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PopPhoto Obit

PopPhoto is Dead, Again

After shuttering in 2017 and reviving in 2021 as an online-only magazine, Popular Photography -- colloquially known as PopPhoto -- has let go its last staff members and is effectively dead once again.

Canadian Magazine Photo Life Has Shipped its Final Issue

Popular Canadian photography publication Photo Life has announced that the March 2021 issue will be its last. In a letter to readers on its website, the Photo Life team says that while it has weathered many of the storms the industry has faced, the pandemic was one it could not overcome.

Facebook’s Acquisition of Instagram Now a Done Deal, Final Value of is $735M

The final hurdles have been cleared, and Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The startup's 16 employees will be relocating from San Francisco to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. In an announcement released through its newsroom, Facebook reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Instagram running as a standalone service:

As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.

There will certainly be more resources available at Instagram founder Kevin Systrom's disposal: the photo sharing app is being taken in by a company with roughly 4,000 employees and legions of world class software developers.

Noktor and Its Hyperprime f/0.95 Lens Are No More

A little over a year ago, US-based startup company Noktor announced a manual focus HyperPrime 50mm f/0.95 lens for Micro Four Thirds cameras that generated some buzz, and there was even murmurings of the lens being released for Canon and Nikon DSLRs. The company never really took advantage of the excitement they caused and not much was heard about the project since then. At the end of last week, the company took down the Noktor website and announced that the effort had come to an end.