Expressing Your Creative Passion With Polarr

polarr

A group of creatives and techies with passion for visual expression decided to create a web tool their fellow creatives to express themselves, without losing the fidelity of their creative desire and inspirations. This turned into Polarr.co.

While there are many tools online for making basic modifications to photos, Polarr actually learns from the unique style of each user,and performs recommendations and customized renditions of their photos in a high quality and production ready environment.

Since most creatives, or Polarrians as they like to call their users, would much rather spend their time at photo shoots, coming up with new aesthetic angles, and interacting with their cusomters, creating a tool to shorten the time needed for post-production is the primary focus of Polarr.

I have personally used the system and found it to be very easy to use, enabled me to create some fantastic images (I’m a horrible photographer) and the best part, it’s easy to use. So many tools out there are so complicated it take more time learning how to make basic modifications, I’d rather just pay someone else to do it. With Polarr, you can quickly and easily make great things happen without wasting time or money.

Professional creatives will find this a great tool to increase their productivity, and people like me with creativity thought but not the talent to turn into reality, will love what Polarr is doing, and their approach to technology and creativity.

They’re a relatively young startup, so go check them out and share with your friends!

NY Startup: Emotish Lets You Share Pictures With Emotion INTERVIEW

Emotish is a new mobile app startup in New York City. They’ve taken a twist of the standard photo sharing app and added an element to it that makes this app special. The element is emotion.

With Emotish you take photos of yourself or you and your friends and you can tag it with what you’re feeling at the time and then share it via Facebook and Twitter.  Users will soon be able to keep tabs on the photos and tags and see what feelings are trending, how everyone was feeling in a given area, favorite photos and contextual tags.

Emotions bring a whole new life into photo sharing. Instagram is great with it’s filters and likes but with Emotish not only will you see photos and a smile but you’ll have a better context of what the smiles about, or even what the long face or frown is about.

What makes Emotish even cooler is this isn’t just about great coders or a cool mobile app development startup. Emotish Co-Founder Ryan Wegner is actually a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. So like Smurks in Chicago, there is actual real psychology behind this app and what emotion brings to the table in people’s every day lives, in context and in photos.

We got a chance to talk to Wenger in between saving the world and developing great apps, check out the interview below:

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Google+ Updates Its Android App To Mimic It’s Update To iOS

Google has finally updated their Android app to follow the model of the iOS version they released to make the mobile experience “more beautiful.” Many Android users were pretty jealous to see the beauty iOS users were beholding, and they now can finally have it themselves. With some glitches though, the tablet version is still a little lacking as seen below. Most of the update takes what was a bland boring application and just makes it pop with the photos and posts, as well as some  other major updates that we’ve all been waiting for and hoping for.

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Ikea Introduces New Knappa Cardboard Digital Camera

Ikea is the largest retailer of framed artwork in the world. They area also known for their flat laying furniture. I remember as a kid being amazed that everything that came from Ikea came in a box. It’s also the place for great swedish meatballs, cheap batteries and even cheaper trash cans and toilet plungers.

Now the Swedish furniture empire has added cheap digital cameras. How cheap? How’s free?

Ikea has introduced a new Knappa cardboard digital camera. The 2.3 megapixel camera is made out of one piece of cardboard, 2 batteries and a circuit board that houses the entire rest of the camera.

In a promotional video Ikea touts their great zooming function, just stretch your arms out. They also show their unique image stabilization function that greatly increases the clarity of the photo. Simply rest your elbows on a stationary chair and hold the camera tightly, voila it’s that easy.

The shutter time is nothing to write home about, from picture to picture you’re looking at about 8 seconds. It also only holds 40 pictures.

The idea behind the new cardboard camera is to use it to take pictures of Ikea’s new PS2012 collection and upload them to an Ikea furniture sharing social networking type site.

You can delete your pictures when you mass upload them to your computer or by holding a paperclip into the delete button.

There’s no word on whether they will sell these cameras after the promotional period or how long the promotional period will last however it’s actually a good idea to have them handy at Ikea in case a customer comes in without a digital camera or cell phone and wants to take photos of the exciting furniture, after all, Ikea is the DisneyLand of furniture stores.

Source: GizMag

What’s In Your Bag: Colby Brown

In this episode of What’s In Your Bag we get up close and personal with a good friend of mine in Colby Brown. We’ve covered him more than anyone else with numerous Beyond The Lens features. He’s that much of an interesting interview so I couldn’t help it. He has been on the road and was able to take the time to inventory his gear along with sending a couple of photos…

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Beyond The Lens: Colby Brown

 

This past weekend, in between our busy schedules some how me and Colby Brown where able to sit down together for another interview. He was the first Photographer I’ve interviewed for Beyond The Lens so our talks are a little more interesting. For those of you who have been living under a rock Colby pretty much is the ambassador on Google+ for both Photography as well as Android. He spear headed Behind The Lens Critique a group in which Photographers put their work on the “Chopping Block” and ask for critique. He also is the man behind the Android Photography page as well.

 

For what turned out to be yet another great interview, here you go.

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Beyond The Lens: Brent Burzycki

For this Beyond The Lens we take a look at Brent Burzycki, whom recently opened up to us in our What’s In Your Bag feature. He explains to us about his love for photography and how his Dad was a major influence in getting him interested in photography. Along with hints for those wanting to Photograph models in the future ;)

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Instagram For Android, Why Did We Even Need It?

 

Instagram for Android came out today, and by searching Twitter, you could find either utter stupidity in the hatred or joy that it’s finally on Android. Both views though are utterly stupid. For one, those iPhone users are idiots and need more proof just reread what was said above, or click on Twitter in the first sentence and just follow the stream of stupidity down to your local Apple store.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Instagram isn’t a “good” application, it’s just Android really never needed it. We have applications such as Paper Camera, puddling camera , Retro Camera Plus . Just to name a few. What Instagram did for the iPhone is something that has been done since Android first came out. Third party Camera applications with trendy filters that the camera couldn’t do on it’s own.

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What’s In Your Bag: Brent Burzycki

I first meet Brent Burzycki on Google+ on the Behind The Lens Critique group. We quickly hit it off, as his love for a failed futbol team and my love affair for the great Chelsea gave plenty to talk about at first. Later on it was his beautiful photography of women, two guys, what else you expect? To helping me when ever I had questions with my own photography.

During his busy schedule in between him going to the Air Show this weekend we are able to have him inventory his bag for our What’s In Your Bag feature, and here it is.

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Sony To Launch Their 4K Camera At $9,000

 

In the film industry, Red cameras were all the rage for the past couple of years. However, as we’ve seen during this past CES a new format has came out called 4K. The name is derived from the horizontal resolution, which is approximately 4,000 pixels. While we saw a sneak peak at what Sony was to reveal, we are now getting more information about it. NEX-FS700E will be released at NAB and the estimated price will be around $9,000, well bellow the price Canon is to release theirs at.

With slow motion options includes 120, 240 and 480 at 960fps. As of now we are unsure as of now if the camera records internally to 1080p or the full 4K. With a June release date.

 

Source: Engadget

Beyond The Lens: Colby Brown

This is a repost of an article that was written on TheDroidGuy.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been in talks with Colby about photography as he is the man behind the new viral group that has started on Google+ called Behind the Lens- Photo Critique. Which has in just a few short days amassed over 100′s of photographers and hopeful ones(like me). What the group does is let photographers post pictures on Google+ with the tag “Behind the lens- Photo Critique” and other photographers, give their honest opinions on the photo. Besides being a full time photographer and a new father, he is also an avid Android user who was the one who actually alerted me that the Droid3 was rooted via one of his post. Following that we talked about doing an interview with him and here it is…

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What’s In Your Bag: Michael Neal

Michael Neal a photographer out of Maui, after seeing another What’s In Your Bag contacted us, and I’ve been in talks with him ever since and couldn’t wait for him to show us what was in his bag. After seeing some of the photos from his site I knew his gear was going to just be as crazy as his photos, and he didn’t disappoint.

I’m a freelance surf and nature photographer based on Maui,Hawaii. I have been shooting professionally for 7 years. My surf photos focus on the many talented surfer here on Maui, with an emphasize on the big waves of Peahi (Jaws). These images regularly appeared in magazines and websites in the USA, Europe, South Africa, and Brazil.

Maui is an awesome place and I love capturing the beauty of nature found here.

My print work in sold through many of the fine galleries on the island. Maui has some of the most endangered creatures on the planet, I work regularly with conservation groups here documenting their work.

These images are being used by the Nature Conservancy,Haleakala National Park, the Maui Ocean Center and others to promote the incredible work being done here.

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Beyond The Lens: Alvin Toro

I first met Alvin while on the first PhotoWalk put on through Google+. It also happened to be my first ever experience around photographers and the art in which I’ve grown to love. Alone that one day I learned more in just those few hours than I’ve learned my whole life. Alvin was a big part in that as he helped me with random questions I had, even though I only had my HTC MyTouch4G(Taking photos with) and my Motorola Xoom(For all the notes.) Since than we’ve been on more PhotoWalks together and I knew I had to interview him not just for me, but for others to be enlightened by him as well. So we sat down for our Beyond The Lens feature and here it is.

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What’s In Your Bag: Randy Jay Braun

What’s In Your Bag: Photography amateurs and professionals share the contents of their camera bags.  Besides our little interview in which we just had with Randy Jay Braun, he also opened up to use what was in his camera bag that he always uses. Nothing really jumped out at us until he mentioned he carries around Duct Tape which could be or could not deal with photography if you are in a certain mood…

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