The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.

Twitter sees hundreds or thousands of Tweets published every second, and many of these are photos of things happening real-time. Hashalbum is a new website that aims to help you browse this constant stream of images in real time by allowing you to do a simple search by hashtag, returning images that are found in Tweets containing that hashtag.

Hashalbum (via Lifehacker)

Goodwill has an online auction site called shopgoodwill, and categories in the Cameras & Camcorders section include film cameras, lenses and accessories, and vintage cameras. It’s not nearly as well-known as popular auction sites (e.g. eBay), so you might be able to find a good deal on camera gear!

(via A Photography Blog)

FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It’s a human-powered comparison engine consisting of “comparison apps” in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things such as focal length, minimum aperture, and weight.

The site needs to gain a lot more traction before other photography-related apps turn up (e.g. tripods, photo labs, etc…), but the site could potentially be very useful for browsing camera gear and other photography-related categories in the future.

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they’ve upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

If you don’t have a full arsenal of lightning equipment, you can filter the photos by what kind of lighting equipment was used to browse photos that are more relevant to you.
Read more…

If you tried to visit the Nikon Rumors site this morning, you’ve probably gotten an error message. According to the Google information, 47 pages from the site were tested over the last three months, and one page resulted in malicious software downloaded and installed without user consent. It appears that the site was flagged for that content yesterday. Yikes.

Another camera-related site, Cinema5D was attacked last weekend. Sebastian Wöber of Cinema5D wrote that primarily users running older browsers, particularly PC users running IE6 or users who downloaded Java or PDF apps were at risk of malware.

It’s unclear why these photo-related sites were attacked, but it’s a good idea to run a virus check if you frequent either of the sites, especially if you are in the at-risk group. Sophos has more information about the attack, which is common to sites running OpenX ad servers, here.

If you’ve got boxes of old prints and family photos you’d like to salvage from those awful sticky photo album pages, SnapHaven will scan them for free. For a limited time, the photo storage and backup service is offering free unlimited scans for customers with an active membership — though you’ll have to pay to ship your own prints.

SnapHaven is still the only dedicated photo backup and storage site. They also offer services for making prints, photo books, and other photo gift accessories.

SnapHaven originally launched last December, but has just re-launched with new membership options. Previously, the company had plans based on upload limits, but membership is now available at a yearly flat rate, starting at $49.99. Now, rather than paying more for more space, annual memberships are straightforward and include unlimited photo backup, protected by the company’s 99 year lifetime guarantee. SnapHaven also assures that even if the yearly membership is not renewed, customers can still have full access to the photos for viewing, printing, sharing, and downloading.

We wrote about Snapsort at the beginning of this year, when it was still a newly-launched, bare-bones website for comparing digital cameras. Though it was spartan, the service was useful for comparing the specs of cameras and seeing how they stack up against each other.

The service has gotten even more useful in the past few days, with a massively updated website taking the place of the first version. In addition to the sweet new design, the service now offers much more than simple comparisons. New features include detailed camera pages, customized advice (i.e. by budget), and a learning section filled with bookmarkable material. You can even compare cameras that haven’t hit the market yet.

If you’re currently in the market for a digital camera, you’ll definitely want to give this page a peek.

Pick&Zip is a simple web application that lets you easily download Facebook photographs with a few clicks.

You can download photos tagged with your name, your own albums, photos tagged with friends’ names, or your friends’ albums. After selecting the photographs you’d like, you can download them as a ZIP or PDF file.

I just tried it out, and the service works pretty well, allowing you to pull photos at the highest resolution Facebook stores (720px) quickly to your computer without having to click and download individual photos.

Something that’s slightly annoying is that you can’t seem to download all possible photos with one click, but must “select all” on each individual page. The app is pretty useful, nonetheless.

If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don’t have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It’s a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.

Here’s an example photograph that we ran through the app:

We were pretty surprised at how well the adjustment worked. It’s a great app for when you only want to fix red eyes and nothing else. PicTreat also offers web-based red-eye reduction, but it touches up the rest of the photo as well.