Opened in 1949, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York is the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography. It’s world renowned for its collection of more than 400,000 photos and negatives dating back to when the medium was first invented.
If you would like to check out some of the museum’s photos but can’t make the trip out to Rochester, there’s now a sleek new way for you to browse the imagery. The museum announced this week that it has become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project.
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How well does your favorite photo hosting and/or sharing service handle the copyright information and EXIF data of your photographs? How do the popular services stack up against one another in this regard?
Metadata handling isn’t often discussed when photo sites are compared, but that’s what the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has been devoting an entire study to. The organization has published its findings regarding which companies play nicely with your metadata, and which pretend it’s not there.
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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.
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When shopping for a new computer, online shops often allow you to customize the computer and choose the individual components that go into it. If the computing world can offer that, why not the photography world?
Turns out you can with Leica cameras. The company has a website called “Leica à la carte“, through which you can configure a film Leica rangefinder to suit your tastes and needs.
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There are currently 22 “generic” top level domains (e.g. .COM, .NET, .ORG), but that’s about to change. ICANN, the authority behind the Internet’s domain name system, began accepting applications for new gTLDs, meaning we may soon see web addresses that end in things like .PARIS, .FERRARI, and .KIDS. Yesterday was “reveal day” — the day on which the full list of domain proposals and applicants was published. The reveals some pretty interesting clues on some photo-related domains that might soon hit the web.
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The Image Language is a simple web app that lets you “write with images”. Feed it a chunk of text, and it turns each words into the top image result on Google Images. The image above shows what this paragraph looks like when fed through the system.
The Image Language (via Laughing Squid)
Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? Sightsmap is a simple Google Map app that takes geo data from the photos uploaded to Panoramio (now a Google service) and uses it to generate a heatmap.
In August 2005, a UK student named Alex Tew launched a creative project called The Million Dollar Homepage. It was a simple webpage containing 1 million pixels that he sold to advertisers for $1 each. The idea quickly went viral, and Tew became a millionaire less than six months after launching it. The Most Expensive Picture is a new photo website that may make its owners rich in a similar way. Anyone can upload a photograph to the website, but for a price: you’ll need to pay $1 more than the person before you. Each photo is featured for at least an hour before new submissions are accepted, and the first 300 submissions will be turned into a book (which all the submitters will receive).
The Most Expensive Picture (via Coudal Partners)
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).
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tokyo camera style by John Sypal (see our interview with him) is a popular website documenting the analog camera culture in Tokyo, Japan by sharing photographs of cameras being used on the streets — it’s like The Sartorialist except for cameras instead of fashion. If you’re a fan of the site and love browsing photos of old school cameras people use, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a number of similar websites for other cities and places around the world.
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