Daily deals sites have become quite popular as of late, with Groupon and LivingSocial leading the charge. Photo Dough is a similar service that’s geared towards professional photographers. Every few days the site features a new service or product that’s heavily discounted thanks to group buying, allowing you to save money on things like photo editing programs, digital picture albums, and website templates.
Ex-Magnum and current National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols first launched his website back in 2001 but left it untouched until last year, when he finally decided to update it with new work. After spending a considerable about of energy towards the update, he suddenly decided to change course:
I spent months updating it: new galleries, new captions, stories and videos. It was an incredible amount of work. Right before I hit publish on the site, I realized that I just couldn’t give it away anymore, I had poured my soul and time into it and while I don’t care about making money off of it, I needed to be sure people would value it. I wanted to be the guinea pig for the rest of the photographers out there. So I scaled back the content on my website and decided to embrace the new technology of the iPad and build an app. This way, the audience views the photo essays with my voice behind them. [#]
His paywall experiment seems to be well-received so far — the app currently has a 4.5/5 star rating in the iTunes Store. It’ll be interesting to see if more photographers follow his lead.
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.
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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.
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Earlier this year we saw the launch of two search engines — Stolen Camera Finder and GadgetTrak Serial Search — that help find stolen cameras by searching photos on the web for the serial numbers. The idea is neat, but no one knew whether it would actually help recover stolen gear or not. Turns out it does work.
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Emotional Breakdown is a cool new web app that attempts to gauge the mood of the world every day by analyzing the photographs found on The Guardian’s 24 hours in pictures. Using facial recognition technology to find happy, sad, angry, surprised or neutral faces in the images, the app creates a colorful pie chart breaking down the emotions. From the chart above, we see that the world was mostly neutral, surprised, and happy today.
Even cooler is the fact that you can also run the tool on any other URL. Try your own photo collection to see what emotions you’ve been capturing in your images.
Emotional Breakdown (via Mashable)
This comment posted (and deleted) by Reddit user WonkoTheLucid shows why photographers need to make sure their websites are secured properly:
My friends wedding photos were posted with watermarks on a photo reprint site for sale. The prices were a bit outrageous. Another friend who does web design clued me into manually entering the photo address to display a full resolution photo without a watermark. I wrote a script and downloaded 500 free high res photos. Burnt many dvd copies and mailed them to a bunch of random people who were at the wedding.
If you’re a professional photographer that lets clients review proofs online, make sure the high-res, non-watermarked versions of the photos aren’t accessible by simply changing a portion of the URL.
As a professional photographer, this really makes me angry [Reddit]
Millions of people know Instagram as a fun way to share photographs, but get popular enough on the service and it can be a profitable one as well. Keepsy, a startup that helps people quickly create albums from Instagram and Facebook photos, has launched a new curated gallery featuring top Instagram artists. Fans can purchase photobooks from the site at a price set by the artist, and profits are split 50/50 between the service and the photographer. While only about 20 users are represented currently, they’re planning to slowly add more based on merit.
The gallery is also a good place to find people to follow for fresh inspiration.
Featured Photographers (via Mashable and TechCrunch)
Last week we featured Shopobot, a new website that can show you the price history of camera gear and tell you whether it’s stable or not. Decide is a new service (just launched yesterday) that goes a step further — it not only tells you whether to buy or not based on price stability, but checks to see whether there’s a newer model available or likely to be announced in the near future. The service bases each decision on 40 price factors, historical trends, and relevant rumors regarding upcoming announcements. With a new camera being announced every 45 hours on average, Decide might just help you avoid the pain of buyers remorse.
Update: A reader reports that the retailer AJRichard (which reportedly does bait and switch scams) is listed on Decide. Be smart when choosing where to purchase from! (Thanks Ryan!)
You’ve probably seen countless photographs already of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March, but they were likely captured by professional photographers looking to have the images published in news outlets. What, then, would photographs look like if they were taken by ordinary people who were directly affected by the disaster? Aichi Hirano found out the answer to this question by distributing 50 disposable cameras to survivors at a number of shelters with a note that read,
Please take photos of things you see with your eyes, things you want to record, remember, people near you, your loved ones, things you want to convey… please do so freely. And please enjoy the process if you can, even if it’s just a little bit.
Hirano did this once shortly after the disaster, then again two months later.
Rolls Tohoku (via Conscientious)
