March 9, 2012

Here's a short one minute time-lapse video that took nine months to create. It creatively documents a pregnancy and announces a new baby girl. We shared a very similar one last year.

Kodak's film business just can't seem to catch a break. One week the company announced the death of its entire slide film lineup, Kodak announced today that it is increasing the price of all the surviving films by 15%, stating, …

Want to protect your gear from dings and scratches while customizing its look? Try using some carbon fiber vinyl film -- the kind designed for cars. When you're done with the application, you can also use some acrylic spray to make the "carbon fiber" look nice and shiny.

Instagram is reportedly in the process of securing new round of funding that values the 16-month-old company at a staggering $500 million -- 20 times what the company was valued at a year ago. Although the $40 million round has drawn a lot of interest from investors, many of the top VC firms have decided to stay away due to the high valuation and the fact that Instagram still needs to prove that it can turn popularity into profit. The 9-man company currently has over 15 million users and is …

PBS art series Off Book created this short video that presents a brief history of the animated GIF.

We've all seen photographers make mad dashes into group portraits, hoping to get into position before the camera's self timer automatically snaps a photograph. Apple wants to make those a thing of the past. A new patent filed by the company (#20120057039) describes a new and smarter self-timer system that uses facial recognition in addition to the standard timer. Using a picture of the photographer's face, the camera will wait until the shooter is in the scene before starting the countdown, …

Here's a quote by photographer Richard Benson on Lee Friedlander’s approach to photography (from his afterword in In the Picture: Self-Portraits, 1958-2011): …

If you want an extra personal touch at birthday parties, you can turn portraits of the birthday boy or girl into picture perfect party hats! Simply print out a portrait using a special template, turn it into a cone, add some fringe, and you're done. Eden over at Sugar and Charm has the low down.

Photo-sharing site Pinterest, the new darling of social media, has a copyright infringement cloud hanging over its head. The fact that anyone can upload and share copyrighted photographs through the site has prompted many sites -- most notably Flickr -- to ban "pinning" for copyrighted works. Up to this point, Pinterest has tried to avoid legal trouble by having a Terms of Service that places all the blame for copyright infringement on its users, but a new solution may be on the horizon: …

The Giottos Rocket is a popular tool used by photographers to remove dust from cameras and glass, but if you're in love with yours, you might want to think twice about flying with it. Reddit user gynoceros found out the hard way that some TSA airport screeners aren't too enthusiastic about the Rocket's shape. He writes, …