February 25, 2011

In 1999 Corbis -- privately owned by Bill Gates -- paid $20 million to acquire Sygma, a legendary photo agency that was the largest in the world at the time. After the acquisition, the agency bled money and suffered heavy fines due to the mismanagement of photographs, paying $2 million at one point for losing 750 of one photojournalist's photos. In 2010 the new agency, named Corbis Sygma, filed for bankruptcy after its debt had risen to €73m (~$100 million). Now the court appointed …

Photographer John B. Crane was ice climbing in Colorado when he came upon a little ice cave full of "tiny wonders". Wishing he had a green gel, he suddenly had the brilliant idea of using some Fruit Roll-Ups he had brought along for that purpose.

If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.

In the boring old past, printed portfolios were a great way of showing off your still photographs, but any video you also wanted to show off had to be included and viewed separately from the main portfolio. Now, new technology is allowing photographers to embed video right into their portfolios, with a small LCD screen displayed right on the page.

3D Photo is hardly a useful app, but it's a fun way to play with the camera on your iPhone. What it does is map your photographs onto geometric shapes, giving them a pseudo-3D effect by allowing you to move the shapes and view them from different perspectives. You can find it for $1 in the iTunes store.

If you want to make your camera stealthy for whatever reason (maybe wildlife photography?), there's special camouflage-patterned bags or cases you can buy to put your camera in. Those can be pricey though, and an easier do-it-yourself solution is to simply tape up your camera with some camouflage duct tape. Instructables member Nano_Burger posted a series of photos showing how he did this with a cheap film camera.