If you’ve always wanted to go scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef but haven’t had a chance to, this might be one of the next best things: Google has added gorgeous underwater panoramic photographs to Street View, allowing to swim around at the world’s largest coral system as if it were a street in your neighborhood.
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Lensbaby’s big announcement at Photokina this year was the new Spark: an affordable plastic lens that offers selective focusing at a low price point of $80. A few weeks prior to the announcement, the company sent us a free copy of the lens to test out.
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Bankruptcy has not been friendly to Kodak. The once-important camera company — now a printing company — is worth less than 20 cents a share today, a completely different picture than its glory days in the mid-1990s, when the price briefly surged beyond $90. Now that the share price is so low, would it be wise to invest in the company in hopes that it emerges from bankruptcy protection? Matt Krantz over at USA Today says no, and writes,

Some investors figure that companies that were as large and powerful as Eastman Kodak can’t just vanish. And because of that, they think that when they see the shares trading for just 22 cents that they can’t miss. But investors who assume this are missing a few key points that wind up resulting in huge losses and disappointment.

When companies undergo bankruptcy restructuring, common stockholders are last in line for what’s left of the remaining company. It’s pretty common for the common shares to be delisted from a stock exchange and ultimately be moved to a lightly regulated marketplace. That’s what’s happened with Kodak shares. Some shareholders find getting out of these positions can be costly or troublesome.

He says that while it’s possible that Kodak will succeed in its plans of emerging from bankruptcy next year, it’s unlikely that anyone still holding on to shares in the company will see their wallets getting fatter.

Ask Matt: Are Eastman Kodak shares a bankrupt bargain? [USA Today]

Image credit: Illustration based on Kodak Building in Rochester, NY by Viktor Nagornyy

When tourists visit famous landmarks, they commonly pull out their own cameras to snap some photographs as mementos, even if they themselves aren’t in the picture. Despite the fact that there’s almost always guaranteed to be an identical photograph taken by someone else, somewhere online, there’s something about capturing the moment for oneself that makes redundant photos special.

That’s why a new patent filed by Google is a bit puzzling. It’s called “Image zooming using pre-existing imaging information” and, as the title suggests, revolves around using other people’s photographs to “boost” a digital camera’s zoom.
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Regardless of how you feel about Hasselblad’s idea of taking a $1,100 Sony NEX-7, souping it up, and selling it for $6,500 as a Hasselblad Lunar, I think we can all agree that there needs to be honesty in marketing the camera. Well, that’s what a couple of sections over on the Lunar website seriously lack. Check out the page boasting about the camera’s APS-C HD CMOS Sensor, which contains a side-by-side comparison showing the common APS-C sensor size next to other popular sizes. Does that look like a Micro Four Thirds sensor to you?
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Instagram is in the process of pushing out version 3.1.0 of its photo sharing app. For iOS, the new version updates the app to be compatible with iOS 6 and the taller screen of the iPhone 5, doing away with the annoying gap that owners of the new phone have been seeing. While it’s certainly a welcome improvement for Instagram devotees, seeing an app be updated for the new display isn’t exactly a rare sight these days.

What’s interesting is what the new update eliminates: live filters are gone.
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Want to know what the professional photography industry was like over half a century ago, and what advice was commonly given to aspiring professionals? Check out this 10-minute vocational guidance film from 1946 that offers a quick overview of the various types of photography that people went pro in at the time. Suggested careers include portrait photography, commercial photography, and photojournalism. Here’s how the video starts off:

Photography is often called “the universal hobby.” It is a means of creative expression within the reach of people in all walks of life, and it speaks a language that everyone can understand.

The camera lens is a mechanical eye: seeing everything, and recording everything. It captures actions that will never again be repeated.

It’s fascinating to see how much the industry has changed in some ways, while remaining virtually unchanged in others. The brief glimpses of negative retouching are probably quite foreign to many modern day photographers, while the tip on starting photography as a hobby first is still heeded by many an aspiring photographer today.

(via The Atlantic via ISO 1200)

Aaron Feinberg is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer. Visit his website here.

PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Aaron Feinberg: Well… I grew up on Long Island, NY. Spent summers at camp in upstate NY and was introduced to hiking and mountains that way. There was always a sense of achievement after reaching the peaks and taking in the view. That stuck with me through college, as I would head up there with friends while attending University of Albany for Atmospheric Science (Meteorology). After graduating, I headed out to UT to spend time ski-bumming and enjoying the amazing snow that UT has to offer. Throughout college I had a point-and-shoot digital with me that I would experiment with and explore. However, while out in UT I started to shoot my friends with my new one, a Canon A610, they encouraged me to pursue my hobby. With that I purchased a Canon 20D and 17-85 in March of ’06. You could say the rest is history.
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It looks like the Olympus financial scandal is finally coming to an end. It has been nearly a year since it came to light that there were massive cases of fraud and coverups going on in the upper echelons of Olympus management. What started as a CEO’s firing quickly spiraled into one of the biggest scandals to ever hit corporate Japan — the country’s equivalent of the US’ Enron fiasco.

In the end, a number of the company’s top executives were arrested after submitting their resignations. The trials for those former bigwigs are only now starting to get underway. Three of them, including former chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa (pictured above), pleaded guilty today to charges of falsifying accounts and covering up more than $1 billion in losses. The camera company itself also filed a guilty plea.
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Haute couture and Occupy protests are two things that are completely at odds with one another — the perfect combination for a photo shoot dripping with satire and social commentary. Photographer Ben Ritter did an American Psycho-themed fashion shoot featuring models wearing pricey suits hanging out among semi-homeless Occupy protestors camped out in Zucotti Park in New York City.

In one photograph, a model sporting a Christian Dior suit sits next to a dreadlocked guitar player while daintily eating caviar with an oblivious look on his face. In another, a model takes on the role of a fashionable protestor, attempting to blend into the crowd by wearing his Dior tie as a headband and banging away on a bongo drum.
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