John Rogers was once one of the high flying entrepreneurs in the photo world. After coming up with the brilliant idea of scanning old photos for newspapers and splitting the rights to the digital images, Rogers was on his way to amassing one of the largest photo libraries in the world and was earning a whopping $120,000 per week selling his images on eBay.
Photo sharing service EyeEm has raised an additional $18 million in funding after taking $6 million from investors back in 2013. The new war chest will be used to further the company's mission of becoming the top network for photographers looking to make some money with their photos.
Instagram updated its community guidelines today in order to give users a clearer picture of where the service stands on the issues of copyright and nudity. Policies themselves haven't changed, Instagram says, but the rules have been fleshed out and clarified in response to user questions and various incidents.
Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera module company that is trying to revolutionize the mobile photography industry with state-of-the-art cameras that are extremely small yet powerful enough to lead "the way to DSLR performance in slim handsets."
Abigail Scarlett is a London-based photographer who believes that Bitcoin is the future. Her belief is so strong, in fact, that she's willing to put her digital currency where her mouth is. For the next half year, Scarlett will only be accepting photo work that is paid in Bitcoin.
Kessler Crane has announced that it will be ending its business relationship with British filmmaker Philip Bloom after accusations were made by a former partner.
LinkedIn announced today that it has shelled out $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda, the popular online education site that is teeming with material for photographers. As part of the acquisition, LinkedIn is now the new owners of, among many other things, 500+ photography courses and 24,000+ photography tutorial videos.
A few months ago, we shared a chart showing how sales the camera market have changed between 1947 and 2014. The data shows that after a large spike in the late 2000s, the sales of dedicated cameras have been shrinking by double digit figures each of the following years. Mix in data for smartphone sales, and the chart can shed some more light on the state of the industry.
Photojournalist Troy Wayrynen has been selected as the 1st Prize winner of the Sports Feature category in this year's Best of Photojournalism contest by the NPPA, one of the most prestigious awards for photojournalists.
Famous rock star and photographer Lenny Kravitz is having quite a year in the world of photography. In addition to publishing his own photo book and holding a gallery exhibition for his work, Kravitz has also partnered with Leica in designing a custom Leica M-P rangefinder called the "Correspondent" edition.
Olympus has launched a new program called Olympus Rewards that's designed to reward loyal photographers in the United States with special savings.
Sony became the largest shareholder in Olympus back in 2012 after investing $645 million in the company in exchange for a reported 11.5% of shares. It's not the largest anymore.
Photoflex, a popular manufacturer of lighting gear and camera accessories, has unexpectedly announced that it will be closing its business that has been in operation for three decades.
Last week SpaceX posted its photos to Flickr and released them to the public domain. Unfortunately for the company, Flickr didn't have any public domain designation they could use, so even though SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the photos were public domain, the images were shared under a Creative Commons license that required attribution.
Amazon has just dropped a huge bomb on the file storage industry by announcing two new unlimited cloud storage subscription plans. One lets you store all the files your heart desires for just $60 a year, and the second is one that may be a very attractive backup option for photographers: unlimited photo storage for just $12 a year.
Sony is making big restructuring moves in order to increase profitability, and one of the big changes has been closing its inefficient physical retail stores. 26 of the stores were closed in 2014, and now the latest word is that in addition to closing all of its shops in Canada, Sony will be pulling the plug on 8 of the 10 remaining US locations.
Back in 2012, The Camera Store released a lighthearted stop-motion video of mirrorless cameras attending a party. It reflected the state of the industry at the time -- particularly how the Canon EOS M was late to the game and how it had a painfully slow autofocus system.
In February 2014, Leica moved its headquarters to the newly constructed Leitz Park Wetzlar, a state-of-the-art campus for its management and manufacturing. Here's a look at what the beautiful campus is like from the outside and inside the buildings.
The world of photography lost one of its own this week. Photographic lighting pioneer Paul C. Buff has passed away at the age of 78. Among his many contributions to photography were White Lightning, AlienBees, Einstein flash units; the CyberSync radio remote system; and the Vagabond power system.
NASA is a government agency, so the photographs it creates are released to the public domain and can be used by anyone for any purpose. Now that private companies such as SpaceX are getting involved in space exploration and collaborating with NASA, the copyright of mission photos becomes a little more murky.
Renowned Magnum photographer Alec Soth is experimenting with a new way of delivering photos to art buyers and a new way for art buyers to experience photos. One of his latest projects takes a page from Snapchat's book, using the social photo sharing service to sell photos that disappear after just 10 seconds of viewing.
The New York Times has published an in-depth feature in its business section that looks at how Kodak, at one time a juggernaut in the photo industry, is working to reinvent itself after missing the boat when the camera world shifted to digital.
The first one I ever saw was "Chicks Who Click." It was years ago and the photography industry was predominantly male. I didn't think too much of it, but wondered (aloud at times) the wisdom of not only creating a gender based photography group, but giving it a cutesy name like "Chicks Who Click." …
After doing offline auctions for 270 years, Sotheby's is partnering up with eBay to deliver its high-end auctions more widely in the Internet world. Starting next month, prospective buyers of the auctioned items will be able to submit bids in real time through the new website, found at eBay.com/Sothebys. The very first auctions to be held on the service is a collection of famous photographs.
Just two months after partnering with Polaroid for a rebranded version of its service, the pioneering photo-a-day website Blipfoto has now gone into liquidation.
Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Wedding photography, much like the entire business of weddings, is highly influenced by the ebb and flow of trends. They come, they go, and they’re cyclical. When I plunged into the business in early 2012, I committed myself to research the industry: what works, what’s popular, and what sells? I quickly discovered that there’s a common, predictable, and heavily relied upon set of post-processing trends in wedding photography.
Here's how much the average couple spent on wedding photography for their big day in 2014: $2,556. That's nearly a 5% increase from the average cost the previous year of $2,440.
The tumult surrounding the World Press Photo awards for the last couple of weeks has been quite earth-shaking. An Italian photographer, who had been awarded for “Contemporary Issues” was, finally, disqualified for having mis-labelled where a picture was shot (not in the town of Charleroi which was listed on the entry but 30 miles away in Bruxelles.)
Light field photo studios are now a thing. This morning Lytro launched the world's first light field imaging studio in Tokyo, Japan.
When Japan was devastated by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, countless families lost precious photos in their homes that washed away. In response, many organizations sprung up to recover, restore, and reunite photos with their owners.
This photo of President Obama leading a commemorative march in Selma, Alabama, was featured on the front page of the New York Times this past weekend. The event was attended by notable politicians from both sides of the aisle, including former president George W. Bush, who was also on the front line of the march. Times readers who noticed that Bush was notably absent from the photo began to criticize the paper, and soon news organizations began to report on this omission as well.
It pays to have a lot of Instagram followers -- literally. Top users on the photo-sharing service these days are finding that their simple picture snapping can be turned into real dollars, and a lot of them at that. The numbers may astound you: some users are receiving thousands of dollars in exchanging for sharing a single photo that promotes a company's products.
Photos of a frog riding a beetle have been flooding the Internet over the past month. Think it looks cute and adorable? Reactions to the series of photos have been split between blind praise and outrage over the authenticity of the photo-story and welfare of the subjects. So, did this scene really occur naturally as claimed? We don't think so, and here's why.
In a surprising turn of events, the World Press Photo organization has announced that it will be withdrawing the 1st prize award it had given photographer Giovanni Troilo for his Contemporary Issues series "The Dark Heart of Europe." This comes one day after a new claim surfaced that accused Troilo of misrepresenting where a photo was shot.
Although things like RSS feeds and social networks have become primary channels for broadcasting and consuming content these days, some people still enjoy good old fashioned email newsletters. If that describes people in your life whom you'd like to share your latest kid photos with, KidPost is a service that wants to help.
Update: World Press Photo has decided to strip Troilo of his 1st place award.
If you sell your photography as stock shots with royalty free licenses through services such as Getty Images, you need to be okay with buyers using the images in ways that seem disproportionate to the meager price they paid. That's a lesson Turkish photographer Murat Koc learned this past week after discovering his photo used as a wallpaper on a newly launched laptop.
“World Press Photo is committed to supporting and advancing high standards in photojournalism and documentary photography worldwide.” …
Last year Nikon announced that it had set aside $1.96 billion for mergers and acquisitions into new industries in order to diversity from the camera industry that had grown the 98-year-old company to greatness.
We shared last week that the Belgian town of Charleroi was protesting after a series of photos casting it in a bad light was awarded 1st prize at the prestigious World Press Photo contest. According to the town's mayor, Italian photographer Giovanni Troilo had gone out of his way to stage shots for the purpose of painting the city as "The Dark Heart of Europe." …
High-flying Kickstarter campaigns get a lot of glory, but they come with their fair share of risks: just ask Triggertrap. Back in 2013, the UK-based camera trigger maker launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new modular camera trigger it had developed, called the Ada (initially it was the "Redsnap"). With an initial goal of only £50K, the company successfully raised £290,386 (~$446K) from nearly 1,971 backers.
According to a new report, Sony is saying that it will stop producing all CCD sensors by March 2017 in order to focus on expanding its involvement in CMOS image sensors.
Here's a collection of camera commercials that have appeared over the past 20 years. No matter your age, there’s probably something here that you’ll remember, and I hope it will bring back a bit of nostalgia. I've also selected what I consider the best commercial of them all.
Services such as Mosaic already let you make photo books in 5 minutes for $25, but if that's still too taxing on your time and rich for your blood, Fujifilm UK has a new service for you. Called POP BOOK, it's designed to help you make small, casual photo books in a few taps for just £5.
Twenty20 is a new stock photography service that just launched to the public after months of beta testing. It claims to have the world's largest crowdsourced commercial image catalog -- one that contains 45 million photos from 250,000 photographers based in 154 countries.
Photographers often grumble about Getty Images taking too big a slice from each stock photo sale, but it turns out the company hasn't been lining its pockets with mountains of cash generated by its contributors -- in fact, it hasn't been doing so hot financially as of late.
Charleroi is a town of about 200,000 people in Belgium that has fallen upon some tough times in recent years due to increases in unemployment, poverty, and crime. Italian photojournalist Giovanni Troilo pointed his lens at the city last year, capturing a gloomy photo essay titled "The Dark Heart of Europe." The images were recently awarded 1st prize at the prestigious World Press Photo contest in the Contemporary Issues category.
Lytro has announced that it just raised $50 million to undergo a "strategic shift" in strategy. Instead of focusing on light field photography and refocusable 3D photos, the company plans to expand into the fields of video and virtual reality. A large number of jobs will be shed during this process.
In 2013, we reported that the Italian film company Ferrania was planning to reboot its production of analog film. The next year, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign and ended up raising over $300,000 to bring film back.
