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Facebook Launches ‘Scrapbook’ to Help Parents Tag Photos of Their Kids

Facebook doesn't allow children under the age of 13 to sign up for the social network, which makes things trickier for parents who wish to organize photos of their kids with tags. Today Facebook launched a new feature called 'Scrapbook' that's designed specifically to allow parents to tag children who don't have their own accounts.

Trevor Paglen on Photographing Secret Military Sites with a Telescope

PBS series Art in the 21st Century recently released this 6-minute look at the work of photographer Trevor Paglen, a guy who points his camera through astronomy telescopes at secret military sites to photography things that are off limits to the public. As we shared back in 2012, Paglen calls his imagery "Limit Telephotography."

Olympus to Make 40MP Sensor Shift Photos Possible During Handheld Shooting

One of the main innovations found in the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 II is its ability to shoot massive 40MP photos with its 16MP sensor by doing "sensor shifting" and combining multiple shots. The main downside, however, is that you need a tripod to make sure the camera doesn't move between shots.

That may soon change: Olympus says its working on making the sensor shift technology work even when the photographer is shooting handheld without stabilization.

Google+ Can Now Apply Its Auto Enhance Magic to Your Home Videos

Back in May 2013, Google+ began offering auto enhancement to improve the quality of users' photos. Now the magic has arrived for video as well.

Open a video through the Google+ website or through the Photos app on Android and you'll see a new "Auto Enhance" feature that can automatically help correct lighting, color, stability, and speech.

Facebook Now Auto-Enhancing Your Smartphone Photos

Ready to see an improvement in all of your Facebook friends' snaps? Facebook is rolling out a new auto-enhance feature for its mobile app that will automatically correct things like light, shadows, and clarity in your smartphone shots.

Touchscreen LCDs Coming to Nikon DSLRs Starting with the D5500 in January 2015

Canon and Nikon DSLRs have traditionally been neck and neck in terms of feature sets, but one thing that Canon has offered since the T4i in 2012 is a full-fledged touchscreen interface.

There's good news for Nikon shooters, though: the gap is set to close in the very near future. Nikon's new D5500 will reportedly be announced in January 2015, and the camera will feature a touchscreen LCD.

Nikon Patent Shows a Vibrating DSLR Shutter Button That Helps You Track Moving Subjects

Cameras have many different methods of guiding photographers toward capturing quality shots, but physical feedback isn't really one of them... yet. In addition to providing useful visual and auditory information, DSLRs in the future might actually guide photographers through their sense of touch.

A recently published Nikon patent shows a DSLR that helps photographers capture moving objects without having to look through their viewfinder. Instead, the camera uses vibrations to guide the shooter.

Tinderella: Portraits of Tinder Dates Insightfully Capture the Awkward World of Online Dating

In the age of the Internet, dating has taken an interesting turn. Some would say it’s for the better, some may say it’s for the worse, but whatever your thoughts, there’s no denying that online dating services are more prevalent ever before -- especially among the younger generation.

Australian photographer Kirra Cheers decided to capture this strange, awkward world by meeting up with and photographing 'matches' she found through the dating/hookup app Tinder. The resulting series Tinderella is interesting, sometimes appalling and surprisingly artful.

‘Self-Portraits with Men’ Series Explores the ‘What-Ifs’ of Life with Different Partners

Have you ever wondered what you life would be like if you ended up with one of your exes? Or just a random person on the street, somebody whose trajectory in life would have changed your own drastically?

Czech photographer Dita Pepe has, but she took it an step further than most of us when she turned these spousal what-ifs into a series of portraits that take an interesting look at "what might have been" had her family life taken a different direction.

Sneak Peek: A Useful Focus Selection Tool is Coming to Photoshop CC on June 18th

A couple of weeks ago, we told you to mark June 18th on your calendars, because Adobe would be revealing "the next evolution of Creative Cloud." Well, we're still a few days away from the fateful keynote, but Adobe has given us a little teaser, showing us just one of the features that the Photoshop team has been working on for this major update.

New #AmazonCart Hashtag Brings Gear Shopping to Twitter

For those of you who already have an Amazon camera gear purchasing infatuation, leading to a slim wallet and empty bank account, this may be NSFL (so turn your head away): Amazon has teamed up with social media giant Twitter for a new feature that allows you to now add items to your Amazon cart directly through the social network.

Facebook Unveils Shared Photo Albums

Facebook today announced a new shared photo albums feature that allows multiple users to contribute photographs to a single album. This makes it easy to aggregate memories from events that were captured by different photographers. It also likely dampens the prospects of the countless collaborative album startups that are vying for a piece of the photo sharing pie.

eBay Unveils ‘My Gadgets’ Feature, Keeps Track of How Much Your Gear is Worth

It seems like new and improved camera gear pops up every couple of weeks these days, leading to an endless cycle of discover, buy, sell and repeat. Well, if you're the kind of person who always wants to have the newest gear around, and you're constantly selling off your old gear on eBay to make it happen, the website has just officially announced a new feature that will make your life much easier.

Called My Gadgets, the new eBay feature can keep track of all of the gear you own and let you know about how much you can expect to make when you sell it, making it that much easier when it comes time to upgrade.

Life After Steel

“Don’t forget, Eric: there is a story in your backyard.” This is the advice David Alan Harvey gave me while reviewing my portfolio of travel images during a 2011 Magnum Photos Workshop I attended in Toronto.

Just Me Screen 1

Just.me App Introduces ‘Selfies’ Feature, Instagram-like Filters

Mobile messaging service Just.me has released a new update (version 1.2) to their iOS application that brings the wonderful world of selfies and Instagram-like filters to the fingertips of its users.

The move comes as the world of social networking continues to expand at a rate potentially faster than that of the universe itself, and people simply cannot just get enough of uploading pictures of themselves for friends and strangers to see.

The Business of Style

Recently, I was looking through a photo gallery of a potential new hire and was a bit dismayed by her use of a particular photo enhancement editing choice. All of her photos were very overly processed with multiple styles, much like the photo below.  She did have a wonderful eye, and her composition and posing were really lovely. But her processing choices really distracted from the beauty of her work. The people in her photos didn’t look real.

The Bloomingdale Trail

It’s a stark divide. In front of me, a man snores softly among a pile of beer bottles, yet somehow manages to sit upright on the edge of a slab of broken cement, not far from the edge of the crumbling bridge I’m standing on. Just beyond the bridge and barely 30 feet below lies a line of townhouses; each easily sold for over half a million. They stand sentinel-like, crowding each other, overlooking an old, unused elevated railroad embankment. Between the snoring man and I lie old rails, overgrown grass, and gravel. To the east, Chicago’s downtown skyline towers over the flat Midwest expanse. Welcome to The Bloomingdale Trail.

Samsung Working on Overlay Feature to Help Strangers Snap Better Shots of You

Asking a stranger to snap a photograph of you is a risky proposition. If the person has no concept of basic photography concepts and techniques, the resulting photographs may be completely different than what you had hoped for -- and you're too embarrassed to ask for another photo (so you wait for that person to leave and for a new one to walk by).

Samsung wants to help solve this problem: they're working on a camera feature that helps guide photo-inept strangers in snapping the shot you want.

Sid Kaplan: Legendary Darkroom Printer and Quiet Master Photographer

Have you heard of Sid Kaplan? If you've studied the works of great American photographers, you've likely at least seen some of Kaplan's handiwork. Although he's a master photographer in his own right, Kaplan had made a name for himself as one of the industry's finest photo printers. Over the past four or five decades, Kaplan has made prints for some of the biggest names in photography.

Instagram Now Lets You Tag People and Brands in Photographs

One of the key features afforded by the fusion of photo sharing and social networking is people tagging. On services such as Facebook and Flickr, adding information to identify the people in photos is as easy as clicking/tapping a face and telling the service who that subject is.

Instagram this morning announced that it's joining in on the people-tagging fun. The company has released a new "Photos of You" feature that makes tagging a person as easy as adding a hashtag.

Photographer Hunts for Vintage Cameras That Contain Undeveloped Film

Two years ago, photographer Chris A. Hughes purchased a 1914 French Richard Verascope camera (shown above) from an elderly man who was clearing out his camera collection in preparation for retirement. When he got into his car after the purchase, Hughes was surprised to find two packages of slides in the camera's leather case.

Upon closer examination, he discovered that the photographs on the slides were captured by a French soldier during World War I.

Tutorial: Shooting Double Exposures with a Canon 5D Mark III

Cameras today have many extra functions that are often buried in menus and forgotten. Last year, I bought the Canon 5D Mark III and, after a few months, realized that there were some interesting features I had never played with. After figuring out that there was a way to do in-camera double exposures, I immediately started experimenting. At first it was very hit and miss. (I still hadn’t read the manual.)

Jeremy Lock: The Chuck Norris of Military Photography

Every year since 1960, the government has held a Military Photographer of the Year competition to highlight the best images created by photographers in uniform. US Air Force Master Sergeant Jeremy "JT" Lock has won the award a staggering seven times. No other military photographer has come close to that.

Google+ Quietly Rolls Out a Photos-Only Filter for Search Results

Facebook announced its photos-only news feed filter earlier this month (alongside a major News Feed revamp) at a major press event surrounded by much fanfare. Now, Google has followed suit with its Google+ social network -- albeit much, much more quietly.

The service unveiled a new photos-only feed today, but instead of holding a major press event about it, it was outed by Google engineer Dave Cohen through his Google+ page.

Portraits of Refugees Posing With Their Most Valued Possessions

If you had to quickly flee both your home and country, what one possession would you make sure you take with you? It's a question that reveals a lot about your life and values, and, unfortunately, is one that many people around the world actually have to answer.

NYC-based photographer Brian Sokol has been working on a project supported by the UN Refugee Agency titled "The Most Important Thing." It consists of portraits of refugees in which the subjects pose with the one thing they couldn't let go of when running away from home.

Google Hangouts Goes the Way of the Photobooth with New Capture Feature

If you often find yourself taking screenshots of your friends and family while in Google Hangouts video chats, the company will soon be releasing a new featured designed just for you. It's called the Hangouts Capture app, and it lets you easily snap and save funny moments with others as they happen on your screen.