Most stock photography websites and agencies work the same way: photographers upload their work, set prices, and let clients browse for what it is they’re looking for. If the client wants a photo of a family on the beach, they’d better hope someone came through. And on the other end, the photographer has to hope that they’re putting work out there that people will actually want to use.
Advertising creatives Cassandra Nguyen and Grazina Snipas’ new website PicoImages does away with that model, replacing it with more of a “stock photography to order” sort of system. Read more…
In the aftermath of the tragic Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, investigators are turning to crowdsourced photographs and videos in order to hunt down the perpetrator(s). Authorities are calling for anyone at the marathon that day to send in photographs or videos captured in the area. Read more…
A couple of months ago, we spent some time telling you about CrowdOptic, a company that has been pioneering a way to sift through the millions of photos taken every second of every day and separate the “noise” from the “signal” when it comes to finding newsworthy content.
The company’s technology takes advantage of the fact that smartphone photographs today come with both GPS and heading data attached, allowing algorithms to determine not only where a photo was taken, but also what it was taken of. And in the video above, former football player Jim Kovach explains the tech in detail at TEDxSiliconAlley in New York City. Read more…
A couple of weeks ago two concepts for a “real-life” Instagram camera rolled across our computer screens — one fake and funny, one real and kind of cool — but we were pretty certain that neither of them would become a reality any time soon. It seems, however, that we’re being proven wrong by ADR Studio‘s Antonio De Rosa and the crowdsourcing site Indiegogo.
In the six days since he’s posted his camera (the second, non-joke, pretty cool one) on Indiegogo, his project has already raised over $2,300 of the $50,000 he’s aiming for. If the campaign is a success he plans on using the money to find a great partner and bring the camera into the real world. All contributors to the successful campaign would then receive a “massive discount” on the final product which he is hoping to sell for under $350. If you want more info on the camera you can find it on our original post or his Indiegogo page.
Star Wars Uncut is a remake of the original Star Wars movie created with the power of crowdsourcing. The project started back in 2009 after creator Casey Pugh sliced the original movie into 15 second segments and asked volunteers to use their creativity to recreate the scenes at home. The best clips were combined into a feature length film, which went on to win an Emmy Award in 2010 for “Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media”. Above is the recently-released director’s cut of the film.
Instagram is changing not just the way photos can be shared, but how music videos can be made. UK indie rock band The Vaccines recently created a website that asked fans to snap photographs of themselves while at music festivals and then tag them with “#VACCINESVIDEO”. After receiving nearly 3,000 submissions, the band used them to create the music video for their song “Wetsuit”. Aside from a few video clips, everything you see in the video was submitted through Instagram.
P.S. Building upon this idea: what if a band were to ask fans to snap photos during a live performance of a song, and then combine the photos afterward using the timestamps of the photos to sync them with the song? That would be crazy.
Want to play role in the legendary agency Magnum Photos? Well, now you can as a “Magnum Tagger”. The cooperative is having a tough time keeping their large archive of historical photographs organized and easily searchable. Of the 500,000 images they’ve uploaded to the web, about 200,000 have little or no associated metadata. Magnum has decided to tackle this problem by crowdsourcing it, asking for volunteers to sift through the photographs and add useful information. For the trial run they’re looking for 50 volunteers, which shouldn’t be hard to find given the hundreds of thousands of followers they have on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery. Read more…
life.turns. is a creative crowd-sourced stop-motion project by photo sharing service Blipfoto. By dividing the motion of a human walking into eight simple frames, they invited contributors to submit photos of people in one of the eight poses. 1025 photos were submitted in 40 days. After putting the submissions in sequence and aligning them, what resulted was a stop-motion video of thousands of people in 21 different countries walking. Read more…
