According to a recent analysis of its 2012 wedding insurance claims, Travelers Insurance cites the photographer as the most common cause of wedding day mishaps. In its breakdown of the numbers, 24 percent of all wedding issues (the largest chunk) were vendor-related, and 58 percent of all the claims filed under that category involved photos or video. Read more…

Flickr users have made quite a commotion in the past couple days begging new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to make the photo sharing site “awesome again”, but how does one go about doing so? Mat Honan of Wired says that one of the site’s big weaknesses is user engagement, and conducted a test to prove his point:

I wanted to test out this notion. So at 3 p.m. on Tuesday I took a photo of a sticky on my desk and uploaded it to several photo-sharing services — Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Path. And just for kicks, I also uploaded it to MlkShk as an afterthought, almost a half hour after all the other platforms. MlkShk is a site with only about 20,000 users, but it’s a very engaged community.

[...] By the next morning Twitter was at 66, Facebook at 51, Instagram at 57, MlkShk at 46, Google+ at 19, and Path stalled out at 2. And Flickr, where it landed on the site’s “Explore” page that highlights the most interesting photos of the day? 23. Perhaps more damning than the poor showing in terms of up votes was how ignored it was in real-time. It was only even viewed a total of five times on Flickr in that first hour.

Online retailer Woot did a similar (unscientific) test earlier this month and also found that Flickr lagged behind the other social networks in terms of how engaged its users are.

Flickr’s Engagement Problem May Be Too Big for Even Marissa Mayer [Wired]

Image credit: Photograph by Mat Honan/Wired

After receiving several complaints from professional and private sources alike, Nikon has finally stepped forward to admit to and address the reported “lock up” issue with its new D4 and D800 DSLRs. The issue, which Nikon maintains only affects “a small number of D4/D800 users,” causes both cameras to lock up unexpectedly and up until now could only be “fixed” by removing and reinserting the battery. Read more…

If you’re the proud owner of a Sony NEX-5N but have been pulling out your hair due to strange clicking noises ruining your videos, here’s some good news: it’s not just your camera. Frustrated camera owners have taken to the Internet to complain about the faint clicking noise that can be heard from inside the camera when moving it around, a problem that was found in every NEX-5N that Engadget tested. 1080/60p video recording is one of the highly touted features on the camera, so Sony could be in for quite a PR nightmare if there isn’t a simple fix for this widespread problem. If you’ve been considering the NEX-5N, hold off until this is resolved.

(via sonyalpharumors)

Some Leica M9 owners are discovering that their camera will suddenly stop functioning and render their SD card unreadable on any device. Photographer Gil Lavi writes on his blog,

A couple of weeks ago I got a new Leica M9. All excited, I put in the best SD card on the market, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB. It took only a few hours of taking pictures before the card crashed and the camera become unresponsive until I removed the card. I wasn’t worried at the beginning. I was in love.

A few days after, I had a high profile portrait photo shoot for an important client. Of course I took the M9 and my beloved Leica 90mm with me, together with a new SanDisk SD card, not before installing the newest firmware update. It was a very long photo shoot with heavy production, a tight schedule and sweaty assistants. It was just before that end of the photo shoot that the other new SanDisk SD card Extreme crashed inside the M9, making the camera dead and the card unreadable in any device. With all the embarrassment, I had to reshoot everything all over again with my backup equipment.

Leica and SanDisk are currently investigating this issue after a number of customers have reported it, and currently recommend that SD cards be FAT formatted.

(via Pop Photo via 1001 Noisy Cameras)