right that certainly isn’t as guaranteed as it once was.

Final note; A reminder that NONE of these products are yet available to buy, although Adam’s says on his site that a limited batch of bags will be available soon. Until these or other tech solutions come to market, it’s a hand to the camera and a reminder to keep those knickers on. Have you seen what pops up on Facebook?

Have you done as I have and just recieved/downloaded Windows 7 to get your PC working properly after suffering Vista for the last 2 years?

Good, because Win7 fixes a lot of things Vista got wrong, although they forgot something for us foto folk: RAW support when browsing files in Windows itself. By this I mean opening a folder and seeing the picture directly, not a generic icon.

Thankfully, Fast Picture Viewer is a wee little freeware program that fixes this, adding proper image preview of RAW foto files. This will a preview image to your RAWs within Windows, without having to fire up Adobe Bridge or other such RAW browsers.

I’m probably going overboard mentioning Win 7 so much, as it also works for Vista and XP.

What can I say, the delivery man brought me a Windoze version that works!

[Fast Picture Viewer]

Think what you will regarding Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace prize, but in my book the real highlight of this year’s round awards was honouring Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith with the Nobel Prize for Physics, given for thier invention of the CCD camera sensor.

For the non-technical, the CCD sensor is essentially what replaced film inside the camera to be able to make a direct digital recording of the image the camera captured.

Invented 40 years ago, it only came into general use over the last 10-15 years, being the heart of any digital camera. Now being slowly replaced with CMOS sensors (which offer vast improvements on image noise and power consumption), it was still THE fundamental stepping stone towards getting digital image recording to market.

Interesting footnote: While it may have taken 20 odd years to get to general use, the basic technical concept was devised in about.. 1 hour. Threated by employer Bell Labs with a funding cut, Boyle and Smith sketched out the idea on a blackboard in that fateful 60 minutes, devising a solid enough concept that they were both saved from funding cuts as well as being set up to work on the idea fully.

Check out this Wired.com article for more.

An interesting history of the digital camera via CNET, from its early 4kg, .01 megapixel count (in black and white only of course) beast of a machine, through to the first true digital images (no analogue involved) of the auroras (at a then-mind-blowing 100×100px), with Apple’s entry into the market (the Quicktake) as the other big boys jump in, and even a link at the end to Hasselblad’s viciously high tech latest, the HD3 II, which for it’s 18.500£ price tag will allow you to record up to 39mp images, for which I have no words other than “damn!!!”. A trip through the ol’ skool….

I figure a very good place to start this blog is on on a cool piece of tech that Iphone users will already know and love, the multi-touch interaction system, or Multi Touch,

or ’surface computing’ as Microsoft’s marketing calls it. Since it seems MS is about to/already starting their push of this change in computing into the home PC market, perhaps the end of the mouse and keyboard truly is nigh.

There’s a background piece here and here’s a couple of youtube videos to (imho) *wow* you with:

Jeff Han showing off his working concept:

…and Microsoft’s slick show via PopularMechanics.com:

Pretty Cool Huh?

Now to be sure, the applications for this go far beyond fotos and the management aps featured on those clips. I myself found just the Google Earth interface mind-blowing (we can fly even more!), and could easily fill pages here with how this will completely change how we percieve and interact with computers in future.

But this blog is about foto use, so we march that way…

Now, having thought about how we can look at the uses for this technology in the foto world, the main thing that turns me on about this are the creative possibilities for the artistic end of the foto medium.

With lazy viewing habits and less time to invest in caring about a static image, maybe it’s not so bad that to start thinking about what exactly a foto should be, a static moment in time, or perhaps reflect time itself, ever changing and impermanent. While this is certainly a debate in itself, imagine what those who will inevitably ‘animate’ a foto will make for interfacing with their creative fixes.

Some concepts that rattled out of my head, obviously the hardware will need to be there:

· Fotos that are fully touchable and allow real-time manipulation could open up a new world of creative ‘foto wikis’, perhaps involving either the creator and audience, or simply a mass of artists sharing an image, all manipulating it (perhaps without seeing his peers effort) for live feed to a gallery/website.

· A foto series (and more!) emphasizing the ‘touch’ aspect the artist has with his/her piece in its’ creation, perhaps in relation to handstrokes gestures etc that inspired the overall visual motif in the image edit.

· An overall benefit as multitouch becomes everyday is that the foto maker and viewer will feel less distanced by digital manipulations when viewing a piece. My experience when people seem put off that I’ve Photoshop’d an image seems to be more about the cold mouse/screen interface used as opposed to nostalgic vibe of a darkroom, not the fact it’s by computer. Perhaps this will reconnect that passion.

· With the multitouch already in the iPhone and latest iPods in mind, the groundwork is there for an easy interface to move around virtual worlds (don’t ask me, way beyond my code skills). In that respect, is it impossible to imagine an image fixed onto a virtual gallery wall, and you can use this interface with the angle you view/manipulate an image to further creative viewing/making possibilities. Obviously a young concept, but it opens possibilities nonetheless.

· Applications on social foto networks like flickr, where the API (main guts of the computer code) is available for public use. Much like Flickrpickr allows you to call all fotos on flickr with the colour you chose, we could start seeing aps that let you find fotos based on the pressure area/amount you apply, common hand-strokes, but to name the less abstract ideas possible.

Now of course I have to repeat here that the technology involved in this would certainly have to be at least somewhat widely available (obviously in regards to the more public-interactive uses), but as things look to me, this isn’t as far away as it may look. With a large company like Microsoft involved in this, not to mention the *BOOM* public foto-taking/sharing has had since digital became standard, the tech industry seems to be moving towards pushing next-gen hardware to show off the fast CPUs they’re churning out.

I’ll skip a huge TV for one of these any day of the week, your thoughts?