If you’re interested in donating your images to the public at large, Wikimedia Commons just made it that much easier. For a while now, their online media archive has brought together a huge library of free-to-use content under one roof; and because images uploaded to Commons must be licensed as public domain, GFDL, CC attribution, or CC attribution/share alike, everything is free to use and/or share.

Now Commons is releasing a new app (formerly only available in beta) that will allow users to upload photos to the Commons archive right from their phone and, it’s their hope, encourage more people to contribute “high quality educational photos.” Read more…

One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of “big camera” sensors into “small camera” bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that’s smaller in size, why wouldn’t you want to? (That’s the idea, at least).

The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography — the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we’ve compiled photos from those “good ol’ days” to see how far photography has come.
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Project Gutenberg is a digital library volunteer effort that takes old public domain and converts them into freely available eBooks for the benefit of the general public. Founded back in 1971, the library now has over 42,000 items in its collection.

Among the books in its collection are a number of old books on the subject of photography. One such book is the 1881 title, The Art and Practice of Silver Printing by Capt. Abney and H. P. Robinson (shown above).
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Flickr celebrated the 5th year anniversary of the launch of The Commons today. The massive collection of public domain photos now includes more than 250,000 images from 56 different libraries, archives, and museums.
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The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it’s also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.
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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)