selfies

A small study out of Europe is confirming what many of us probably knew intuitively already: while plenty of people love taking their own selfies, most people have no interest in looking at anybody else's.

For some reason, "entry-level" mirrorless cameras almost all have one thing in common: a cringe-worthy focus on selfies—the Olympus E-PL8, Panasonic GF8, and Fuji's own X-A2 are all great examples of this. Sadly, Fujifilm has not strayed from this formula with the brand new entry-level X-A10.

In addition to the more exciting updates this week, Olympus also debuted their newest entry-level mirrorless interchangeable lens camera: the PEN E-PL8.

The Auto Insurance Center used Instagram hashtags to put together another study about people and driving. Last time, they tackled road rage, this time, they wanted to see where people take the most selfies while driving.

After seeing the trailer for Inception years ago, photographer Patrick Gilbert of North Bay, Ontario, recently decided to recreate the surreal "folding landscapes" in a series of drone selfies. The project is titled #BendNorthBay.

Computers are changing photography in a big way—from colorizing black and white photos automatically, to telling how memorable your photos are. And now, a new imaging technology can change the apparent focal length of a photo, making it look like a wide-angle selfie was taken from further way with a portrait lens.

Justin Bieber announced this week that he will no longer stop to take photos with fans while out in public. He says things have gotten to the point in which he feels like "a zoo animal" due to the endless impersonal picture requests.

Shootlr is a new iOS and Android app that turns selfies and photo taking into a social experience that you do with friends and family. Instead of shooting and sharing selfies and snaps yourself, you can use the app to request pictures from others.

A baby dolphin was killed in Argentina last week after beachgoers scooped it out of the water and passed it around for selfies. The incident has sparked outrage from animal rights activists and warnings from a wildlife foundation.

Back in September 2015, we reported that selfies now cause more deaths worldwide than shark attacks. As people become more and more daring in their attempt to snap the perfect self-portrait to share online, there are more stories of those picture-takers getting seriously injured or killed.

Here's a closer look at the numbers behind this disturbing trend.

Manny is a gray tabby cat that's attracting attention for his special camera skills. More specifically, Manny is quite skilled at shooting selfies of himself, and now tens of thousands of people are following his photos on Instagram.

"Sunset Selfies" is a project by photographer John Marshall of Frye Island, Maine, who photographers silhouettes of himself posing with creative cardboard cutouts.

"Today, I was enjoying a sunset banana down by the lake when the most amazing thing happened," Marshall writes of the photo above. "All of a sudden, this warm breeze started blowing across my neck and it smelled just like bananas too."

During the MLB baseball game yesterday between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies, a cameraman spotted a group of sorority girls who were apparently more interested in snapping the perfect selfie than watching the game. The announcers for the TV broadcast took notice, and the whole thing turned into a strange case study of what Instagram has done to our culture.

Here's a crazy but true statistic: selfies are now a bigger cause of death in the world than shark attacks.

Shark attacks are extremely rare: only about 5 people die from them every year around the globe. By comparison, there have already been 12 confirmed cases of people accidentally getting killed while trying to take a selfie.

Earlier this year, artist Richard Prince sparked a huge controversy by taking people's Instagram photos, making very small changes to them, and selling the prints as fine art for $100,000 a pop. Now there's a new website that's following in Prince's footsteps, on a larger scale but with smaller prices.

It's a service called Sellfie, which scours Instagram for the hashtag #selfie and then sells the photos as single-edition, high-quality prints for $150 -- all without the photographer's permission.

It looks like the idea of sharing front- and rear-camera photos at the same time isn't lucrative enough to be big business. After raising a whopping $4 million from investors, the unusual photo-sharing app Frontback is now announcing that it will be shutting down on August 15th, 2015.

This headline may sound like a piece of satire, but unfortunately it's not: Russia has just launched a new public safety campaign called "Safe Selfies" to warn citizens of the dangers of taking careless and risky self portraits. Apparently there have been a large number of deaths and injuries in recent days that have been directly caused by selfie-taking.

After winning the FA Cup Final yesterday, star soccer player Santi Cazorla ran behind the goal, grabbed one of the remote DSLRs placed there, and used it to shoot a series of selfies with his teammates to celebrate their victory.

Pizza Hut just posted this humorous 2.5-minute commercial public service announcement warning that “egotastic specimens of visual self obsession” …

Here's a cute little video to brighten your day. It shows a baby sloth at the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica interacting with a camera that's being held near its bed. Instead of taking a nap, the slow-moving sloth decides to explore the camera and reach out its arms for some selfie-style portraits.

As a result of the selfie culture boom in the past couple of years, the media is often quick …

It's becoming trendy to offer selfies as a feature in video games now. Just weeks after World of Warcraft added self-portraits through a new patch, the classic first-person-shooter Doom is getting the same treatment -- albeit unofficially.

There's a new mod for the game called "InstaDoom" that adds a selfie stick and 37 Instagram filters to the game, opening the door to some strange in-game photo ops.

As the selfie stick craze sweeps the nation, major museums in the United States are banning the device in order to protect both visitors and artworks.

On May 31st, 2014, a small Cessna plane crashed in a field a few miles away from Denver, killing its pilot and passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) just published a report with findings from its investigation, concluding that the crash was most likely caused by the pilot becoming disoriented while taking selfies of himself.

Underwater photographer Aaron Gekoski was recently on an outing to photograph one of the largest migrations in the world's oceans, but the project was hampered by unfavorable conditions. Instead of writing the trip off as a failure, however, Gekoski and his buddy decided to tackle a different photo project instead: selfies with sharks.

A popular Muslim cleric from Earth's most populous Muslim country is causing quite a stir due to public comments about the sinfulness of selfies. Felix Siauw of Indonesia warned his nearly 1.2 million followers on Twitter against the practice, saying that it opens the door to a multitude of sins.

You can tell that "selfies" are a big trend right now by the fact that more and more camera companies are touting it as a feature for their new models. Less than a week after Fuji launched a "selfie-ready" mirrorless camera, the X-A2, Panasonic is unveiling its own: the GF7.

A followup to the GF6, the GF7 is an entry level Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera that offers "modern selfie shooting features," something Panasonic calls "one of the world's most powerful trends."

Major soccer teams over in Europe may be banning selfie sticks from the stadiums, but selfies appear to be alive and well on the field. After "selfie" was named word of the year in 2013, players have been incorporating actual picture-taking into their goal celebrations.