David Becker

Want to get more likes on Instagram? Make sure your images are predominantly blue, spaciously cropped, bright and mildly desaturated.

If you're Maroon 5 or the like, you get to commission photo shoots for your album covers and boost Terry Richardson's bankroll.

Smaller-scale musicians need to DIY it, however, and now music-sharing service SoundCloud has made it easy by partnering with Instagram.

From the Dept. of "I Wonder What Will Happen If I Shove This Into There" Research comes news of handy substitute for a dedicated remote camera trigger.

You might not thing there was much economic clout left in the Kodak brand, but apparently it still carries some weight in the courtroom.

The one-time photography monolith recently won a $76 million judgement from Japanese electronics conglomerate Ricoh to settle a dispute over patent licenses and royalties.

If you're looking to make an argument for the inherent superiority of Western-style capitalism, consider how difficult it apparently is to find a competent Photoshop jockey in the Communist world.

The latest example comes from the Eastern provinces of China, where what was supposed to be a heartwarming record of regional officials honoring the elderly turned into an internationally recognized example of how not to doctor a photograph.

No doubt feeling pressure from certain other social media sites raking in the dough, Google announced Wednesday a slew of new features for Google+ intended to enhance the way users share, organize and tweak photos.

Here's an advanced tip for all you would-be stormchasers: Watch out for the water.

That seemingly obvious proposition apparently escaped a couple of British photographers in one of the better photobombs to emerge from Europe's not-quite-a-hurricane.

This almost one-of-a-kind Leica camera -- which was discovered as part of an Antiques Roadshow episode years ago -- could sell for more than $1.6 million when it goes up for auction next month.

Hey, sometimes you're just in the right place at the right, sexylicious time. That's about the extent of the explanation Notre Dame running back Cam McDaniel gave for a ridiculously attractive viral shot of him from last week's USC game that looks more like an Old Spice ad than a candid sports moment.

First Lady Michelle Obama is turning to Instragram in order to organize a meet-up/photo walk and give the world a tour of the White House gardens this weekend.

Leading international camera maker Canon cut its annual profit forecast Thursday, revealing that sales of interchangeable-lens cameras are slowing for the first time ever.

The squeaks and grunts whales make are still mysterious, but at least now we know what whale-speak is for "Get that thing out of my face!" That would be thanks to diver/photographer Chris Coates, who had a close encounter of the paparazzi kind while observing humpback whales off the eastern coast of Africa recently.

From antique pistols to high-powered assault rifles, Instagram has emerged as the leading online marketplace for guns. And, even more troubling, it seems few of the sales violate the law or even Instagram policy.

Looks like Kanye West and his ilk aren't the only ones with paparazzi issues. Newly released images from the Wildlife Conservation Society captured endangered Andean bears repeatedly trying (and sometimes succeeding) to destroy camera traps set up to monitor their behavior.

Good news, camera weenies -- not only does photography make you attractive and rich, it helps your brain stay sharp as you age. That's the conclusion of a new University of Texas study that evaluated a number of different types of activities to see how they affected cognitive skills -- particularly memory -- in the elderly.

Seven sports photographers are suing the National Football League, Getty Images and the Associated Press in a complex case that argues the agencies went too far in allowing their images to be freely used for promotions by the league.

Narcissism and obsessive personal documentation are all fine and good, but sometimes you just want to buy and sell stuff. A new site promises to make that considerably easier to do just that through Instagram by restricting searches to postings with a #forsale hashtag and providing a simplified transaction system.

Next time a spouse or friend razzes you for spending too much on camera gear, try pointing out all the cool, expensive stuff you didn't buy. Like the antique, no-name, large-format lens currently up for sale on eBay for close to half a million bucks.

You can worry all you want about photos being stolen via Flickr, but maybe someone will like your photo enough to buy it... and put it on the cover of a platinum-selling rock album... and boost you overnight from the fuzzy border of hobbyist/professional to a high-profile career as a portrait and fashion photographer.

DIY camera geeks have a new low-light option with the debut of the Raspberry Pi NoIR, a version of the popular camera module add-on for the single-board-computer that ditches the infrared filter on the image sensor.

New York Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota may be running as a law and order guy, but apparently the "law" part doesn't cover intellectual property.

Turns out nine of the images used in a recent Lhota campaign ad -- an ad meant to illustrate what a mess the Big Apple used to be -- were taken without permission from Flickr users, several of whom are not too happy about it.

Great news, Micro Four Thirds shooters -- you no longer need Instagram filters and the like to make your photos look... how shall we put this... distressed.

That's because toy camera powerhouse Lomography has just released an arsenal of plastic lenses that can add multiple-exposure, fisheye, color tint and other effects to previously ordinary shots.

Students at a British university may have hit upon the basis for the next generation of image sensors -- a living module based on bio-engineered, light-sensitive bacteria.

"You should've seen it! I was that close to the dude's teeth!" No doubt there was some pretty excited talk going around a South African seal colony recently, after a young pup narrowly escaped a shark attack by balancing on the great white's nose.

Irish wildlife photographer David "Baz" Jenkins captured the decisive moment in an image that's quickly gone viral worldwide.

Getting shots of people in midair can be a source of fun and fascination, but making them requires either a fair investment in remote triggers or a surplus of time and luck.

With a little bit of ingenuity, however, mechanical engineer Andrew Maxwell-Parish (aka Electric Slim) has made the process easy, cheap and reliable using a laptop, webcam and open-source software.

There are all kids of systems for clamping a lens onto a phone, but few are as versatile as the Beastgrip, a Kickstarter project about halfway to delivery stage. Not only will the gadget work with just about any smartphone, it'll also adapt lenses and other accessories you may already have for your SLR.

Believing the world cares what you had for lunch may still be a symptom of narcissism, but a recent study seems to indicate that it could at least be a useful form of narcissism.

The study, which was conducted by marketing researchers at Brigham Young University, found that the more time people spend looking at pictures of food, the less interested they become in actually eating that same foods. Results were published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Media outlets may need to start considering the possible psychological effects of difficult assignments on their photojournalists in the wake of an Australian photographer's claim of crippling post-traumatic stress.

An educational project in India is encouraging Muslim women to take up photography, in defiance of a controversial fatwa issued earlier this year that said the practice was "unIslamic."

Woman's advocacy group Aawaaz-e-Niswaan -- which is based in the Mumbai suburb of Kurla -- has trained more than a dozen women in photography skills, going against of regional customs and, now, this particular fatwa.

A British TV producer is working on a reality television show for photographers, in which up-and-coming artists will compete to become the country's next big fashion (though they prefer the term 'style') shooter.

Young people love to take selfies and don't really care about printing photos and putting them in albums. That might not be the biggest shocker of the year, but a new British survey at least puts some numbers to this amateur photography trend that's leaving us with a lot fewer prints and a lot more digital clutter.

Memoto, the company behind the wearable camera that automatically documents the user's life by taking a photo every 30 seconds, has a new name, $3 million in fresh capital, and plans to start shipping product next month.

Having already racked up more than 3 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is ready to spread some photographic love soon with a full-on Instagram presence, according to Vatican sources.

Mystery semi-solved. Singer and recently-infamous celebrity Miley Cyrus' baffling sale of a used Nikon N80 SLR on eBay last week might have been part of her plan to consolidate into a digital, Canon-based workflow.

At least we can surmise as much from a recent Rolling Stone interview in which the former teen queen revealed that she considered going to photography school as part of a career reboot after her smash run on Disney's "Hannah Montana" show ended in 2011.

Medium-format, questionable build and instant prints? Lomography has hit yet another trifecta with the new Diana F+ Instant Film, a low-fi shooter that adds instant printing capability to one of the company's most popular models.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's one thing to swipe a photo and slap it on your website, and quite another to enter that stolen image into a high-profile photo contest passed off as your own work.

That is exactly what Mark Joseph Solis, a graduate student at the University of the Philippines, is discovering as he becomes a subject of international ridicule for winning several thousand dollars worth of prizes with a purloined portrait.

Any professional photographer who's been working long enough has experienced the humiliation of missing the big shot, so it wasn't that big a story when two sports photographers missed Ichiro Suzuki's landmark 4,000th base hit at a recent New York Yankees game.

It's what happened afterward, when USA Today Sports Images photographer Debby Wong passed off a photo of another Suzuki swing as the iconic moment, that turned the incident into a significant photojournalism ethics fail.

Engineers at Ohio State University have imitated aspects of human and insect eyes to create what may turn out to be the next big advance in camera lens technology.

Update: The Associated Press has re-released the photos, and is now confirming that they DO show scenes related to the Navy Yard shooting.

A widely distributed image used to illustrate stories about Monday's horrific shooting at the Washington Navy Yard likely had nothing to do with the tragedy, offering a cautious tale of modern media overreach.

Hey, not everybody wants a homemade gun. So how about using that 3D printer you've borrowed to make your own home-brew point-and-shoot digital camera?

DIY portal Instructables now has directions to do just that, thanks to creator Randy Sarafan's plans -- including a downloadable template to print the body -- and RadioShack's mighty JPEG Color Camera Board to go inside. The final product would make a fine companion to the OpenReflex 3D-printable film SLR for those ready to go digital.

Of all the items that can be destroyed in a disaster, few are as valuable or hard to replace as family photo collections. Photographer Brian Peterson saw that first-hand while living and working in Japan two years ago, when an earthquake and even more devastating tsunami swept away everything many families owned.

Sensing that photography could be a way to help them heal, Peterson started the organization Photohoku (named for the Tohoku region devastated by the tsunami) to help families rebuild their photo albums.