Brad Plumer:

Back in the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry went through a major upheaval. Foreign automakers started opening up more and more plants in the South, taking advantage of the region’s weaker unions and lower labor costs. That, in turn, undercut the historically dominant position of Detroit and the Midwest.

Now, half a century later, the U.S. auto industry is going through yet another major churn. And this time around, Mexico is the driving force.

That’s one upshot of a new report on the auto industry from the Brookings Institution. The report is ostensibly a case study focused on Tennessee’s automotive sector, but it also offers a glimpse of the way the entire North American auto industry has shifted over the last 20 years.

The big story here is Mexico, which has massively expanded its share of North American auto manufacturing since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Automakers from GM to Nissan have been opening plants south of the border, attracted by Mexico’s low wages and dense industrial clusters:

The iPhone 5s does an admirable job capturing outdoor sports images.

Let’s up the ante and go indoors where light is precious and parent photographer walk around space is rather limited.

Once again, the excellent Canon zoom with the occasional extender pleases the eye with images such as this cross court capture:

Tap to view a larger version.

I augmented the iPhone 5s camera’s standard focal length with the slick iPro 2 telephoto lens (note the FAQ on iPro 2 and the iPhone 5s and 5c).

The images below were captured using the built-in camera app. I pinched to digitally zoom, tapped on a tennis player to focus and used the 5s’s 10 frames per second “burst mode” to capture* a series of images, some of which were interesting:

What about video?

I captured a brief “slow mo” video scene, again with the iPro 2x telephoto lens (exporting slow mo video is presently non trivial):

iPhone 5s: Tennis slo mo from Jim Zellmer on Vimeo.

The results were better than expected and superior to some of the nearby point & shoot and entry level cameras.

Apple’s powerful “system on a chip” expertise, user experience ethos, app ecosystem and developer community has created a photo tsunami, one that is engulfing the traditional players. The Canon & Nikons of the world are operating at a much, much slower pace (OODA).

Shooting with my Canon dslr today, I thought back to the 2007 iPhone introduction when it was immediately obvious that button heavy phones were toast. The iPhone’s computer heritage and touchscreen meant that developers were no longer lashed to the phone first hardware. The phone became an app and the rest is history.

Apple and third party developers, including lens makers, will certainly continue to push the iPhone photography frontier.

* I find the lack of significant camera app shutter lag to be rather impressive, particularly when shooting action scenes.

The Economist:

A bigger job will be to ready Apple for the coming fusion of fashion and technology. The most talked-about new devices are wearable. Google’s Glass smuggles a smartphone into a pair of spectacles. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear squeezes some smartphone functions into a wristwatch. Apple is also keen to surf the wearable wave. An iWatch, which Apple may launch next year, would pull it towards Ms Ahrendts’s home turf, since it would compete with fashionable timepieces like Burberry’s.

Apple has long been something of a fashion house. Its product launches are choreographed like catwalk shows. But its glamour has faded since the death of Steve Jobs, its founder, in 2011. His successor, Tim Cook, is striving to regain it. He recently hired Paul Deneve, the boss of Yves Saint Laurent, a French fashion house. Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s design guru, now oversees the look of software as well as hardware. Ms Ahrendts brings another eye for beauty, and a knack for seducing consumers.