Eric Calouro

Chances are you may, at some point or another, have seen New York-based photographer Zhang Jingna's work in your daily lives. Her work has appeared in Photo Vogue, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar print media, and her commercial clients include popular that include: Wacom, TRESemmé, Mercedes-Benz, and even Canon.

Jingna was born in the People's Republic of China in 1988, and before she found herself shooting cameras professionally, she was shooting air rifles for the Singapore national team. Years later, she's going strong and making remarkable imagery.

There's a slight mystery of sorts taking place in the stock photo community at this time. Stock photo service stock.xchng, reachable at sxc.hu, has been down for days now without reasonable explanation. The website is run by HAAP Media Ltd., a Getty Images subsidiary based in Hungary, and offers free-to-use images and illustrations to the masses.

Since Microsoft launched their Bing search engine a little over four years ago in mid-2009, one of its characteristics that set it apart from search giant Google was the featuring of a lovely image that changed on a daily basis.

Featured images ranged from landscapes, animals, people, and more. Today, online photography community 500px has announced that they are collaborating with Bing to power the search engine's daily photo display.

In what could be called an interesting move, popular online retailer Amazon has announced that they're launching the "Amazon Art" marketplace effective immediately, bringing more than 40,000 artistic works from various dealers and art galleries to you with one click.

More than 4,500 artists' works are in the collection, and featured are scores (almost 6,000 pieces at the time of this writing) of fine-art photographs from the likes of Melvin Sokolsky and even Andy Warhol (priced at a whopping $200,000).

Nokia Lumia users now have a way to easily transfer images and videos to and from their devices with the freshly-released Photo Transfer application -- released today. That's not to say it wasn't simple to transfer normal photos in the past, however. Users have been able to use an app such as iPhoto previously to move images over to their computers, but Photo Transfer now allows for the transfer of additional formats.

Mobile messaging service Just.me has released a new update (version 1.2) to their iOS application that brings the wonderful world of selfies and Instagram-like filters to the fingertips of its users.

The move comes as the world of social networking continues to expand at a rate potentially faster than that of the universe itself, and people simply cannot just get enough of uploading pictures of themselves for friends and strangers to see.

Are you sick and tired of switching between a video LED light and flash? Folks, it just may be that LightRight is the product for you.

Designed by ColorRight (a family owned business that specializes in lighting for photographers and videographers), LightRight is the LED panel and flash diffuser combo you've potentially waited for you're entire life. It's not out yet, but there's an Indiegogo campaign going on right now to get this thing on sale near you.

Take a look at that stock camera app on your iPhone. Does a fair job, doesn't it? Then SnappyCam Pro 3.0 lands on it and makes you realize how truly slow the stock app takes photos. For your reference, it's about 3-to-6 images per second at full resolution (assuming you're using an iPhone 5).

SnappyCam, on the other hand, is able to take 20 full-resolution images per second on the iPhone 5. You read that right, a whopping 20 frames per second. It's all thanks to John Papandriopoulos (who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering) and his frustration with what he thought to be "inadequate" camera applications (we're looking at you, stock camera app).

There's something to say about the curious nature of journalists. Some spend all of their hours researching a particular subject, others go out into the field to experience first-hand, and some others quit their job and take up coding classes.

Wait -- what?

It's true. Just ask Benji Lanyado. This once full-time Guardian writer and contributor to other publications decided to quite literally quit his day job to pursue building what he thinks is the next big thing in stock photo buying and selling.

It would appear as if popular photo sharing service Instagram is potentially blocking the uploading of images through third-party app clients, such as Instance for Windows Phone 8, according to reports surfacing on the web.

The Cassini space probe is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement. It's been over 15 years since the probe was launched, an about 9 years since it reached Saturn. Since then, it's been snapping scores of images of just about everything it sees.

Vimeo user Fabio di Donato has uploaded a video titled "Around Saturn," which features more than 200,000 images snapped by Cassini from 2004 to 2012. These RAW images were converted to PNG and set to a Waltz.

They look as if they're a complete fabrication of one's imagination, but they aren't. German photographer Stefan Diller has managed to create worlds using microscopic images of plant and insect life, giving us a view of what our eyes can't quite see. The technology, called nanoflight, is described as "a revolutionary new way to visualize structures of the microworld," and has "the ability to move a virtual camera in eight degrees of freedom around the specimen."

There's no doubt about that fact that street photography is wildly interesting. There's just so much to it that makes it appealing. Real people, real moments -- good and bad. Best of all, there's something new to capture every day. And while many of us don't have the courage to get out there and point our camera at a stranger, it's interesting to see it happen, especially in a metropolis.

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunn (who is a street photographer herself) is working on a documentary called Everybody Street, which features the master street photographers in America's most populated city -- New York City. The trailer above gives a taste of what it's about (note: it's slightly NSFW).

Every once in a while someone gets really, really creative and it makes our jaws drop. Such is the case with UK pop artist Dan Black's timelapse music video for his song called "Hearts."

In short, the video (created by the folks at Chic & Artistic) features Black and company on a Parisian rooftop -- for a full 24 hours. That's right, one full day of shooting (from 11AM to 11AM!).

Maybe you've read an article or two here regarding Socialmatic. They're the team who brought us the Instagram-inspired instant camera that made uploading images from a tiny device easy, and even allowing users to print their pictures from the device on-the-fly (more on that here).

We're in the midst of Summer, and if you're one of the many folks who live by coastline, you have access to one of mother nature's most beautiful elements: the ocean. And while the lot of us prefer to purely listen to the waves crash from the comfort of the golden sands, photographer Sarah Lee has been taking her gear into the water and capturing surfers do their thing off the big island of Hawaii.

Having snapped scores of mesmerizing imagery of surfers beneath the waves -- as if they themselves were sea life -- Sarah Lee's art piqued our interest. How does she do it? Surely there's more to bringing your camera into the water and firing away, right?

Chances are that over time you've accumulated a good amount of photos on that iPhone of yours, and that makes it rather difficult to find that image from that one time your auntie fell in the swimming pool after one too many cocktails.

Using the metadata attached to each of those images, though, a relatively new app called Viewfinder aims to making organizing, finding and sharing your images, well, easier.

Never underestimate the power of 212 Instagrammers. Now that might seem like a strange thing to say, but vehicle manufacturer Lexus quite literally put over 200 mobile-phone-toting-picture-takers on a lot with a 1,400-foot track and let them go to town on the 2014 Lexus IS F SPORT -- a vehicle we all would probably like to see sitting outside our front doors.

There doesn't seem to be any shortage of high-speed cameras out there, doing work to slow down footage of fast moving objects enough for us to study what's happening in that short, short time frame. But what about using a camera to capture what could potentially be the slowest moving substance of all time? Yep -- someone's doing it.

Here's yet another example of how technology used in space can help us earthlings in other ways. A partnership between scientists at Cardiff University and the UK Astronomy Technology Center has yielded a prototype device that can help detect Age-Related Macular Degeneration (otherwise known as AMD) -- a common form of sight loss -- using camera technology designed originally for use on space telescopes.

They say you shouldn't laugh at one's misfortune, but a prank pulled off by BlackBoxTV shows just how silly we look when we're terrified -- and it's pretty funny. That's because these mean geniuses pulled off a prank that absolutely terrifies some innocent folks just trying to get their picture snapped by a photo booth.

If you think your SLR camera is capable of taking high-resolution photos, the folks over at the Institute of Optics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are about to put your gear to shame.

That's because they claim to have developed a 100-megapixel camera that captures 10,240 x 10,240 images, thanks to its square-format sensor. That's a whole lotta megapixels (though we fear in a number of years we'll look back at our marveling of this and laugh, whilst holding our gigapixel cameras). In fact, it's the highest megapixel camera in China, at the moment.

You can quit squinting your eyes and holding your hats, folks. That's not a UFO coming in for a landing, it's Manfrotto's brand-spanking-new Pixi tripod. It's designed for smartphones and smaller cameras, and did we mention that's it's so tiny and cute? Oh yes it is!

It's the Internet age, and the lot of us have some form of website or blog. With 130 million monthly active users sharing an average of 45 million photos per day, a good chunk of us are also Instagram users. What do you get when you put the two together? Embeddable Instagram pictures and videos, of course!

It seems like developers are always finding goodies hidden in Apple's iOS 7 beta software. Late last month it was discovered that iOS 7 may eventually be capable of detecting blinking and smiling in photos, and now? Well, let's just say Apple may be developing a slow-motion camera for the next iteration of the iPhone, which is expected to be announced later this year.

Boston-based artist and inventor Steve Hollinger has just been granted a second patent here in the United States for his Squito invention, a ball sporting embedded cameras and position sensors that allow for panoramic imagery in reconnaissance and recreational situations.

When famed sports photographer Bob Martin came to this year's Wimbledon competition, he came not only armed with his usual gear, but with a powerful robotics system that allowed him to capture imagery from vantage points not previously seen at the world's oldest tennis tournament.

The leading photography portfolio service PhotoShelter (also known for their sales and marketing tools for photogs) today announced the launch of their overhauled and much improved portfolio sites and tool suite, dubbed 'Beam.'

Presently in beta, Beam is an API-based platform that promises to allow photographers to "showcase their images at their best on nearly any device." Not only that, Beam is designed to be flexible, allowing for rapid expansion of template designs, tools, and the inclusion of third-party integrations.

Combining the impressive technological improvements humanity has made with regard to cameras and cleverly-written software has yielded some interesting products for consumers. Case in point: UK's Snap Fashion, an application made for iPhone that lets users snap a photo of an outfit they see and get information on where to buy it.

Google's Plus social networking site -- now in its second year -- has received a series of updates that are expected to make photo sharing on the service a bit more convenient, and a bit less painful. That's according to Google's Jon Emerson, who has posted some updates to Plus on his very own Google Plus page as of Friday.