March 11, 2011

After several Egyptian secret police buildings were raided recently by protestors, Egyptian blogger Hossam (AKA 3arabawy) stayed awake for two days organizing and uploading photographs of members of Egypt's secret police who have been accused of brutality and torture. The problem was, Hossam was uploading the images to Flickr, and Flickr wasn't happy about the fact that he didn't shoot them. Flickr soon vaporized the photographs and emailed him a warning for copyright violation.

You know all those not-so-awesome portraits found all over social networking services like Facebook and Myspace? If you've felt like there's something strangely uniform about them, perhaps the reason is because they were all taken by Sheffield Quigley, the world's first and only professional Myspace photographer.

The massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that devastated Japan today was located just east of the city of Sendai, which subsequently suffered major damage due to the resulting tsunami. What you might not know is that the city is home to Nikon's flagship manufacturing facility -- the plant that produces Nikon's professional DSLRs (e.g. D3s, D3x and D700). Fortunately, Nikon reports that there have been no reports of injuries among its employees in that city, and the plant seems to have escaped …

"Alphabet Truck" is a project that took photographer Eric Tabuchi four years and thousands of miles of driving to complete. He photographed the giant logo letters found on the back of 18-wheelers, capturing one for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The end result is beautiful, creative, and difficult to replicate.

Like the US Government, the CIA has its own Flickr account, and one of the sets they have features photos of various gadgets used by the agency's spies over the years. Among the gadgets are a number of spy cameras designed for various purposes and scenarios.

It seems like it's only a matter of time before compact cameras are made to be directly connected to the cloud. According to social gadget website gdgt, Sony is currently working on a digital camera (i.e. not a smartphone) that has a built-in 3G modem that would allow users to easily upload and share photographs using popular services (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter). There would likely be some level of free service -- such as a couple dozen uploads per month -- after which users can pay for …