Marc Levoy - Lectures on Digital Photography - Lecture 1 (21mar16).mp4

The star tracking feature of the astrophotography mode definitely has me interested. I'm disappointed to see the continued lack of battery capacity on the smaller phone though. While I'd love a larger battery, I'm one of the unfortunate ones whose small hands can already barely reach across my Pixel 2's phone screen -- much less the top section. I'm also incredibly excited about the face unlocking feature -- I owned a Pixel Xs for about a week before returning it, and face unlock was my absolute favorite feature. It's very seamless especially compared to fingerprint unlock. As an aside, Marc Levoy, who spoke at the Google event today is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, and has a great series titled "Lectures on Digital Photography" available for free on Youtube: [this video]

I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite "optical" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked! It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional. I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: [link] . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: [this video] . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).