This portrait is of a little boy named Lucas who lives in Sydney, Australia. Like many children around the world, Lucas enjoys playing with toys, particularly his set of miniature trains and wooden railroad tracks.

Like many photographers around the world, Gabriele Galimberti enjoys traveling. During an 18 month span of travels, Galimberti visited and photographed children in a long list of countries around the world with each child posing with his or her favorite toys. Lucas was one of the kids Galimberti visited for his project, which is titled “Toy Stories.”
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We now take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to direct your attention to an interesting study that was published yesterday by Pingdom. The website tracking company decided to analyze the demographics of the world’s top 100 blogs (according to Technorati), sorting them by reader age and gender. It’s findings regarding PetaPixel caught our eye.
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The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey this week that sheds light on social media use among Americans. One of the networks they asked participants about was Instagram.

After surveying 1,802 Internet users in late 2012, the study found that 13% of Internet users use the mobile photo sharing service. It also found that the service is “especially appealing” to “Adults ages 18-29, African-Americans, Latinos, women, [and] urban residents.”
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Ever wonder what the average age of professional photographers is? Dave Good of Rangefinder magazine writes,

Ed Lee is the group director of InfoTrends Worldwide Consumer and Professional Imaging Services. “The number of female photographers has grown,” he says. Now it’s a 2/3-to-1/3 split of males to females, a pickup from last year.” Forty percent of them are part time, while 28 percent, he says, are full time. “And it’s a younger female at that,” he says. “Age 45, and younger,” according to the 2011 & 2012 InfoTrends Professional Photographer Study.

“It comes down to the economy,” Lee says. “With families still struggling, people are turning to part-time photography as a way to bring money into the home.” He sees the photo business as a changing of the guard. “The average age of the full-time male photographer is 50. The average age of the full-time female photographer is 41.” The implication is that more full time male photographers are retiring. “You’re going to see a shifting towards an even higher percentage of females.”

The magazine’s entire Business Trends Report 2012 is worth a read if you’re at all interested in how the photo industry is changing.

State of the Industry: Business Trends 2012 [Rangefinder]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Phil!

Image credit: Photo illustration based on Tree rings by eric.rayner@btinternet.com

Social recommendation engine Hunch has a new Twitter Followers Tool that can analyze a Twitter account’s followers and make predictions to what they would answer for certain questions.

For an account to be analyzed, it needs to be “famous”, which Hunch defines as having more than 1,000 followers. We had PetaPixel analyzed and received a gigantic list of predicted answers. Here’s a selection:

• Word Association: I say photo, you say: Flickr
• When the traffic light turns yellow, are you more naturally inclined to: Brake quickly
• Do you fold your underwear? Yes
• Do you have a blog or keep a personal website? Yes
• If you suddenly became independently wealthy, in one year do you think you’d:
  Still be doing the same type of work I do now
• Do you think John Travolta is a good actor? No
• When waiting in the slowest of three lines, will you dart to another line to save a minute? Nah, what’s the rush?
• Can art change the world? Yes
• Are you a Mac person or a PC person? Mac
• Do you think Microsoft has made the world a better place? No
• Do you think name brand products are usually of higher quality than generic versions? Yes, the brands invest in products and have a reputation to maintain
• If the opportunity presented itself in a safe environment, would you volunteer to be Tasered, to see what it feels like? Get real, no
• Do you consider yourself an environmentalist? Yes
• Do you have an iPhone? Yes
• Do you enjoy shopping for clothes? No
• Are you male or female? Male

It’s interesting that many of these questions are actually things we’ve asked in our polls. Maybe in the future we’ll run a “Do you fold your underwear?” poll.

Do these predicted answers describe you well?