Now here’s a photograph you don’t get to shoot everyday: the White House Flickr stream published a photograph of the most powerful man in the world having dinner with the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. In terms of photography-related technologies, what you see is Picasa on the left, iPhone and Facebook Photos on either side of the President, and Flickr in red on the far end.

Being present at meetings like this is yet another reason why it must be awesome to be Pete Souza, President Obama’s photographer.

Image credit: P021711PS-0705 by The White House

If you think making prints at home with your photo printer saves you money over having the prints made through a service, you might be wrong. How-To Geek has a neat tutorial and XLS spreadsheet you can use to calculate the cheapest method depending on your printer expenses. Simply download the file, fill out the boxes according to the instructions, and you’ll learn how much you’re actually paying per-print with your home printer.

Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? (via Lifehacker)

Twitter sees hundreds or thousands of Tweets published every second, and many of these are photos of things happening real-time. Hashalbum is a new website that aims to help you browse this constant stream of images in real time by allowing you to do a simple search by hashtag, returning images that are found in Tweets containing that hashtag.

Hashalbum (via Lifehacker)

DropMocks is a new photo sharing service designed to help you share photographs online as quickly and easily as possible. Created with HTML 5, the service has a minimalistic homepage that invites you to drag and drop photos into the browser. It then adds those photos into a simple gallery, and provides you with a short URL you can share. It’s a bit like file hosting service DropBox, except for photos and done through the browser.

You don’t need an account, though you can create one to keep track of the “mocks” you create. Here’s an example mock we created using some photos from PetaPixel’s Flickr account. Keep in mind that since the galleries are publicly accessible through private URLs, don’t upload anything you wouldn’t want to be made public.

DropMocks (via Lifehacker)

Earlier today Lens Tip published a leaked photograph of an upcoming Pentax K-5. The article is no longer available, suggesting that they were forced to take it down.

Yesterday someone over on PentaxForums posted a list of specs. If the specs are the real thing, then the K-5 will be a 16.2 megapixel DSLR with HD video recording, a magnesium alloy body, ISO expandable to 25,600, 18 autofocus points, 8 fps continuous shooting, and a price of $1700 for the body only.

One iffy thing about this leak is that the body looks pretty much identical to the Pentax K-7. Do you think it’s a fake?

(via Photography Bay)

The above is supposedly a leaked photo of the not-yet-announced Sony A33 and its pellicle mirror, the first of its kind on a DSLR. Rumor has it that the camera will officially be announced early tomorrow morning.

SonyAlphaRumors received a tip that Sony will be using the following arguments promoting the new pellicle system:

• Minimal shutter lag: Mirror does not move, and therefore results in shutter lag of less than 0.1 seconds
• Auto focus: First DSLR to offer phase detection autofocus during HD video recording
• Frames per second: No moving mirror allows camera to reach 10 FPS
• No mirror blackouts: Optical view and Live view will remain uninterrupted during shooting
• Compact design: Eliminating the moving mirror system reduces weight by 25% and size by 20%

Stay tuned. Official news about the A33 and A55 should arrive shortly.

Update: Amateur Photographer just published a post titled, “New Sony Alpha 55 and Alpha 33 EVF DSLRs to feature fixed Translucent Mirror“. Almost as soon as it was published it was taken down (darn those easy-to-click “Publish” buttons!). Here’s a quote from the now-removed article:

Sony is set to introduce shooting speeds of up to 10fps, as well as video, in its latest Alpha DSLR cameras, the Alpha 55 and Alpha 33, by using a new non-moving ‘translucent’ mirror. Echoing the technology of the pellicle mirror in Canon’s EOS RT of 1989, Sony’s new semi-transparent mirror allows light to be fed simultaneously to a camera’s imaging sensor and AF system, removing the need for a moving mirror and providing the potential for much improved focus tracking as well as active AF in Live View and video modes.

Looks like this is no longer a “rumor”.

(via SonyAlphaRumors)

Here’s a funny example of a photo-based security feature gone wrong: starting in May, Facebook started doing user verification checks when logging in from an unfamiliar computer in order to make sure it’s actually the account owner logging in. The verification checks are photo-based, and involve correctly naming people you have listed as friends. Unfortunately, the feature will sometimes ask users to correctly name unfamiliar things: people they don’t know very well, dogs, cats, objects, gummy bears, etc…

The above screenshot was taken by Facebook user Eleanor Herman, an author who connects with her readers and who hasn’t been able to correctly identify 5 out of 7 random friends. After failing the test, one must wait an hour before trying again. Herman has been locked out of her account for the past 10 days.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

This past week, BP has received a lot of  attention for its release of “official” images that later turned out to be very poorly photoshopped. So far, three badly altered photos have been called out. Aside from the inevitable backlash and disappointment from the public, the photo has taken on a life of its own as an internet meme. People have been adapting their own versions of the helicopter scene, replete with geek jokes and bizarre photoshopping. Here’s one amusing example: Read more…

Earlier this month, the Daily Mail published some photos taken at a Dalston polling station during the British General Election by Emily James of Just Do It.

James’ photos were originally uploaded via TwitPic. Later, they were republished on several other sites, including The Guardian and Times Online, initially without permission or compensation. However, The Guardian and Times both offered James retroactive compensation. The Times offered £250 for using one photo, along with a brief emailed apology for using the image without permission.

The Daily Mail, however, initially incorrectly credited the image to someone else, then removed the credit line altogether.  James sent them with an invoice for £1170 — a rate set at £130 and multiplied by three per image to compensate for their lack of knowledge or permission.

The picture editor at the Daily Mail responded, saying:

Thanks for the invoice.

Unfortunately we cannot pay the amount you have requested, these images were taken from twitpic and therefore placed in the public domain, also after consultation with Twitter they have always asked us to byline images by the username of the account holder.

We are more that happy to pay for the images but we’ll only be paying £40 per image.

James, aware of the difference between TwitPic and Twitter Terms of Service, responded to the Daily Mail:

I’m afraid that you are wrong about the terms of publishing on Twitpic. If you read the terms of service you will see that copyright is clearly retained by the poster:

http://twitpic.com/terms.do

Third parties who wish to reproduce posted images must contact the copyright holder and seek permission.

You should have contacted me if you wanted to use the photos, as every other news outlet did. had you done so, you might have been in a position to get the photos for £40’s each.

However you didn’t contact me, even though this would have been very easy to do, nor did you inform me that you had used them. Instead, I had to uncover that you had used them, that one of them was not credited even with the correct twitter account, and that none were credited as I would have asked them to be.

James and the crew at Just Do It Films say they are still waiting for full payment and an apology.

This seems to be a similar issue that photojournalist Daniel Morel has with news agency AFP over whether images distributed over TwitPic and Twitter warrant free public distribution.

(via British Journal of Photography)

Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in “3D” mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.

You can upload up to 100 panoramas to the site, comprised of 2 to 4 images for partial panoramas or 7 to 24 for 360-degree images — plenty of photos to allow for overlap as well.

It’s a pretty cool tool, complete with sharing and embedding options. It also has a fullscreen mode that makes the viewing process very immersive.

Head on over to the create page to get started!

(via Lifehacker)