sales

How have camera sales changed over the past 60 or 70 years? The chart above offers an interesting look at this question. It shows camera production between 1947 and 2014.

Swift Galleries is an upcoming platform whose goal is to get your photography work on your clients' walls and, in turn, bring in some extra profit for you.

By leveraging a simple drag-and-drop web app, Swift Galleries makes it easy for you to customize and show off how your photographs would look in your clients' homes, with little to no effort on your behalf.

Snapwire's mission is to make photo selling 'human again,' which is why creative collaboration between image makers and the brands/companies that need those images is at the center of the photo sales platform's model.

Today, the company enters into a creative collaboration of its own with Adobe in order to make sure their users have the most photo editing algorithms on the market at their fingertips.

When it comes to wanting to sell physical prints of your photographs online, there are but a few platforms. And of the platforms that do exist, many of them seem to fall short when it comes to offering everything you need in one, simple workflow.

Seeing this as a ripe opportunity, an incredibly talented team consisting of the co-founders of DNA 11, CanvasPop and dozens others have created an online marketplace that offers an end-to-end platform for artists to leverage. It’s called Crated, and it has the potential to be a game-changer for photographers who want to sell their work online.

We're unfortunately accustomed to bad news in the photo industry. That's not to say there's not great news and exciting new products and a bright future ahead, all of those things are there too, but slumping sales and discontinued products are becoming all-too-common reports.

Case in point: it seems flash trigger king PocketWizard is struggling of late, with reports claiming that the company has had to lay off as many as 20 of its 50 employees due to low sales figures and increasing competition out of China.

The camera industry is turning into a two-tier market, with Canon, Nikon and Sony DSLRs at the top, smartphones at the bottom and nothing in the middle, according to a recent Reuters report that finds little traction for mid-tier camera makers counting on mirrorless to save the day.

With every passing year, the digital camera sales dataset offered by the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA) grows more comprehensive. These records are made available to the public by this coalition of camera manufacturers which includes Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm, Sony, Sigma, Ricoh, Olympus, and dozens of other recognizable brands. Since 2002, they've been improving and increasing the scale of their database, which now separates digital cameras into fixed-lens, mirrorless and DSLR categories, and reports sales figures for different regions.

It sometimes seems that commentators are primarily interested in the CIPA data to prove just how far up a creek camera manufacturers are so far this decade. But these depressing pronouncements are just scratching the surface. Here's some other things the data shows:

News coming down the Nikon financial pipeline isn't good. Whether you're talking about official financial forecasts that mirror what we saw recently from Canon or unofficial sales numbers that don't look promising, the camera company may be coming up on some hard times.

Leading international camera maker Canon cut its annual profit forecast Thursday, revealing that sales of interchangeable-lens cameras are slowing for the first time ever.

From antique pistols to high-powered assault rifles, Instagram has emerged as the leading online marketplace for guns. And, even more troubling, it seems few of the sales violate the law or even Instagram policy.

Lenstag generated quite a bit of buzz last week by introducing a service that aims to crack down on gear theft by making it easier to track and report stolen gear. The service is now getting a new feature that will further add trust to the used gear buying process: disposable verification links for individual items.

It's official -- the point-and-shoot market is dying, while DSLRs and other interchangeable lens systems champion the cause for standalone cameras.

A new report from retail researchers NPD tallies U.S. sales of $2.1 billion worth of interchangeable lens cameras between June 2012 and May 2013, an increase of 5 percent over the same period a year ago. U.S. sales of compact cameras, meanwhile, plunged 26 percent, to $1.9 billion. This is the first time interchangeable lens cameras have surpassed the sleek-and-shiny segment.

Photographers need clients, and clients need photographers (even if they don't always think they do). The issue is that most clients have no idea how to find good quality local photographers; they have no place where they can find reviews, look through work and pricing, and compare photogs side-by-side. In lieu of other options, many amateurs in particular get work through a quality website, cold calls and word of mouth.

Photographer, developer and Google+ founding member Chris Chabot is trying to streamline this process with his new website Snapsation: an online marketplace where clients and the photographers they need can do business.

Dear Getty Images: I quit.

I just sent Getty Images the email above, which, I think, is how I terminate my relationship with them. Hopefully. I’m not 100% sure, but I can’t seem to figure out any way to do it online, so I’m hoping that email works.

Last week, Canon reported its latest quarter's financial results, which included some big double-digit drops in revenue and profit. Now it's Nikon's turn to show the world how it's finances are doing. The company reported its latest quarterly results yesterday, and the numbers are decent.

Japanese electronic industry analysis company BCN has published a new report (in Japanese) on the current landscape of the mirrorless camera industry. Using data gleaned from retailers and manufacturers over in Japan, it reports that three companies -- Olympus, Sony, and Panasonic -- account for nearly 70% of mirrorless camera sales in Japan. Nikon and Canon, both relatively late to the mirrorless game, are fourth and fifth (respectively), with a combined share of 22%.

Businessweek writes that Canon has lowered its sales estimates across all its camera …

Over the last year or so, as camera phones and "phoneography" have taken off, many have feared and/or expected the death of the digital camera. In many ways this fear has come to fruition -- point-and-shoot cameras are becoming a thing of the past -- but for another segment of the market, the advent of the camera phone has benefitted companies and consumers alike.

Canon's president Tsuneji Uchida announced today that he will be stepping down to pave way for a younger management team as the company fell short of expectations for the second straight year. Canon's stock price dropped 19% last year while Nikon's grew 4%. The total number of Canon cameras sold dropped 4% last year, likely a result of both a shift away from consumer cameras and the shortages caused by Japan's earthquake and Thailand's flooding.

After sticking too long to film technology, it looks like Leica is finally …