2013

This might just be one of those services both the loves and haters of Instagram will like. Because while other services print your Instagram shots on magnets or postcards, Boomf prints them on... marshmallows.

So, you see, if you like Instagram you get to turn your favorite photos into edible confections, and if you don't, you get to eat all of those pretentious selfies, food shots and cappuccino pictures you so despise. As Michael Scott would say: "win win win."

Here's a bit of inspiration that should help start your Wednesday off on the right foot -- whether you're preparing to stuff your face tomorrow or today is just another hump day. It's a short stop motion film that pays tribute to the late great Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and it was created by a 14-year-old with some time and the Foldify iPad app.

I’m not going to say that we flew down to Florida to get a picture, because we didn’t. We flew down to Florida to see my grandfather, who is 94-years-old and my son’s only living great-grandparent. All my own great-grandparents passed away long before I was born, as did my husband’s great-grandparents.

So I’m not saying that we flew down to Florida to take a picture, but I’m admitting we wanted one. A photograph of four generations, all alive at the same time. Proof that it had happened. Me, my son, my father, and his father.

Lomography is no stranger to releasing strange cameras -- everything from Where's Waldo editions to a hand-cranked movie camera have crossed our desks -- but the Transparent Collector's Edition Konstruktor is perhaps cooler and definitely less useful than all of those.

A patent filed back in September of 2011 was finally awarded to Apple today, and it has the whole photo world atwitter. That's because this patent describes a camera system that would use the light-field technology made famous by Lytro to take refocusable images -- and it could work inside portable devices such as an iPhone.

That's right, light-field technology in an iPhone... now you see why everybody is excited over something that is, after all, still just a patent.

When the Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire photo staff last year, I commented that one of the problems was the utter failure of website design to appropriately showcase photography. Above is an example of the current design and the way photography is displayed.

Leica began its takeover of Swiss view camera manufacturer Sinar all the way back in 2006, when the German company acquired a 51% stake in Sinar from Jenoptik. The real goal, however, was only truly achieved yesterday when both companies announced via press release that they had reached an acquisition deal.

News broke yesterday that four of the photographers fired in last May's mass-layoff instituted at the Chicago Sun-Times may soon be rehired, while others will see restitution payments, thanks to a new agreement reached by the Chicago Newspaper Guild. Under the agreement, four photographers would get their jobs back and some of the rest will see one-time payments of $2,000.

Some may be inclined to call that a victory for photojournalism, at least a small one, but they should reconsider.

Back in June, graffiti artist Sofles was featured in a hyperlapse that showed him making his way around an abandoned building and creating various impressive tags at super speed. That video was received very well, so naturally, if one graffiti artist is good, four would be four times better right?

Last week, we reported the news that Android developer Josh Brown had discovered some juicy tidbits within the Google camera API: namely, that RAW capabilities and a few other features were in the works. That was just an interpretation of code, but now, it looks like Google has come out to confirm some of what Brown found.

Born in Vienna and trained as a filmmaker in England, Tina Schula's photography combines cinematic techniques, portraiture, family stories and political history to create staged narratives of complex human drama. In 2009, she received her MFA in Photography from The School of Visual Arts in New York.

She was a finalist at Critical Mass 2013, Photoville 2012, The Print Center 86th International Photography Contest 2011, The Sixth Annual BamArt Silent Auction, Scope Basel 2010 and a winner of the  CCNY Darkroom Residency in 2010.

News regarding the Chicago Sun-Times and its former photo staff is usually of the negative variety. Whether we were covering how the entire staff was unceremoniously laid off, or the fact that they were being replaced by iPhone photography classes, there hasn't been much positive news to report.

That changes today (at least to some degree) thanks to a settlement between Sun-Times Media and a newsroom employees union that managed to get four of the 28 photographers their jobs back, and secure a $2,000 one-time payout for the rest.

On the off-chance you thought photo blogs had some kind of monopoly on rants about lazy and thoughtless photography practices, witness the majesty of Denver TV news anchor Kyle Clark in action.

It's not a proper beginning to the week if you don't get at least one awesome time-lapse in your system. Okay, maybe we made that rule up just now, but regardless this one is well worth the three minutes of your time it demands.

After experiencing one too many embarrassing, high-profile Photoshop disasters, China is turning its research focus on image-editing software, although not in the way you might think.

In English, the title of husband and wife photographer team Kurt and Edwige Moses' photo series Un Petit Monde translates into "A Small World," but there's nothing small about the world the duo have created for the series, only its inhabitants.

An Instagram 'short film' time-lapse has been making its way across the Internet recently, simultaneously demonstrating the creativity of the filmmaker who created it and the lack thereof of the smartphone photographers from whom the content was crowdsourced.

You might have found yourself in this situation before: you're in the middle of a photo shoot and you find that you badly need to set up a shot or lighting that is, in fact, impossible to do 'professionally' given the gear you have on hand.

So what do you do? You go all MacGyver of course! You put together an off-the-top-of-your-head DIY fix that gets the job done (even if it doesn't look all that good doing it). The Tumblr blog Shitty Rigs is dedicated to showing off those brilliant, if a bit silly, creations.

The one-of-a-kind Leica M created by world-famous designers Jony Ive and Mark Newson finally went up on the auction block yesterday, and it wound up fetching more than twice as much as auction house Sotheby's highest estimate.

A few days ago it was a National Geographic robot camera rig vs. a tiger, today we swap out the tigers for a pride of lions and the Nat Geo rig for "Car-L," a little remote-controlled 'buggy' packing a Nikon D800E.

Whenever I look online for information or advice relating to street photography, Eric Kim’s name regularly surfaces. I’ve been reading his blog for a couple of years and in that time; I’ve watched his career and online prominence grow.

In comparison to other areas of photography, there’s relatively little advice online about street photography. But a number of photographers like Eric are helping to tackle this problem as well as build a solid and much-needed community for street photographers.

A few years ago, Bangkok-based photographer Visarute Angkatavanich started selling his work through microstock sites, and so he went in search of some interesting subjects to populate his gallery and generate some sales. Interestingly, he found what he was looking for in his own house: his pet fish.

The Daniel Morel vs AFP/Getty Images saga has been going on since 2010 when the agencies first pulled his photos off of Twitter and distributed them without permission to several major publications. Now the saga has finally ended, and ended on very happy terms for Morel, who is walking away from the deal $1.2 million richer.

Here’s a little bit of funny to start your Saturday off on the right foot. A while back, …

Picture -- A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three. - Ambrose Bierce

I’m a fan of the satirical and cynical definitions of Ambrose Bierce, first written as a daily newspaper column and later collected in The Devil’s Dictionary. (It was originally called the Cynic’s Word Book, but so many politicians of the day called Bierce a Devil that he felt the new title more appropriate).

In May of 2012, filmmaker and photographer Sungjin Ahn set out to capture something both beautiful and somewhat rare: the Joshua Tree.

But what began as a simple time-lapse of the trees -- which can only be found in western Arizona, southeastern California, southern Nevada, and southwestern Utah -- turned into something more for Ahn when he discovered that Joshua Tree National Park might someday lose the right to that name.

It's not necessarily the way you expect to go viral when you're a photographer, but one of NYC wedding and lifestyle photographer Sascha Reinking's photos is racing across the Internet at warp speed today after actor Zach Braff (of Scrubs fame) photobombed his newlywed shoot in the middle of NYC.

A new smartphone photography product is making some serious waves on the Internet ever since the launch of its Kickstarter campaign just a few days ago.

It's called Foldio, and it's an ultra-portable (foldable in fact) light box for smartphone shutterbugs who want to add a new dimension to their work or take some professional-looking product shots.

A few days ago, we shared photographer Sasha Leahovcenco's inspirational project in which he photographed people in Siberia who had never had their photo taken. Photographer Jimmy Nelson's series/book Before They Pass Away is similar in that he, too, is probably photographing people who have never seen a camera.

But the project takes on a deeper, more tragic meaning as well. You see, as the name suggests, Before They Pass Away is about capturing photographs of ancient tribes and cultures that, before long, may no longer exist to be photographed.

Self-promotion is a tricky thing. We all know that marketing is probably more than half the battle when it comes to getting great clients (after all, no matter how good you are, they can't hire you if they don't know you exist) these days.

And now, as the photography market is becoming more and more saturated, the name of the game is "make an impression." There are tens if not hundreds of photographers available pitching your client... how are you going to stand out?