Shopobot is a new shopping tool that helps buyers determine the best price to buy products from various retailers by tracking their price changes across time. Retailers often change the prices of different items often to determine the best price point, which can cause frustration for people who buy a product only to find it $50 cheaper the next day. If you’re looking to buy a camera, lens, or any other piece of gear, you might benefit from doing a quick search on Shopobot to find the price history of that item.
Shopobot (via Reuters)
DEAR PHOTOGRAPH is a neat photo project by Taylor Jones that collects pictures of pictures from the past in the present. These are images that show old photos held up and aligned to the present day location, offering a glimpse into what once was.
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Twitter has just announced that they will be launching their own photo-sharing service that will let you attach photographs directly to Tweets, competing with services like TwitPic. Rather than host the images themselves using their own servers or Amazon’s S3 storage, they’ve decided to partner with photo-sharing giant Photobucket. It’ll be interesting to see whether photographers feel more comfortable sharing their images on Twitter now that the functionality will be baked into the service itself, especially after recent brouhahas involving third party services.
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If you’re both a photography lover and a Mac user (there’s a lot of you out there, right?), computer expert Lloyd Chambers has an uber-helpful section on his Mac Performance Guide website for photographers who want to learn how to optimize a Mac for Photoshop and other photo editing programs.
Google Street View photos won’t be limited to the exterior of buildings for much longer — the company has just announced Google Business Photos, a service that will allow Google websites to show the interiors of local businesses. If you thought having vehicles equipped with Street View cameras driven up and down every street in every city was a tedious project, for Business Photos Google is planning to have photographers sent to businesses that apply for the service. Crowd-sourcing the imagery would definitely be less labor intensive, but shooting inside private property requires permission.
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There have been a number of devastating tornadoes in the Southeastern United States this past week, with the homes in many communities reduced to rubble. While certain things can be rebuilt or replaced, photographs lost in the storm often cannot be. A new Facebook page has been created after the storms that aims to reunite owners with photographs scattered in the winds, and already boasts close to 50,000 fans and 600+ uploaded photographs. It’s a neat idea, and a great example of how Facebook can be used for good and not just procrastination.
Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes (via PhotoWeeklyOnline)
Update: Interesting turn of events… Looks like Facebook didn’t like what was going on, and killed off the page. Wow.
Update: Never mind. Looks like the URL of the page got changed or something. Here it is.
The Stolen Camera Finder is a new search engine developed over the past two years by programmer Matt Burns. His idea is to search the web for photographs that have a stolen camera’s serial number embedded in the EXIF information. It uses two web crawlers — the first is a standard one that accesses Flickr’s API, while the second is a Google Chrome browser plugin that silently runs in the background and peeks at the serial numbers of images on any webpage viewed. These serial numbers and URLs are stored in a database, and if you’d like to volunteer your browsing for this you can download the Chrome plugin here.
Back of a Webpage is a creative new site that imagines what popular websites might look like if you look at them from behind — as if you were a tiny person sitting inside your computer monitor looking at the other side of the screen. What you see here is the one for Flickr. We finally get to see what those digital prints look like on the back!
Back of a Webpage (via Laughing Squid)
Looks like Nikon has a new 50mm lens primed for announcement. Earlier today a AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G product page appeared on Nikon’s website, but was quickly pulled — but not before it was already widely reported (here’s a screenshot of the page). The lens features a Silent Wave Motor for quiet focusing, and a “newly developed optical system employing an aspherical lens element”. It will be compatible with both DX and FX format cameras. No word on when this lens will become official or how much it will cost.
(via Nikon Rumors)
Hiding or censoring part of an image through obfuscation is as easy as selecting the area in Photoshop and applying the Pixelate->Mosaic filter, but what if you don’t have an image editing program at your disposal? If you’re seriously paranoid about your privacy on the Internet, there’s a new service called PhotoHide that helps you quickly add these pixelated areas to any photo. Everything is done through the web browser, and you can download the final image once you’re done.
Doing this to every single photo of you on the Internet would be ridiculous, but you might find it useful for more reasonable applications (e.g. hiding your house or license plate number in a photo).
PhotoHide (via PhotographyBLOG)
