Some sad news has emerged from the Midwest today: The Kansas City Star is reporting that a former employee and blogger committed suicide yesterday outside a local police station. Prior to ending his own life, 60-year-old Martin Manley created his own memorial website that includes detailed information about his life, including photographs captured over the years of himself and his experiences.
There's a slight mystery of sorts taking place in the stock photo community at this time. Stock photo service stock.xchng, reachable at sxc.hu, has been down for days now without reasonable explanation. The website is run by HAAP Media Ltd., a Getty Images subsidiary based in Hungary, and offers free-to-use images and illustrations to the masses.
There's something to say about the curious nature of journalists. Some spend all of their hours researching a particular subject, others go out into the field to experience first-hand, and some others quit their job and take up coding classes.
Wait -- what?
It's true. Just ask Benji Lanyado. This once full-time Guardian writer and contributor to other publications decided to quite literally quit his day job to pursue building what he thinks is the next big thing in stock photo buying and selling.
As higher resolution photography (and photography in general) has become ubiquitous, photo sharing and storage websites have had to adjust to keep up. From increasing storage capacity and file-size limitations to launching "spectacular" redesigns that offer beautiful browsing experiences, everybody is adjusting in their own way.
The latest player in the photography sharing game to make some big changes is SmugMug, who announced and launched a major overhaul earlier today.
News photographers have a potentially valuable new tool with Covertimes, a new website that congregates images of front pages from newspapers around the world.
I feel stupid. I admit I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. I have to use my index finger when figuring out clockwise vs. counter-clockwise; it wasn't until recently I found out that capers are the buds of a flower and not teeny tiny olives; and I made it all the way to my sophomore year in high school before discovering the name of the book is "Catcher in the Rye" and not "Catch HER in the Rye."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Photobucket is quietly one of the 800-pound gorillas of photo sharing. First launched back in 2003, the nearly-10-year-old service boasts a staggering 100 million users, putting it in second place behind the picture sharing juggernaut, Facebook. As the demise of MySpace showed, however, the mantra for online services needs to constantly be "innovate or die".
In an effort to stay hip in the crowded market of online photo sites, Photobucket has begun rolling out the first major redesign in its 10-year history.
Obvious Corp, the company that spawned Twitter, has unveiled a new project called Medium. It's a site that attempts to revolutionize how online publishing is done.
Instead of content being centralized around individual people, it features photographs and text grouped into themed collections. Content within collections can be sorted by how "interesting" viewers rated it to be.
Instagram is a photo sharing service based around instant photo sharing and viewing, so why not take advantage of its real-time nature for gauging the "pulse" of a city?
This is Now is an awesome new website that shows you a live view of the world through the eyes of Instagram users.
If you’re interested in the subject of lighting, check out Guess The Lighting.
Instagram grew to its $1 billion acquisition price through a service that's used almost entirely through a mobile app. As it continues to balloon in size, it only makes sense that it would expand onto the web to compete against the likes of Flickr and 500px. That day may be closer than you think.
Flickr users have made quite a commotion in the past couple days begging new Yahoo CEO Marissa …
Idan Shechter, the guy behind Camera Size, has launched a new website for photographers who understand sizes better through visual comparisons than through specs and figures. Sensor Size is a website that offers quick visual comparisons of sensors found in popular digital cameras. Select the cameras you want to check out from a couple of drop-down menus, and the sensors are displayed in relative sizes next to each other. You can also stack the images or display them in a 3D overlay for a better view.
Watch out, Flickr — Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing …
It's a shame that the digital age brought with it such widespread copyright infringement and, sometimes, downright theft, but it's a reality we have to live with. Fortunately, there's a new website up on Tumblr that is looking to help expose the people who are taking credit for other's work, and in the process help to cut down on some of the blatant infringement many photographers deal with week in and week out.
The Web Platform Team over at Adobe is currently working on …
DEVELOP Tube is a video channel on YouTube and …
The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called "The Lively Morgue" to breathe new life into items in the newspaper's photo archive (nicknamed "The Morgue"). Each week they'll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection.
Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? …
Candidtag is a new service designed to make it easy to earn a …
Street View Stereographic is a fun little web app that creates a “little …
Ashley Ambirge of the middle finger project on pricing your services the right …
In August 2005, a UK student named Alex Tew launched a creative project called …
Knowing how long to develop film for is easy if you use popular films and developers, but what if …
Just launched this week, Lighting Diagram is another simple web-based tool …
Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It's a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).
Daily deals sites have become quite popular as of late, with Groupon and …
Ex-Magnum and current National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols first launched his website back …
Everpix is a new company that wants to make your entire photo collection -- both online and offline -- accessible from anywhere through the cloud. Introduced yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference, the service will come as a desktop client that monitors folders on your computer and photo sharing accounts on the Internet. Whenever you add new photographs, they're automatically beamed to the cloud (i.e. Everpix servers), allowing images created using many different devices and stored in many different places to be available in one central location. Even photos emailed to your through Gmail can be picked up and back up by the service.
Photo sharing is proving to be one of the main battlegrounds in the social networking war between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Facebook launched another counterattack today by increasing the resolution of displayed photos yet again from 720px to 960px, a 33% increase (last year they increased by 20% from 604px to 720px). Furthermore, the company claims that photos now load twice as fast as before.