Photography is an art; by looking upon past examples, we can not only learn to improve our own technique, but also to study and appreciate times before ours. However, with the first photograph taken almost two-hundred years ago, it can be difficult to find a place to start. Enter, The Red List: a website with over 100,000 images that continues to cull the world of photography to find the very best images.
Yesterday we shared how one photographer was surprised when a casual request to "share" her Facebook photo turned out to be a request to use it in a national TV ad. Unfortunately for photographers, it seems more and more companies are requesting photos in similarly subtle ways.
A restaurant and winery in Israel made headlines recently after designing special plates specifically for diners to shoot Instagram photos. It seems restaurants in the US are jumping into this trend as well.
While it's not going so far as to fashion new dishware, Chili's is making changes to its dishes in order to improve how they look in Instagram snapshots.
A few months ago, we shared a chart showing how sales the camera market have changed between 1947 and 2014. The data shows that after a large spike in the late 2000s, the sales of dedicated cameras have been shrinking by double digit figures each of the following years. Mix in data for smartphone sales, and the chart can shed some more light on the state of the industry.
Wedding photography, much like the entire business of weddings, is highly influenced by the ebb and flow of trends. They come, they go, and they’re cyclical. When I plunged into the business in early 2012, I committed myself to research the industry: what works, what’s popular, and what sells? I quickly discovered that there’s a common, predictable, and heavily relied upon set of post-processing trends in wedding photography.
Back in 1887, a photography instructor named Edward M. Estabrooke published a book titled Photography in the Studio and in the Field. It was "a practical manual designed as a companion alike to the professional and the amateur photographer."
Filled with detailed information on how to practice photography with the equipment and technologies of the time, the book also contains interesting passages that describe how the world of photography was changing.
Want to see how the mirrorless camera war is going over in Japan? Here's a simple graph that will illuminate the situation. It was published recently by tech industry research company BCN, and shows how market share changed in Japan over the course of 2014.
China's CCTV is reporting that more and more couples in Asia are flocking to South Korea in order to have their engagement photos captured on the sets of Korean drama TV shows. These shoots can cost upwards of $4,000 -- at least four times more than the shoots would cost in other countries.
Last week we shared some interesting data about the most popular cameras on Flickr over the course of 2014. Today Flickr released some new charts that offer an inside look at camera trends over the past couple of years.
How have camera sales changed over the past 60 or 70 years? The chart above offers an interesting look at this question. It shows camera production between 1947 and 2014.
It seems as though each decade is defined by a handful of trends, fashion and otherwise, that permanently seal …
In stock photography more so than any other type of photography, the trends of photographs being taken and shared change from year to year. As marketing approaches and accompanying business values change, so does the stock photography market, so as to reflect the growing need for a specific ‘look’ or ‘type’ of photograph.
Here to show us what’s trending for 2014 is an interesting (and possibly useful) infographic released by Getty Images’ iStock.
Living smack in the middle of the information age, we're well acquainted with the incredible amount of data and statistics gathered and thrown around on a daily basis. And with the advent of social networking, the amount of publicly available data about society has only increased.
These networks are a treasure trove of information for better understanding the underlying trends and habits of people. Trends that would otherwise go unseen. One research project in particular, called Phototrails, is trying to spot these trends by gathering insights from that photography-oriented social media site many of us love to hate: Instagram.
There was a time in the mid to late 90s when Nirvana was all the rage, people wore too much flannel, and the design world was pre-occupied with “grunge.” Ironically, the proliferation of digital design via Aldus Pagemaker led to a decidedly analog look that was epitomized by David Carson’s Ray Gun magazine – a vehement statement against clarity, cleanliness and legibility. Carson even went so far as to lay out an entire magazine piece in Zapf Dingbats because it was “just a really boring article.”
According to a report in today's Wall Street Journal, the market is not looking great for digital cameras. The report states that as the popularity of smartphones has increased, sales of digital cameras have decreased.
If you're an active participant in the stock photography industry, you've likely heard of the big rumblings as of late. Earlier this month, bestselling microstock photographer Yuri Arcurs announced both a $1.2 million investment in Scoopshot (a crowdsourced photo app) and a new exclusivity agreement with Getty Images/iStockphoto.
If you dismissed the news the first time around, you might want to take a second look -- it may be bigger than you thought.
Let me say this right at the outset. This is not another high and mighty rant against cell phone cameras, Instagram, "art" filters, Lightroom presets, etc. You’re not about to read another gripe about everything that photography has become in the twenty-first century, even though I was afraid that’s what it would sound like when I started writing this.
I'm photographing a wedding in a couple of weeks. During one of our meetings, I asked the bride whether she and her fiancé had made a decision regarding their guests being allowed to photograph during the ceremony and reception. She started shaking her head, saying that it hadn't even occurred to her.
I could tell she was getting a little agitated thinking about whether they would offend their guests if they told them they couldn't take pictures. So we talked about the pros and cons of it. They haven't made their decision yet.
It's official -- the point-and-shoot market is dying, while DSLRs and other interchangeable lens systems champion the cause for standalone cameras.
A new report from retail researchers NPD tallies U.S. sales of $2.1 billion worth of interchangeable lens cameras between June 2012 and May 2013, an increase of 5 percent over the same period a year ago. U.S. sales of compact cameras, meanwhile, plunged 26 percent, to $1.9 billion. This is the first time interchangeable lens cameras have surpassed the sleek-and-shiny segment.
We recently published an article about She & Him enacting an anti-photo policy at a gig. Signs were posted saying “At the request of Matt [Ward] and Zooey [Deschanel], we ask that people not use their cell phones to take pictures and video, but instead enjoy the show they have put together in 3D”.
It reminded me of a story my Father told me about a Frank Zappa concert. Apparently, people were given opaque-lens glasses at the request of Zappa and the band so that, audience-members could more fully experience the music without any visual distractions.
Call it female empowerment; call it friendship; call it bonding... Whatever you call it, the newest trend in boudoir photography involves “getting your boudoir on” with your friends. Yes, according to the Today Show, groups of women are now stripping down to next to nothing with their besties for professional group boudoir photos.
Magazine and newspaper stories have traditionally revolved around the writer. A writer would pitch stories and was almost always the architect of the piece. When the story needed visuals, a photographer or illustrator would be brought in, often after the story was finished. This order of operations placed the writer in the driver's seat.
The primacy of the writer was reflected in the leadership of the publication where editors, responsible for direction and content, rose from the ranks of authors. During the nineteenth century, when publications were gray tomes celebrating the written word, this was a perfect arrangement. Artwork accompanied the story, augmented it, clarified it, attracted attention to it, but always served a subordinate role. Photography was the appetizer to the article's main course -- the words.
Hiroshi Hiyama over at Phys.Org reports that smartphones are crushing the point-and-shoot industry, …
Professional photographers are often hired to capture moments in life that are memorable and emotional -- two words that aptly describe military homecomings. The number of photographers hired to shoot homecomings is reportedly growing, as more and more families are hiring professionals to document the reunions that occur when soldiers return from war.
Ever wonder what the average age of professional photographers is?
Yesterday we shared a piece by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on why Instagram isn’t fit for photojournalism. Now, …
Another sign of the times (and bad news for film-photography enthusiasts): one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the world no longer accepts film photographs. Earlier this week Nikon published a "call for entries" for its 34th Nikon Photo Contest.
The photograph seen here was shot using a tablet computer -- one that doesn't officially exist yet. Google engineering SVP Vic Gundotra posted the image to Google+ at 4:57 this morning with the caption, "Early morning walk on the beach." A quick peek at the EXIF data reveals that it was captured with the "Google Nexus 10," a tablet that'll reportedly be unveiled at a press event next Monday.
Businessweek writes that Canon has lowered its sales estimates across all its camera …
In an interview we published this past weekend, popular photo blogger …
Nikon published a news post recently boasting that its D4 and D800 DSLRs had "become the first DSLR cameras to pass the very elaborate European Broadcasting Union (EBU) test, commonly referred to as the BBC Test."
One major trend in the camera industry this year is the introduction of mobile operating systems such as Android into digital cameras. By opening the door to things like Wi-Fi, data plans, and apps, camera makers are going in the same direction that phone makers went some years ago, turning their devices into what can best be described as portable computers with specialized functions (e.g. voice-calling, photography).
While covering the trend, we've been at a loss for what to call the new cameras. After calling the Samsung Galaxy Camera a "voiceless phonecamera" in our hands-on first-look yesterday, commenters suggested that we call the device a "smartcamera". Bingo... that's the term we were looking for.
If you’re trying to make some side money by selling photographs as microstock — or are trying to do …
Are we past the age of entry-level DSLRs? Dan Nosowitz over at …
Everyone is a photographer these days, and it is estimated that 380 billion photographs were taken last year, with …
The New York Times has an interesting article examining how retouching has spread …
Do professional photographers belong in delivery rooms? More and more of them are showing up there. The …
Smartphones are taking huge bites out of the compact camera market. A recent study by market research company …
Apparently Annie Leibovitz is a proponent of the idea that the best camera is the one you have with you. When asked by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams about her camera recommendation to friends, the famed portrait photographer made a surprising pick: the iPhone.
Guess what camera was used to shoot the photograph above? A tablet computer. It was shot using the new ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet, which features a camera with a 8-megapixel back-illuminated CMOS sensor, an f/2.4 autofocus lens, an LED flash, and 1080p HD video recording. Looks like we'll soon be seeing a lot more people whip out tablets for everyday snapshots.