Cactus, a brand once used by a wide range of photographers thanks to its low cost yet high-quality products, has ceased operations and closed its photographic equipment business. Strangely, it doesn't seem as though it notified all of its retail partners.
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.
After 70 years of holding its leading photographic trade show in Cologne, Germany, Photokina may be no more. The world's largest photo trade fair has announced that due to a "massive decline in markets for imaging products," it will be discontinued indefinitely.
Less than 24 hours after Nikon USA announced the temporary closure of all repair service in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Canon USA has (mostly) followed suit by shutting down its service centers in New Jersey, California, Illinois and Hawaii "until further notice."
The photography business Photojojo has closed up shop after 12 years of procuring content and products for photographers.
ImageBrief has announced to its members this morning that it will be closing after six years of connecting agencies and brands with photographers.
New55 has announced that it has shut down operations, putting an end to its dreams of helping to bring peel-apart 4x5 instant film back from the grave.
The renowned New York photo-representation agency Stockland Martel has announced that it closed its doors on December 31st, 2017, after 34 years of repping some of the biggest names in the industry.
The Flickr Marketplace is no more. Two years after launching a commercial licensing marketplace—a place for Flickr users to license their images to big companies looking for "authentic" user-generated content—Yahoo is officially shutting the program down.
Kodak Alaris, the spin-off of Eastman Kodak that produces the photographic film products the Kodak name is known for, may be in trouble. The company plans to shut down one of its five major manufacturing facilities by the end of this year.
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.
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.