If you’re looking to set up a portfolio website for your photography, New York-based photographer Dalton Rooney has a nice WordPress template [Update: no longer available] you can download and install. We’re of the opinion that portfolios shouldn’t be flash-based, and this minimalistic design highlights your work in a simple and easy to use way. Of course, you can always use the template as a base and customize it to your liking.

Oh, and did we mention it’s completely free?

It’s no secret that Polaroid has seen its share of financial troubles over the last few years. This year, Polaroid will be forced to bring some of its historic prints and images to Sotheby’s auction block in order to offset debts incurred as a result of its current bankruptcy, the New York Times reports.

In the lineup are some 400 photos by Ansel Adams, and work by artistic legends such as Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Robert Mapplethorpe. The auction will be held in Sotheby’s New York, the Times cites that is expected to bring in $7.5 million to $11.5 million.

Featured photographers have mixed feelings about the auction; many feel that the historic collection is museum-worthy, the Times quotes:

“It’s an amazing body of work,” Mr. Close said in a telephone interview. “There’s really nothing like it in the history of photography.” But, he added, “to sell it is criminal.”

The collection was initiated and owned by Polaroid founder, Edwin H. Land, who made sure creative minds of his time had a chance to use and tinker with his product, and give him hands-on professional feedback, the Times noted:

It was a handy arrangement, the collection’s longtime curator, Barbara Hitchcock, explained: Polaroid provided some of the greatest talents around with equipment and film, and they gave the company photographs. “Experimentation was encouraged by Polaroid,” Ms. Hitchcock added. “It was a mantra — experimentation, creativity, innovation, pushing the envelope of photography.”

These early Polaroid images provide fascinating glimpses into the work of famous photographers, as well as into the early development of a consumer camera culture that transcended merely functioning as an industry — though ironically, the company would later fall on hard times as a struggling industry.

Some of the remarkable pieces up for auction can be viewed on the NYT’s Lens Blog.

(via The New York Times)

Here’s a story that’s sure to drop your jaws: A Spanish trawlerman named Benito Estevez was recently fishing off the west coast of Europe when his net brought up a digital camera from the Atlantic seabed.

Five photographs were recovered from the camera’s memory card, and included shots of a man and woman posing on the deck of a ship (seen to the left).

In one of the photographs (bottom), a woman is seen on the deck of the QM2 cruise liner, with the QE2 in the background. BBC News reported the story on television last night, and published it online early this morning. This afternoon, they reported that the owners had been found. A friend of the owners, living in England, noticed their photographs last night just as she was about to switch off her television.

Turns out the owners, Barbara and Dennis Gregory of South Africa, were traveling from New York to Southampton in 2008 when the camera fell overboard into the Atlantic. Mrs. Gregory says,

Somebody spotted dolphins in the water and the two of us jumped up and that was it. It literally bounced off his lap, across the deck and into the water with hardly a splash and it was gone. [...] There’s no way we could ever have imagined that this thing would ever turn up again. It sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. [...] You daydream that it might happen that these pictures are going to pop up somewhere, but you don’t think it’s ever going to happen.

It’s absolutely mindboggling.

We agree.

(via Digital Photography Review)

If you’re addicted to The Big Picture like we are, then you probably also wish they posted more than two or three times a week. You should also take a look at The Big Pictr, a neat website we just came across. Although it blatantly copies The Big Picture in its name and design, the idea behind the site is pretty interesting.

It’s basically a community generated photoblog with the large photograph style of The Big Picture. Anyone can start a new collection with a Flickr user, search term, or tags, and then share it privately or publish it to the front page. For example, here’s a collection we just created using photos from our Flickr account.

If this website takes off, it could be a great way to both browse interesting photographs and promote your own photography.

Just in time for the Winter Olympics, Google announced on Tuesday that Street View now includes imagery of several runs at Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, where many of the events will be held. To capture the photographs, Street View cameras were mounted on a snowmobile that made runs down the slopes. Here’s a look at what it’s like.

If they keep this up they’ll have to launch a Google Mountain View. Hah… hah… Get it?

(via Engadget)

The Nikon Coolpix site now features an interesting tool for viewing photos, utilizing the viewer’s webcam and hand motions to flip through and zoom in and out of images. (Think: that one Spielberg film with Tom Cruise…)

The online tool, Virtual Touch Experience, is a javascript app that the user drags to their browser bookmark bar. When the bookmark is clicked while viewing compatible image sites, the images are opened for interaction in another window.

Virtual Touch Experience is a clever ad campaign designed by MRM Worldwide for Nikon’s touch screen Coolpix S70. According to the press release, it’s supposed to emulate the touch screen experience of the camera, as well as Nikon’s emphasis on the human element/touch in photography.

Though Virtual Touch Experience isn’t something you might actually integrate into routine photo viewing, (personally, my arm got really tired, and then I felt a little silly), it’s an interesting idea to make photos more interactive.

We’re curious to see if photo viewing and sorting could go the way of physical interactivity using hardware motion sensors like Nintendo Wii or Microsoft’s Project Natal someday.

We’re not sure whether it’s worth it in terms of cost, but here’s a way to print your own gigantic photograph posters using your ordinary photo printer. Easy Poster Printer is a free program by GD Software that automatically prints out a poster of any size (maximum is 20×20 meters) in individual pieces using your photo printer.

Obviously you could do the same thing using an ordinary program like Photoshop, but this program takes all the work out of the process, doing all the slicing and printing for you. The 6MB program is for Windows only (sorry Mac people!) and can be downloaded by clicking here [Update: the program is no longer available].

Some of you might know that popular photo sharing service Flickr was originally a set of tools built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. In November of 2009 we also reported that Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, had left Flickr and was returning to his original project, Game Neverending.

With a group of former Flickr employees, Butterfield started a small company called Tiny Speck, which just unveiled Glitch, a massively multiplayer game played through a browser. Here’s a trailer they’ve released:

It’s called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the “glitch” — a grave danger of disemprobablization.

This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence and … you know what? You’ll probably just have to wait and play the game :)

Here’s a side by side comparison between an old screenshot of Game Neverending (left) and a new screenshot of Glitch (right):

We’re not sure how a game like this spawned Flickr, but it doesn’t seem as though Glitch will have anything to do with photography. Perhaps the tools were originally used for in-game images and graphics rather than photographs…

Glitch will be free of charge and available by the end of the year.

(via Thomas Hawk)

If you’d like to take nicer looking photographs of small objects, but don’t want to spend money buying a real light tent, you can always check out do-it-yourself options. There’s all sorts of DIY tutorials on the web, but this paper and binder clip tutorial by Nathan Moroney over at The Mostly Color Channel caught our eye. All you need are some pieces of paper and 4 binder clips.

This light tent can also be scaled up and down. How else to take photos of your new light tent but inside of a larger light tent? Cheap railboard is great for larger versions. [...] Given the wide availability of paper and paper clips it’s also quite handy to be able to construct a light tent as needed, especially when traveling, in a co-worker’s cube or on the beach. It takes me about a minute to make one from scratch. The binder clips can be removed for lay-flat storage of the light tent. The resulting images [...] are sufficient for many uses, even blogging.

Ready to get started? You can check out the step-by-step tutorial here:

Cheap, Green & Diffuse: A Paper & Binder Clip Light Tent

Nikonians rejoice! Nikon has just announced two new lenses: the AF-S NIKKOR 24mm f/1.4G ED and the AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR.

The new 16-35mm is huge news for full frame Nikon users, as it is the widest FX-format focal range with VR at 16mm. 16mm without a crop factor is pretty darn wide — that’s a wide angle view of 107°!

Nikon’s 24mm is also nothing to overlook for FX and DX users. It joins Nikons array of prime lenses, but boasts the widest aperture in a wide angle lens.

Photographer Bob Krist had one of the first hands-on shooting with both lenses, and he’s got some photos with the 24mm f/1.4G ED on his site.

Both of the new lenses utilize Nikon’s Silent Wave Motor (so none of that angry-robot whirring like the f/1.8 nifty 50), a Nano Crystal Coat to reduce internal “ghosting” and flaring, and ED glass. (Confused by all the numbers and letters? Here’s a helpful article: Lens names explained.)

But of course, all this fantastic gear comes at a pretty price. Nikon will release the 16-35mm f/4 later this month, with an estimated price of $1259.95. The 24mm f/1.4 will be available late March 2010 for around $2199.95.

Even if you’re not planning on dropping bills on the new lenses, keep an eye out for quality lens resells. The 24mm f/1.4 will likely effectively replace the comparatively cheap but trusty Nikon 24mm f/2.8, and it’s likely that there will be more DX lenses available on the resell market.