Now here is something you don’t see everyday, sure we love to boast about the cameras on our smartphones, but techhive took it to another level. They sent out three professional photographers into the world with a smartphone each as their took! An iPhone 5, Lumia 920 and EVO 4G TLE were the devices. The article could have easily been turned into a versus shootout, instead, it showcases the potential of camera phones in general, especially in the hands of a pro. Such a great piece! Make the jump for the entire article and a lot more images.

iOS: Anne Hamersky

Anne Hamersky

The artist: Anne Hamersky shoots stills and video of real people doing real things. Last year she shot the construction of a straw-bale house on Hopi lands, an urban farm build in the South Bronx, and a wetlands restoration project in Passe a l’Outre, Louisiana. Michael Pollan selected her latest book,Farm Together Now(Chronicle, 2010), as his favorite food book of 2011. Anne lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Instagram (@anneham).

The smartphone: iPhone 5, 8-megapixel iSight camera

Twin Peaks Hike

ANNE HAMERSKYTwin Peaks Hike

I ride my bike a lot up Twin Peaks, the big double hills in the center of my city. The spring flowers are running amok up there right now. So it was fun to try out Photo Grid, a collage-making app for iOS. I used the swap function, the flop function, and the rounded-corner selection.

After using the iPhone’s built-in camera app to take pictures for the collage, I opened the collage in Snapseed and followed this path: Tune image > Contrast +14 > Saturation +6.

 

Windows Phone 8: Carly Marin

Carly Marin

The artist: Carly Marin is a graduate of California College of the Arts, where she received her BFA in photography. She is also the owner and operator of Carly Jean Photography, specializing in wedding photography and portraits. Her interest in photography emerged at the age of 10, and she has since dedicated herself entirely to it. Her work combines different elements of journalistic, traditional, and fashion-based photography. When she’s not photographing, you can find her enjoying coffee shops, doing experimental baking, or relaxing at home obsessing over cats! Although Carly uses mainly a digital SLR for her business, she loves using traditional 35mm film cameras for more-personal work. Apart from building up her commercial photography business, she is also working on fine-art personal projects that she hopes to share with the art world.

The smartphone: Nokia Lumia 920, 8.7-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 autofocus Carl Zeiss lens

A Portrait of Kasi

CARLY MARINA Portrait of Kasi

I took this photo at a park in Pleasanton, California, on a styled shoot with one of my favorite models to work with. Kasi recently got her cosmetology license, so we wanted to highlight her amazing hair and makeup skills with this shoot, as well as her unique sense of style. I used the Lumia’s auto settings, with an ISO of 400, the default exposure value and auto white balance, and aspect ratio 16:9.

Android: Michelle Walker

Michelle Walker

The artist: Michelle Walker is a San Francisco-based wedding, travel, portrait, and dog photographer. A formally trained photographer, she prefers a photojournalistic approach to her work—honest, meaningful, and gorgeous. She runs her own photography business, Michelle Walker Photography.

The smartphone: HTC EVO 4G LTE, 8 megapixels

Umbrellas

Ton Sai Bay, Thailand

MICHELLE WALKERUmbrellas: Ton Sai Bay, Thailand

I love the colors in this photograph—they make me remember exactly what it’s like to be on that beach! I took this using the depth-of-field setting in the native Android camera app.  This is a great setting for creating shallow bokeh (from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze”) that draws the viewers’ attention to the area of the image in focus.

This week in “what took so long?” Netflix finally decides to let us get social via Facebook! You’ll have the ability to see what you’re friends were watching, and even a nice added feature to see only movies friends rated 4 or 5 stars! NICE! On my wish list for the next go around? Someone not so robotic to explain the goodness, I almost feel asleep watching the video below. Check it out!

Now…if only the notebook was still available to stream.

Rumors are flying of Verizon finally returning to the Windows Phone world, and they’ll be doing so in style. According to The Verge, Verizon customers can expect to receive the Lumia 928, nice!

But the higher model number is not only that, the rumors state it will be sporting an all aluminum body, which we’ve been hearing about for a few weeks. Although it would be a departure from the now famous polycarbonate Lumia bodies, anything aluminum is the new “premium,” so I’m glad to see Nokia heading that route. Not to mention, the render in the image above from wmpoweruser looks pretty sweet.

Also included in the rumor is a new xenon flash to improve low light images a bit more. This would be a good day when the or if the rumor comes true, I know a ton of Verizon customers itching to get their hands on some Windows Phone glory. Stay tuned!

If there is one thing I’ve learned in Corporate America, its just how powerful the “reply to all” button can be at times. Sure, powerful may not be the best word, but man oh man can it do some damage and provide comedy!

Every now and then, a mild mannered admin somewhere sends out a high level correspondence on the behalf of her boss and makes a simple mistake. He/she may have included a distribution list that was not intended to receive the message, and there we have it, “please stop replying to all.”

At first, the message goes unnoticed by most, but then an unsuspecting response comes in, “hey, I am not sure this email was intended for me.” Like crows on a wire, now everyone is suddenly clued into the email, this then brings us to the second stage of “please stop replying to all.”

Now all of a sudden, hundreds of people reply to everyone else to say “please remove me from this email list,” closely followed by the rest who didn’t think to do that, but now do it because the person before them did.

Stage four, by now, every one is frustrated and does the only thing they know how, reply to all to ask everyone else not to reply to all. But wait, they reply to all, asking everyone they just replied to, not to reply to all. But wait, they reply to all, to…. lol! You see what I am getting at here.

Enter stage five, this is where the brilliance on the email list starts to thrive. The smarter folks now understand what is going on and start to make light of the situation. You get comments like:

“Mmm donuts…”

“The secret trick to getting removed from a lyris mailing list it to type “#R E M O V E$”

Its a little known trick.”

“I just totally lost my faith in humanity.”

Trust me, it gets worst, but I am not going to copy and paste the madness, yes, its that inappropriate. By the way, this is real and is happening right now as I type, I am about 245 emails in.

Stage six brings with it a sad overtone. The original sender now sends out an e-mail to let everyone know it was a mistake and there is no need to reply to all, then they usually toss in a “please be considerate as there are a number of high level people on this list.” You might also get the “please stop replaying to all because these emails are being reviewed and I will get in trouble with upper management.” As you could image, the volume of ignorance now increases!

This then brings us to stage seven, a super high level executive responds with a “you are mistreating company resources, anyone who replies after this message will have a meeting with HR.” It usually stops here, but today, the mishap was not a company email, so people had little to no response to the sternly spoken IT administrator waving around the site’s TOS.

Although it is not funny, a huge waste of people time, a disgrace to professionals to see professionals behaving this way, and a sad occurrence for the original sender, this is all REALLY AMUSING! Also amusing, almost everyone joining in on the “fun” never thought to remove their personal and work phone numbers, email addresses, working titles, real addresses and even names! Wow. On the flip side, I now have a really good list of direct contact numbers to some really high up people in Microsoft, HP and a few other firms. Sweet!

I know you’re wondering what is the name of the company currently in the mix up, you know im not going to tell you that! but just trust me, this is the stuff life is made of!

iTunes wins again! This time, pulling a crazy exclusive, you can stream Justin Timberlake new album an entire week before release, for free! How about that? But wait, not so fast, isn’t JT the face of the “new” Myspace? Why would this sweet deal go to iTunes and not MySpace? Especially after the rebranding of the site to be heavily music focused? Okay, who didn’t do their job?

Any who, check out the album titled “20/20 Experience” stream here.

So you’re tired of seeing everyone else’s Harlem Shake video, you think its time for you to be a productive member of pop culture and do you own! You’re in luck, if you happen to be an iOS user that is. Behold, the app sent from above, titled, “Harlem Shake Creator HD.”

The app makes your life a lot easier by divided the Harlem Shake awesomeness into three easy steps, so easy, you’d be crazy not to do it! Added “high quality” option is a must, but the best part of the app is the added slow motion effect at the end, NICE!

The original Harlem Shake Creator! Make viral videos with your friends in simple 3 steps.
★ Slow motion for last 2 seconds (canons)
☆ FREE upload to YouTube in HD or medium quality
☆ Save to camera roll
The Harlem Shake is an Internet phenomenon based on viral videos that began to gain popularity in early February 2013, following the release of a video by the YouTube comedy vlogger Filthy Frank.
Due to numerous requests, “save to gallery” option will be available for free within two next versions!!

source Lifestyles Defined

The second trailer to Star Trek Into Darkness just hit the youtubes, and it does a good job at building anticipation for the sequel to JJ Abram masterpiece! Well, masterpiece according to me.

Here is something we could all appreciate, no matter your skill level. Meet Outex waterproof DSLR camera covers. Available in two colors, a black or blue, the elastic housing is made to protect your camera in up to 33 feet of water. The mold even supports openings for the display and obviously lens in the front. Check out the video below. You can purchase yours at outex online store.

The Facebook phone rumor refuses to go quietly into the night, this has been circling for a year and some change. This time around, the rumored spec are:

• Processor: 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960
• Operating system: Google Android 4.1.2
• Cellular connectivity: LTE / HSPA
• Other connectivity: 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• Display: 4.3-inch HD (1280×720 / 320PPI)
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Storage: 16GB onboard
• Rear-facing camera: 5MP
• Front-facing camera: 1.6MP

It is said to be a HTC produced phone with a heavy AT&T presence. Is anyone buying this? Does Facebook still have that strong of a grip on social networking to make users devote an enter device to the brand? To tell the truth, I am on both sides of the fence, it would be interesting to see how it actually sells if it is real.

The folks at phonearena ere nice enough to setup a comparison shoot out between the two heavy weights. I’ve expressed my excitement about Sony’s Xpera Z in the past, I thought it to be the next best thing for android, especially with the bevy of features it brings with it. The Lumia 920, well you know that story, still holding its own in the smartphone market.

The comparison is an interesting one mainly because the Xperia Z holds a fair bit of advantage over the Lumia 920 in terms of megapixel count. The Xperia Z sports a 13MP shooter while the Lumia 920 offers a well tuned 8.9MP camera.

Based on the sample images below, the Xperia Z really comes close to the image quality of the Lumia 920, which is a good thing, or not. The author shot all day time pictures, this is without doubt the Lumia 920’s weakness. I am surprised to see the Xperia Z lacking here, one could only assume the Lumia 920 blows it away in low light settings. None the less, the Zperia Z still has a great camera and is sure to please. Head to phonearea to check out the rest of the comparison images.