Normally, we wouldn't give much attention to the thoughts of an editor/publisher for a small community newspaper. But the response to photographer Kristen Pierson's notice of copyright infringement and invoice for payment is such a classic compendium of bad thinking on intellectual property that it would be a disservice not to share it ... just so you know what you're up against.
Here's an interesting project that captures, in one fell swoop, just how many of us are connected through the social life suck network known as Facebook. Called Faces of Facebook, it's a website/webapp that compiles all 1.2 Billion+ Facebook users' profile pics into a single static-like image, in which each picture is a different colored pixel.
As a veteran wedding photographer, Sarah Roshan knows how tough it is to make everything come together and how devastating it can be when plans fall apart at the last minute -- even if the culprit is something as seemingly intractable as the worst flooding your state has experienced in recent history.
It could be argued that consumer photography didn't begin until 1888, when Eastman Kodak made his Kodak No. 1 (the followup to the Kodak Box) available to the public at large alongside the now famous slogan: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest."
And thanks to the National Media Museum, we now have a small gallery of sample photographs that show what photos taken 125 years ago with the Kodak No. 1 looked like.
Prestigious agency Magnum Photos says it is about to roll out a paid membership system in hopes of turning illegal downloaders into paying customers. The move comes a little more than a year after the agency did away with watermarks on its main site, reasoning that they did little to discourage determined downloaders.
The big camera companies get criticized fairly often for failing to innovate, but Nikon at least has been giving us a lot to write about recently in the patent department. Case in point: the Japanese company has just filed a patent for a camera that will allow you to swap out, not lenses, but sensors.
As the battle for cameraphone supremacy rages on, companies want to win over amateur and professional shooters alike. That's not to say that Nokia or Apple expects you to replace your SLR with a Lumia 1020 or iPhone 5S, but they would probably love to claim that "most professional photographers use our phone."
To that effect, Nokia has put together this video showing how its own camera expert Ari Partinen managed to pull off a real studio portrait shoot using only the Lumia 1020 and some synced external flashes.
There are many reason high-quality lenses cost as much as they do (and in some cases that is quite a lot), and one of them is that high-end lenses use many specially-designed elements that are perfectly-positioned to counteract aberrations and distortions.
But what if you could correct for all of that in post? Automatically? With just the click of a button? You could theoretically use a crappy lens and generate high-end results. Well, that's what researchers at the University of British Columbia are working on, and so far their results are very promising.
It's time like these that hashtags like #facepalm were invented for. Thanks to a reader, we recently stumbled across a "Wedding Photographer Wanted" ad on Craigslist that we sincerely hope is fake. Then again, given previous experience, it's probably not.
With Google+ constantly working on making things better for photographers -- most recently by incorporating better RAW-to-JPEG conversion -- the other social networks are trying to do their part to entice the photo community as well. For Twitter, that means revamping embedded tweets so that photos are more prominent.
It wouldn't be the weekend without a little bit of time-lapse inspiration. So as you're getting ready to enjoy another Sunday packed with football and fun, check out this epic NYC time-lapse and hyperlapse compilation put together by the guys over at The Seventh Movement.
I suppose we all owe a small cultural debt to this anonymous older lady at a recent Colorado Rockies game. Thanks to her, we now know what the exact opposite of a photobomb looks like.
That would be having a cranky grandma type show up in the money shot of your carefully arranged proposal, flipping the bird at the camera to show exactly how she felt about the interruption.
It's been 10 months since Toshiba was said to have been developing a tiny camera module that would bring Lytro-style refocusing to smartphones and tablets, but the company only just announced something official.
We've seen a few interesting twists on the typical photo booth, from the funny and popular slow-motion booth to the Instagram-inspired DIY version. The Thermobooth is yet another take on the old classic, and the twist here is that it won't take your picture until you and the other people in the frame touch.
Some would say that the Olympus accounting scandal is officially over, insofar as jail sentences (or, rather, the lack thereof) have been doled out by the Japanese justice system. Even the company's stock has rebounded and is currently sitting about 25% higher than it was before the dive it took when the company's seedy business dealings came to light.
But stocks rebounding and executives getting off almost scott free aside, Olympus' battle against the backlash from the scandal is far from over, as both Japanese and overseas entities continue to pursue legal action.
Here's a whimsical way to start off your weekend. In a followup to a similar video he created a couple of years ago, Peter Simon (better known as Petey Boy) has put together a stop motion film in which his willing model is treated to all manner of hairdo, beard and mustache combinations courtesy of a stylus pen.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
British photographer Jason Sheldon has won a settlement of £20,000 (about $32,300 US) over a stolen image of his (seen above), after initially being offered less than one percent of that.
Researchers at the University of California-San Diego are fine-tuning some new tiny camera technology that could dramatically boost the detail and field of view of smartphone cameras. Joseph Ford, a professor in the university's Jacob School of Engineering, describes the system in a paper to be presented next week at the Optical Society of America's annual meeting.
According to Ford, his team will soon have the system -- seen above next to a Canon 5D Mark III setup -- refined to a camera assembly with 85-megapixel resolution, 120-degree field of view and f/2 aperture, all in a package about the size of a walnut.
Each year, the WestLicht Photographica auction house puts some incredible historic cameras on the block and lets us mere mortals "oh" and "ah" at them before some collector with deep pockets plunks down hundreds of thousands of dollars to take them home (where they will, of course, be used daily right?...).
So far, the title of world's smallest interchangeable lens camera fell (for the most part) to the cameras in the Pentax Q-series -- starting with the Q, then the Q10 and finally the most recent Q7. But that title won't be held by Pentax (or is it RICOH?) for much longer. If rumors are to be believed, October will see the release of the Panasonic GM1, which will claim the title for itself.
Here's a DIY project for infrared photography enthusiasts who have a few hundred dollars and some time to spend this weekend. Instead of taking the typical routes when it comes to taking IR photos -- i.e. using an IR lens filter or making the magic happen in post -- why not DIY a dedicated IR camera of your own?
Wedding photography can be a rough business. And although the photographers have plenty to worry about (i.e. irate ministers and getting your gear stolen), clients would do well to be careful too, lest they get duped by con artists like New Jersey's Michael De Rubeis.
Few people without PhDs ever set foot inside CERN's (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) lab in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. And although we have had the opportunity to share some stunning pics of the world's largest particle accelerator before, Google is one-upping us (go figure) by letting you take a virtual stroll with Street View.
We hate to contribute in any small way to the Miley Cyrus hoopla/shenanigans/ruckus (pick your poison) but when an old 35mm SLR that would normally go for about $60 starts bidding at almost $100,000 we can't help but take notice.
The camera in question is an old 35mm Nikon N80 SLR, and as you might have already guessed, the reason it's going for so ridiculously much is that ... well ... Miley is selling it.
Too many of our recent posts regarding photography competitions have been about fraud or controversy, so here's to an international photography competition with some honest to goodness winners that will absolutely blow your mind.
The competition in question is the Astronomy Photographer of Year 2013 contest, and we have seven outstanding winners from different categories to share with you.
It's hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.
But get ready, because Google isn't done yet. Another update has been pushed Google+'s way, and this time it concerns your RAW photos. Or, more specifically, how good they look when they're automatically converted to JPEGs for viewing.
Now that Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy woes are over and the company has switched its focus primarily to commercial printing, its name probably won't show up here as often as it once did. But that doesn't mean that the Kodak photographic legacy is dead.
One of the steps Eastman Kodak took to get out of bankruptcy was to sell its personalized and document imaging businesses to the UK Kodak Pension Plan (KPP), and that has birthed a company that plans to keep that legacy alive: Kodak Alaris.
Yesterday, our own Alan Steadman shared some advice. He told you to go out and explore, to travel, to see the world and meet new people so that those experiences could inform the stories you tell when you're working behind the camera.
Well, if you were looking for a shining example to go with those words, look no further than photographer, writer and cyclist Rob Lutter, then man who is currently 15,000km (about 9,300 miles) into a 40,000km (about 25,000 miles) photographic journey around the world.
When Eleanor Macnair made her first Play-Doh re-creation of a famous photo, she had no idea how big her little project would hit it. But only a little over a month after launching a Tumblr to display her work, she's gotten more publicity than she could have expected.
One month ago today, the Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera -- a camera that TIME's own Harry McCracken called "the greatest gadget of all time" -- celebrated its 41st birthday. When it came out it was absolutely revolutionary, and to get the word out, Polaroid put together a few ads to show off the instant shooter.
Art directors Andrew MacPhee and Bart Batchelor are intimately familiar with Getty Images' massive stock photo library. Over the course of their careers, they've had to dig through tens of thousands of photos to find ones that would do for whatever campaign they were working on.
But for every "right one" they found, there were hundreds of "wrong ones." And for every hundred "wrong ones" there were at least one or two that were downright hilariously absurd. It seemed only right that these ridiculous stock photos be shared with the world: thus was born Getty Critics.
In some cases, it seems like the stars align, the sea parts and the universe itself conspires to help you get the perfect shot. That's sort of what happened to photographer Richard Crawley when he attended a Rolling Stones concert in the 1970s and wound up with the most famous shot he would ever take.
Did you know that all of the properties in the Monopoly board game, from Baltic to Boardwalk, were named after real streets in Atlantic City, New Jersey? The names have been used since the 1930s, and a recent fit of curiosity mixed with nostalgia sent Nick Carr of Scouting NY out into the world to photograph these properties in real life.
There are many reasons why "photographer" and "photojournalist" ranked so low on last year's "best and worst jobs" list, but according to a paper released by The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at Oxford University, the threat of computerization isn't one of them.
I've met a lot of bitter photographers over the years, especially as high-end cameras have become cheaper and more accessible. They complain that Photographer A gets more work than Photographer B even though Photographer B's work is clearly better; or that Photographer C doesn't get any work even though their work is the best of the three (Side Note: often times the photographer complaining IS Photographer C).
What these people don't realize is that, sadly, success often has little to do with talent and a lot more to do with personality. I don't mean that you have to be likable either, there are a ton of successful people that could easily be described as horrible human beings. What I mean is that you have to be motivated, unafraid and adventurous.
Back in July, Chinese electronics company OPPO confirmed that it was working on an "N-Lens" line of camera-centric devices that would be the "most important flagship series for OPPO going forward."
Well, the first of these devices has officially arrived, and although it is still more of a smartphone with a camera than a camera that can make calls, the phone packs some interesting features, including (according to OPPO) the world's first rotating smartphone camera.
Boy, is Kanye West going to feel like a wuss when he hears about this. Turns out that if you're really serious about putting paparazzi in their place, nothing short of homicide will do anymore.
At least that seems to be the way it works in Costa Rica, where three former bodyguards for supermodel Gisele Bundchen are on trial for attempted murder after they opened fire on a couple of uncooperative photographers.
For most photographers, names like "Yosemite" and "Yellowstone" likely conjure impeccably detailed images in the Ansel Adams tradition. San Francisco photographer Ashley Erin Somers, however, thinks there's something to be said for a more low-fi aesthetic.
She's started a project to photograph some of the biggest attractions in the National Park system with a homemade pinhole camera, with the end goal being to produce a fine-art photography book documenting her work.
Although the pixel war probably isn't ending anytime soon, a new sensor technology from Samsung shows how yet another company is focusing on improving the tech instead of stacking the spec sheet.
We've seen amazing low-light sensors and dual-pixel AF tech from Canon, organic sensors with insane dynamic range from Fuji and Panasonic, and now new ISOCELL technology from Samsung, which promises substantial increases in color and light sensitivity.