Taking all of your photography gear on the road with you can be a burden, not to mention risky. But even if you don’t want to break your back carrying it all or risk having it stolen, your options are limited. Not all cities have shops that rent out gear, and smaller shops may not have the gear you want and/or need.

Thankfully, there’s a new peer-to-peer solution in town that should greatly increase your odds of finding the gear you need, no matter where you’re headed: it’s called CameraLends. Read more…

Canon shook up the photography equipment rental space last Wednesday when the company announced that Canon Singapore would soon be launching a lens-rental program of its own, dubbed “Try and Buy.” Overlooking the slightly presumptuous name, the program will allow pros and amateurs alike a chance to try out lenses that might otherwise land beyond the boarders of their budget. Read more…

On Monday Adobe officially announced its upcoming Creative Cloud subscription service, which will allow users to “rent” CS6 for $50 a month or Photoshop by itself for $20 a month. Whitson Gordon over at Lifehacker did some calculations on whether subscribing is actually worth it. Here’s his conclusion:

If you’re upgrading from a previous version of the program, it’s quite a bit cheaper to just grab the upgrade from Adobe instead of subscribing. And, if you can get a student discount (which nearly anyone can do), that’ll be cheaper too—at least in the case of Photoshop, which doesn’t seem to offer a subscription for students. In the case of the Master Collection, the student subscription is cheaper than the regular student version, but still not cheaper than upgrading from a previous version. However, once you get past the two year mark, all bets are off—the subscription is more expensive than buying, even if you plan on upgrading every two years.

[...] our official recommendation is to stick with the retail versions unless you only plan on using your Adobe product for under two years. The subscription is great for the short run [...], but it’ll cost you quite a bit more in the long run.

Adobe’s John Nack also writes that one of the huge benefits of the new model is that it drastically reduces the barrier to entry. Previously you had to pay $700 to get started with using Photoshop. Now the cost is $20.

Is Adobe’s Creative Cloud Subscription Cheaper than Buying Photoshop? [Lifehacker]

Instaprint is a neat wall-mounted printer that fuses old-school Polaroid-style instant photos with social media (namely Instagr.am). Basically it’s a box you rent for events that contains a modified, Internet-connected Zink printer. It uses the Instagr.am API to constantly scan for a specific location or hashtag, and when new photos are found they’re automatically printed and pushed out the bottom.
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