Copyright law is in place to protect artistic expression, not individual ideas. That was the crux of the reasoning behind a recent federal appeals court ruling that saw no infringement on the part of Sony. In the court’s opinion, Sony’s photo (right) was not nearly similar enough to Donald Harney’s (left) and “no reasonable jury could find ‘substantial similarity’ between Sony’s recreated photo and Harney’s original.” Read more…

The origin of photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularized his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.
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It seems like every photography app and update has to do with iOS users, so here’s one for the Android fanboys out there. Amazon’s Cloud Drive Photos app — which went live last November — just got an update, complete with several much-requested features. Read more…

Last week, we wrote on how you can use LEGO pieces to keep your lens caps on your camera strap when they’re not protecting your lenses. A reader named Fearn quickly pointed us to a similar tip published over at Sugru at the end of last year. Instead of using camera straps, however, they suggest tripods as a sturdy way of keeping track of the caps.
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Photographer Caleb Charland is an artist who perpetually thinks outside the box for his photo concepts. In the past we’ve featured experiments that include a 14-hour exposure of a lightbulb powered by an orange and using scientific principles for creative images.

Charland’s latest project continues this outside-the-box trend. The yet-to-be-named series features abstract images created without a camera — the artist simply used photo paper and a candle.
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When your grandfather was Dr. Erhard Glatzel, one of the great lens designers of the twentieth century, it won’t come as too much of a shock to find out that you’ve inherited two lenses that, by all accounts, don’t officially exist. Other people? Well, they might be a little bit surprised… and a lot bit jealous. Read more…

If you seriously want to nerd out in the area of photography-related fashion, check out this T-shirt by The Unrefinery. It’s titled “Crop It,” and is available for $24.
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Over the last couple of years, smartphone photography has gained a lot of credibility. Many stock photography agencies, however, have managed to keep their “no smartphones allowed” signs proudly on display even as all of this was happening.

Due to the required megapixel counts and the high quality standards most stock photo agencies try to maintain, smartphones have, for the most part, been kept out of that particular business. Companies are starting to cave though, and the most recent of these is international stock agency Alamy. Read more…

This past Tuesday, a major fire gutted an abandoned warehouse in Chicago. More than 50 fire companies and nearly 200 firefighters were summoned to the scene to battle the blaze. What’s interesting is that temperatures in the area were so low that the water used to put out the fire quickly froze, turning the building into a giant block of ice.
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If you got on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed an abundance of strange, .gif-like video loops. These are the result of ‘Vine,’ Twitter’s stand-alone video clip sharing app that is being called something akin to the “Instagram of Video” by more than a few online sources. Read more…