In the digital age, there’s a lot more to a photograph than the image itself. When most digital cameras capture an image, they record certain parameters and write them in the image’s file for later use. These parameters are called metadata and are stored as Exchangeable Image File data, or EXIF for short.
If you're keeping track today, the score is Big Corporations: 1, Photographers: 1. Because while Carol Highsmith might have all-but-lost her epic lawsuit against Getty Images, a photographer in Germany came out on top when he took Facebook to court.
World Press Photo yesterday announced the winners of its 2016 contest, honoring the best news photos captured in 2015. Above is a breakdown of the cameras that were used by the photographers who were honored by photojournalism's biggest prize.
The prestigious World Press Photo contest announced the winning photos of 2014 last week. In case you were curious, here's a look at the cameras that were used to capture the winning photographs.
Privacy is a big concern these days, what with the NSA looking over both your shoulders, reading your emails and chiming in on your cell phone conversations. And while you might not be able to "fight the man" as it were, you can protect your privacy a bit by learning how to remove sensitive location information from the photos you post online.
You may be stuck in a photographic rut and not even know it. To the rescue comes Lightroom Analytics, a free plugin for Adobe's Lightroom management/editing package that analyses the metadata in your library to spot trends.
If you've been following the news, you might have heard that a man John McAfee is on the run from police who want to question him about a murder. Not just any ol' John McAfee, but the John McAfee, the once-ultra-rich founder of anti-virus software company McAfee. Well, a photograph published to the web today may have revealed the exact location McAfee is was hiding.
Reuters has published its list of the best photographs taken in 2012, a massive collection of 95 powerful images showing different events that have occurred around the globe over the past year. In addition to large photos, descriptions by the photographers, and the official captions, each image is also accompanied by information about the equipment and settings that were used to capture it.
Flickr has quietly rolled out a great incremental update to its photo-sharing service. Individual photo pages now display a number of EXIF details under a new section labeled "Additional Info", found in the column to the right. With a quick glance, you'll be able to see the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and focal length that a photographer was using when he or she snapped any photo.
Donalee Moulton over at The Lawyers Weekly has an article describing how EXIF data is beginning to be accepted as valuable evidence in courtrooms -- at least in Canada:
One of the big conveniences of shooting digital is that your pictures pop out with useful details baked into …
9 out of 10 adults in America believe that people are over-sharing sensitive personal information.
Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don't recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there's an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.
Google has added EXIF data to …
For photo enthusiasts, Google’s new Google+ social network is something like Flickr mixed with Facebook. It has the social …
On August 4, 2006, AOL published a text file containing 20 million searches done by 650,000 users over a 3-month period for research purposes. Although the company anonymized the data by showing the users as numerical IDs, people soon realized that many people searched for personally identifiable information (e.g. their names), allowing real names to be put to unique IDs, thus revealing the search history of that individual. After the media caught wind of this, the whole thing was known as the AOL search data scandal.
One of the big advantages of digital photography is that EXIF data is embedded into your images, allowing you to easily learn when and how (and more recently where) a particular photograph was captured. If you still enjoy shooting film, then a solution is to jot down notes about your photography while you're shooting.