Back in early 2010, we received an e-mail asking us to join an up-and-coming photography blog that was trying to bring all of the best contributors, content creators and experts from the world of photography under one roof. It was described as a “photography website that should have been around for the last five years or more” and it was called Pixiq.

At the time we decided to stay independent, but many big-time photographers and photo bloggers took the offer and jumped on the train — a decision many are undoubtedly regretting: Pixiq was suddenly taken offline today by its owner, Sterling Publishing, just days after the company sent its contributors a warning.
Read more…

Did you know that YouTube isn’t just for uploading videos? Google’s popular video hosting service also has a special feature designed just for photo slideshows. If you’ve never considered using YouTube for photos, you may have never noticed the option, but it’s right there on the Upload page.
Read more…

Over the last year, WordPress owner Automattic has launched pages specifically targeting bands, brides, restaurants and even cities. Today, we can finally add photographers to that list.

This new page is meant to attract photographers, designers and visual artists looking to build a quality portfolio where they can display their work. Not that you couldn’t build portfolios using WordPress.com before, but this is the first time the company has reached out to photographers personally, adding them to the list of demographics it’s gone after in the past. Read more…

Scoopshot is trying to transform the way companies purchase photos and the way freelance photographers find work. In August, we reported that the startup had launched an app that allows smartphone users to easily sell their photos from their phone. Since then, the company has paid out more than $300,000 to participating photographers, and reports that over 60 of its users have earned more than $1,000 by selling their phone photos (one user has earned more than $23,000)

Now, the service is setting its sights on a different group of photographers: professional freelancers. It has launched Scoopshot Pro, a service that connects photo buyers with photo makers for commissioned projects.
Read more…

Are you a Canonite who’s sick of hanging out in the same forums as photographers who pledge allegiance to other brands? If so, that’s kinda sad — why can’t we all just get along? — but Canon has something new that’s perfect for you. The company has just launched its own official online forum, giving photography enthusiasts a new place to “ask questions, get answers and share experiences with peers.”
Read more…

Zack Arias is a professional photographer based in Atlanta who runs a popular personal blog with a sizable following. He’s also runs the photography equivalent of Dear Abby.
Read more…

This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users’ photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user’s photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
Read more…

If you’re a photo enthusiast who uses Pandora for personalized music listening, you’ll feel right at home using Art.sy. Just as Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to offer automated music recommendations, Art.sy has an Art Genome Project through which 20,000 images of art from 275 galleries and 50 museums have already been digitized, analyzed, and stored.
Read more…

Gamification — the application of game design elements to non-game contexts — is a pretty hot idea right now in the online startup world. More and more startups are introducing things like badgets, achievements, leaderboards, points, and progress bars to encourage users to do things such as visit new businesses, answer questions, and, of course, play games. One particularly interesting application of gameification is in the area of education, using fun to motivate learning.

Lunchbox is a stealthy startup that’s planning to introduce this kind of learning to the world of photography.
Read more…

Flickr’s Creative Commons licensing options allows its users to grant licenses that allow creators to make use of the photographs under a set of terms (e.g. attribution, non-commercial). Most photo sharing services have yet to bake Creative Commons licenses into their websites, but starting today, Instagram users can now release their photos under CC — albeit through a third-party solution.

It’s called I Am CC, and is a project started by LocalWiki founder Philip Neustrom that aims to “make the world a better, more creative place.”
Read more…