#Bendgate

Yet another reason for why Apple should've left the iPhone 6 & 6Plus slightly thicker. Just a few millimetres would've solved the protruding camera problem, given you more battery life, and bendgate wouldn't exist — or at least become less common.

Instagram Launches Hyperlapse

Today, Instagram released Hyperlapse, an app for shooting smooth time-lapse videos — not to be confused with Microsoft's Hyperlapse from two weeks ago which also dealt with stabilizing time-lapse videos. Instagram's Hyperlapse does however appear to be a bit more complex than the time-lapse feature Apple added to the Camera app in iOS 8.

From Wired, on the inspiration behind Hyperlapse and how it reached Instagram:

Inspired by a demo in which he saw gyroscopes attached to cameras to de-blur their images, Karpenko had an aha moment: Smartphones didn’t have nearly enough power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes. On a smartphone, instead of using power-hungry algorithms to model the camera’s movement, he could measure it directly. And he could funnel those measurements through a simpler algorithm that could map one frame to the next, giving the illusion that the camera was being held steady. He mocked up a simple demo, and filmed a dot on his wall, while making his hand shake. “The images in the test matched up almost exactly, and that’s when I knew this was doable,” Karpenko says.

Eventually the duo uploaded video of the app in action to Instagram’s internal message board, where it received the ultimate blessing: a single comment from Instagram co-founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom. It simply declared, “This is cool.” This, in turn, egged them on to present their project to the wider group, at the company’s first “pitch-a-thon” for new creative tools, held last January. (Many of Instagram’s new features are the result of that meeting, including the sliders that allow you to dial in the strength of each filter.)

The technology certainly seems impressive. I'm excited to try the app out and might even upload one of my attempts, if it's worth sharing.

Download Hyperlapse

How to Take Photos with Real Bokeh Using an iPhone

First off, what is Bokeh? To simply put it, Bokeh is just a term used to describe a photo with a blurred background. In fact, the literal meaning of Bokeh in Japanese is "blur". You've probably seen Bokeh used in Christmas photography, where Christmas lights in the background are blurred to appear as colorful orbs. You can actually see this exact effect used in one of the photos for our earlier posts for the release of 12 Days of Gifts.

Bokeh is controlled by three factors: 1) the aperture (the size of the opening in a lens to let light in); 2) focal length; and 3) distance. Without getting too technical, you will want to use these three factors to achieve a shallow depth of field which refers to the area that is in focus.

Let's start by observing what happens if you shoot an image with a wide aperture like f1.4. In this situation, the main subject is the sphere. Focusing on the sphere sets the focal distance but, since a wide aperture has a very shallow depth of field, neither the pyramid nor the cube will be included and therefore appear blurred.

This time, by maintaining the focal distance and reducing the size of the aperture to f5.6, we notice the depth of field widens. Widening the depth of field results in all three objects being included, meaning they all appear in focus once the photo is taken.

However, this is not necessarily how an iPhone works. Generally current smartphones ship with a fixed aperture.

In this situation we have opted for a new subject and a background. Since an iPhone has a locked aperture, we don't have the freedom of controlling the depth of field. In this example our subject is the cube so as usual, tap to focus to set the focal distance. However, notice how the background is now also included inside the depth of field and will appear in focus if we take a picture. So how do we overcome this? It's actually quite simple.

First of all, we want to try limiting the focal distance as much as we can. This means bringing the subject as close to the camera as possible before your iPhone can't focus on it anymore. Of course this will also depend on how large your subject is, but try to stay close. Because the aperture is locked, the depth of field remains relatively similar. So to blur the background, all you have to do is push it back as far as possible and that is where the third condition - distance, comes into play.

Here is a photo that I took a while ago with an iPhone 5 applying the same concepts mentioned above. This photo is straight from the iPhone's camera with no post-processing.

Keep in mind that you won't be getting the same level of Bokeh that you can expect from a DSLR and more professional equipment. Also, there are many apps that replicate the Bokeh effect using software and they can easily be used in conjunction with this hardware solution. But overall what it comes down to is not just knowing but rather understanding. Once the concepts are set then all that's left is to try and experiment for yourself.