Flickr user Alex Eylar created this humorous recreation of Pete Souza’s now-iconic photo of Obama in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid.
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Here’s a beautiful illustration titled “A Camera Study” by Mari Sheibley, the lead designer over at Foursquare and the person behind the badges. I think this would be awesome as a poster.

A Camera Study (via Laughing Squid)

In November 2010, Talking Points Memo published an article that included a wire photo taken on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. Yesterday they received a cease and desist letter from the NYSE claiming that photos of the trading floor cannot be displayed without the NYSE’s permission, and that it owns trademark rights to images of the floor:

NYSE has common law and Federal trademark rights in and to NYSE’s name and images of the Trading Floor [...] NYSE owns Federal tradmark rights in one depiction of the Trading Floor and common law rights in the Trading Floor viewed from virtually any angle [...] Accordingly, NYSE has the right to prevent unauthorized use of its Trademarks and reference to NYSE by others. [#]

You can read the two page C&D letter here. What are your thoughts on this?

(via Boing Boing)

Image credit: NYSE trading floor (tilt-shifted) by champura

If you’ve used your flash for quite a while, you may have noticed some yellowish haze where the plastic has oxidized. For flash units that have a smooth surface, here’s a pro tip: you can make it shine again by simply dabbing a little toothpaste onto a cloth and wiping off the haze in a circular motion.
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Sigma generated a lot of buzz recently after announcing its SD1 DSLR with a $9,700 MSRP, and that’s probably exactly what they were trying to do. As articles all over the Internet questioned why a 14.7MP Sigma DSLR would cost the same price as Pentax’s 40MP medium-format DSLR, Sigma was quick to point out that the camera would actually be selling for a slightly more reasonable street price of $6,900.
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Did you know that you can turn any wall magnetic by painting it with magnetic primer? Communications company M Booth did this with one of its walls, then sent out employees onto the streets of NYC with Fujifilm Instax cameras. The result is this impressive wall displaying 800 instant photos!
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One of the big complaints users (or ex-users) have against Flickr is that its account deletion process is often unexpected and almost always permanent. Many users — even paid subscribers — have found their accounts deleted and have had no way of appealing and no chance of recovering their data. Flickr finally addressed the issue today by changing its deletion policy — data is now stored for 90 days on the server after accounts are deleted, giving users a chance to appeal. Huzzah!

Your photos and data on Flickr [Flickr Blog]

Image credit: delete by Vitor Sá – Virgu

Sigma’s upcoming SD1 uses a special Foveon sensor that captures red, green, and blue information at each pixel by stacking three separate 15MP sensors, giving the resulting images 46 million pieces of information. Hasselblad’s new H4D-200MS medium format DSLR also captures each of the three colors at every pixel, but with a different method — it shoots 6 separate photos with its 50MP sensor, but shifts the sensor by 1.5 pixels for each shot, giving the resulting photos 200MP of resolution.
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After Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on its final mission, a woman named Stefanie Gordon snapped a photograph of it from her Delta airlines seat using her iPhone, sharing it with friends and family through TwitPic. Though it quickly went viral, and was shared all over the media, Gordon was only paid by five media organizations for licensing rights to the photo. The Red Tape blog over on MSNBC wrote a great post a couple days ago bringing the issue of copyright infringement to the public’s attention:

In a world where social media users, bloggers and even some professional journalists are increasingly comfortable simply copying the work of others and republishing it, can intellectual property rights survive? Can original content survive? And what should the world do when an amateur photographer takes a newsworthy photo and shares it on a social network?

We didn’t share Gordon’s photo here on PetaPixel because we never got her permission to do so (she never responded to our requests). Luckily for us, NASA just published this awesome (non-copyrighted) photograph of the launch that you can freely share and republish.

That famous space shuttle photo: When is sharing stealing? (via The Online Photographer)

If you’ve ever found folding up a reflector to be difficult, here’s a short and sweet video tutorial on how to make it fit back into its bag.

(via NYIP)