June 21, 2011

The power of the Internet is amazing. Just yesterday we reported on how a man found a battered memory card that apparently spent four years in the ocean and recovered 104 photos from it. After the story went viral and was widely reported, the owner of the camera has now been found. The girl nearest the camera in the photo above was visiting relatives four years ago when she accidentally dropped the camera into the Pacific Ocean from a wharf Santa Cruz.

Turns out that mysterious Leica camera spotted on British singer Seal was in fact a Leica that didn't officially exist yet, but now it does: Leica has just announced the M9-P digital rangefinder. The new camera is basically the M9 with a few cosmetic changes -- all the guts are identical. Like on the non-digital Leica MP, the traditional red dot is missing from the M9-P, which meant to give the camera an "understated appearance".

A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket.

Argentinian photographer Irina Werning's "Back to the Future" series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.

In March 2011 we reported that an iPhone photo sharing app called Color had raised a whopping $41 million in funding before it had even launched. Sequoia Capital, one of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley, invested more money in Color than they had originally invested in Google. Now, just three short months later, Color is still struggling to find users while its less-funded competitors are leaving it in the dust.

If you use Photoshop, you're probably experienced with the uber-useful -- and oft-abused -- Clone Stamp tool, but what about the Clone Source panel that's been around since CS 4? This brief but informative tutorial by Photoshop guru Brian Wood is a great primer for that panel, and also includes some general Photoshop tips and tricks that you might not have known.

Last week we featured Shopobot, a new website that can show you the price history of camera gear and tell you whether it's stable or not. Decide is a new service (just launched yesterday) that goes a step further -- it not only tells you whether to buy or not based on price stability, but checks to see whether there's a newer model available or likely to be announced in the near future. The service bases each decision on 40 price factors, historical trends, and relevant rumors regarding …

Have you been running low on creative juices lately? Fill up again with these 29 simple ways to stay creative.