February 1, 2012

Facebook officially filed to become a publicly traded company today and, in doing so, spilled the beans on many of its internal figures and statistics that are normally under wraps. A crazy fact that emerged is that an average of 250 million photographs are uploaded to the service every day. That's equal to 10.4 million per hour, 174,000 per minute, or 3,000 photographs per second. In terms of storage, the photos and videos hosted by the service take up 100 petabytes, or 100 million gigabytes.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle produced this interesting segment on photographer Yuri Arcurs and how he turned his microstock photography into a million-dollar photography empire. Here's a mind-boggling statistic: on average, Arcurs sells one of his images every 8 seconds.

Nikon has unveiled a new superzoom compact camera called the P510 that offers a ridiculous 42x optical zoom -- the highest zoom ratio ever seen in such a camera. In 35mm terms, the lens goes from a 24mm on the wide-angle side to a 1000mm on the telephoto end. The 16.1MP camera also boasts a 3-inch LCD screen, 1080p video recording, GPS, 5fps continuous shooting, and ISO 3200. It'll hit store shelves later this month with a price tag of $430.

There's an Internet meme called "Sh*t People Say" that has been spreading around the web like crazy recently, sparked by a new YouTube web series called "Sh*t Girls Say". Here's the photographer's version.

We now know the price of the Fujifilm X-Pro1 for US residents: $1,700. One week after become available for preorders over on Amazon Japan for roughly $1,743, the camera is now listed on Amazon's US site for the price of $1,699.95 for the body only. The system's lenses are also available, and cost between $600 and $650 a pop.

Here's a short and sweet video in which Chicago-based food photographer Stephen Hamilton shares some tips on how to take photographs of food using your smartphone. One tip is to use a white napkin as a makeshift reflector to fill in some of the shadows in the shot.

The Microsoft team tasked with building Windows 8 has published a blog post with various user suggestions they've decided to implement in the OS. A big thing they're focusing on is file management -- something that isn't usually touted as a "feature" but is important in day-to-day computer usage. One useful improvement is having the OS read the EXIF data in JPEG photos to automatically present the correct orientation.

Antarctica - Glaciers & Caverns is a photo series by Belgian architect François Delfosse consisting of images captured from inside a white plastic bag.

Early in 2011, there was a brouhaha after newspaper photographer Jay Westcott complained about Lady Gaga's photo release form given to photographers attending her concerts. PDN characterized the story as a "fame monster gobbling up photographers’ copyrights". What you see above is a copy of the actual release form given at concerts. Apparently contracts like this one are pretty standard these days.

Pentax is on the verge of announcing a new mirrorless camera called the K-01. It'll be a K-mount camera with the same 16.3MP sensor as the K-5, and will come with a crazy 40mm lens that's less than 1cm thick (it looks more like a body cap). It'll feature a 3-inch LCD screen, HD video recording, a pop-up flash, and a design by famous industrial designer Marc Newson. The camera will reportedly be unveiled officially tomorrow at a launch event in London.