Lytro is seeing more and more competition these days, as more and more companies are jumping into the "snap now, focus later" game. There are now apps that mimic the technology, and companies like Toshiba are working on building Lytro-style smartphone camera modules.
Back in August 2010, Sony shook up the camera industry by announcing the first pellicle mirror DSLRs, the A33 and the A55. Rather than being called SLRs, the new cameras were labeled SLT, or "single lens translucent", cameras.
The Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, literally "change good," is at the heart of many a successful company. It represents a dedication to constant change for the better, and is famously used by Toyota on their assembly lines, where employees are encouraged to point out issues and suggest improvements.
On the same day that Kodak announced the sale of its camera film business, Hasselblad had big "ending" news of its own. The company today announced that it will no longer be producing the 503CW medium format camera. This teams the V System line is officially coming to an end.
We reported last August that Kodak was looking to sell its camera film business along with a number of other core businesses. Well, the company has now succeeded.
Here's a new iPhone commercial Apple just released today on its website and on YouTube. It's a 1-minute-long spot that focuses on how the iPhone has shaken up the world of casual photography by becoming the world's most popular camera.
Miller's Professional Imaging is the largest professional photo lab in the United States, with facilities in Pittsburg, Kansas and Columbia, Missouri that offer a slew of printing services for hobbyists, semi-pro and professional photographers alike. In the above video, Chris Marquardt of Photography Tips from the Top Floor treats us to a behind the scenes look at the company's 40,000 square-foot facility in Columbia, MO.
How do you solve the problem of professional concert photographers snapping unflattering photos of you during your live shows? One way is to ban them completely, and that's exactly what Beyonce is doing with her latest concert tour. Policies like hers may be growing in popularity among artists who want to control their image, but the policy is still causing quite a hoopla.
The Android operating system has been expanding beyond the world of smartphones and into the realm of "smartcameras" as of late, but did you know that by doing so it has simply gone full circle? That's right: Android was originally intended for digital cameras rather than for phones.
Magazine and newspaper stories have traditionally revolved around the writer. A writer would pitch stories and was almost always the architect of the piece. When the story needed visuals, a photographer or illustrator would be brought in, often after the story was finished. This order of operations placed the writer in the driver's seat.
One of the most prominent celebrity endorsement deals in the camera industry has been actor Ashton Kutcher serving as the face of Nikon. Since 2009, Kutcher -- a guy who boasts over 14 million Twitter followers -- has been appearing in commercials and print ads hawking Nikon digital cameras. In 2012, TIME voted the partnership as a top 10 celebrity tech endorsement.
Photographers often grumble about the rise of hobbyist photographers who charge little to no money across all kinds of photographic niches, robbing hard working professionals of clients and flooding the market with subpar results.
A recent article in the New York Times tells the story of one Addison Beecher Colvin Whipple -- better known as Cal -- to whom photojournalists in particular owe a great debt of gratitude. Mr. Whipple passed away last month at the age of 94, but his quest to get one particular photo published in 1943 has left a legacy that will last for many years to come.
Photographer Remi Thornton recently terminated his contract with Getty after finding out that the agency was allowing online retailer CafePress to use his images on potential merchandise without paying an up-front licensing fee.
After years of providing portrait services to local families and high school seniors, both the Sears and PictureMe portrait studios (the latter found in Walmart) have closed their doors for good. The news has been breaking slowly via local outlets as Sears and PictureMe employees nationwide found themselves without a job Thursday morning -- some having receiving the news as late as Wednesday night.
Last week we reported that Fujifilm is planning to increase its film prices by 25% starting this month due to decreased consumer demand. Turns out that was specifically for the Japanese market, and that the hit won't be as serious in the United States.
Sony has used its "Cyber-shot" brand for digital cameras since 1996, and from 2008 to 2009 the company also slapped the brand on its Sony Ericsson camera phones. Now, with the smartphone industry investing heavily in camera technologies, Sony may soon be reintroducing the brand to its Xperia smartphones in order to compete against other photo-focused phones.
Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, my great grandfather started a printing and publishing business in Philadelphia, which, for many, many years was one of the finest and most successful letterpress shops in that city. Nearly every male descendant of Charles Jefferson Armor, including my great uncle, my grandfather, and my father, worked there for most if not all of their lives.
'Showrooming' is something that's having a big effect in the camera equipment industry and something that many brick-and-mortar retailers are trying to address. It's when consumers walk into a store not with the intention of actually purchasing a camera or lens, but instead to play around with them and evaluate them in person before making the actual purchase for a lower price online.
Former Olympus president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa may soon spend up to five years of his life in prison for his role in Olympus' massive financial scandal that rocked corporate Japan back in 2011. Prosecutors allege that Kikukawa orchestrated a coverup of $1.7 billion in company losses, one of the biggest frauds in Japanese history and the country's equivalent of America's Enron scandal.
Dear Getty Images: I quit.
One half of the face above is a photograph, and the other half is a highly detailed computer generated rendering created using a program called KeyShot by Luxion. Can you tell which is which? If you can't tell, why should we? (Okay, to be honest, we're not sure either).
Nikon has announced that it will soon be opening up a new DSLR-making factory in the Southeast Asian country of Laos (officially called Lao People's Democratic Republic).
Actress Jennifer Lawrence may be fine with excessive Photoshopping, but advertising regulatory authorities in the United States aren't of the same opinion. We reported back in 2011 that the UK had banned certain advertisements for excessive Photoshop work, and that the US was moving in the same direction.
Argentinian photographer Daniel Mordzinski, know for his work photographing literary giants, is accusing famous French newspaper Le Monde of trashing 27 years of his work without warning. Boxes worth of negatives and slides were allegedly thrown away when the photographer's office at the newspaper was cleaned out without notice earlier this month.
Canon is planning to hold a product launch press conference on March 22, 2013, and it's letting various media outlets know by sending them slick black boxes with silver pens. Wait, what? Pens? Yup, and they're not just your everyday pen: Canon's invite pens contain a secret message in a manner worthy of a secret agent.
Google announced a new "spring cleaning" initiative yesterday through which some of the company's not-as-popular apps and services will be terminated to allow attention and resources to be focused on the heavily used ones. The notice that sparked the most hoopla was the death notice for Google Reader, but another photography-related one was also included in the notice: Snapseed.
Kodak burned historic amounts of money in 2012, but is apparently still on track to leave bankruptcy sometime this year. The company released an annual report with performance figures and messages to investors. One of the glaring numbers in the statement was the fact that company lost $1.38 billion in 2012, almost double the amount it lost in 2011.
How well does your favorite photo hosting and/or sharing service handle the copyright information and EXIF data of your photographs? How do the popular services stack up against one another in this regard? …
Adobe is pushing hard towards cloud services and digital distribution. Its Creative Cloud software subscription service appears to be on a tear, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying monthly fees for always-updated software that traditionally came in boxes that carry hefty price tags.
Freshly launched over at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas, Imgembed is a new startup company that aims to promote the legitimate use of photos online. Well, it's actually the latest in a string of companies to tackle the embeddable photo concept. For photo purchasers, it's an easy way to find, pay for, and use images. For photographers, its an easy way to make your images available for purchase.
Fujifilm is best known for its camera and film products, but the company is now using its photographic expertise to invade new markets as well. The company is reportedly using its background in silver to create touchscreen displays that are bigger and more affordable than current offerings.
Facebook is preparing to launch a new smartphone through HTC, and Instagram will be one of the beneficiaries of the partnership. Unwired View has published a leaked list of specs for the "HTC Myst", as it will reportedly be called, which reveals that the photo sharing app will come preinstalled on the phone.
In July 2011, we shared a report that Google was planning to rebrand Picasa as Google Photos later that year. Well, that didn't happen, but it still looks like the Picasa brand name is on track to be sunsetted.
Back in early January, we reported that the Polaroid brand would soon be launching physical retail locations called Polaroid Fotobars. Well, the first of these spaces opened last Friday at the Delray Marketplace in Delray Beach, Florida.
Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered into a patent licensing agreement with Nikon for Nikon's Android-powered digital cameras. While the details of the agreement were not revealed, Microsoft did say that it will begin collecting royalties from Nikon for certain camera models.
On April 8, 2011, Senator Jon Kyl was quoted on the Senate floor as saying, "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." …
New trend alert: Eric Wilson of the New York Times reports that fashion shows are starting to have built-in "Instagram moments," in which models stop to pose for unofficial Instagram snaps: …
In December 2012, Instagram took steps toward profitability by adding some controversial monetization-related sections to its Terms of Service. The resulting outcry led to key sections being restored to original 2010 versions, but that didn't stop a certain user named Lucy Funes from launching a class action lawsuit against the photo sharing service.
Here's a crazy fact that's making the rounds on the Internet: if you live in Australia, it's currently cheaper for you to fly to the US and back to purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection than to purchase it in your own country.
Bruce Livingstone knows his way around the stock photography industry, and he's doing his best to shake things up. After founding iStockphoto in 2000, he turned it into a microstock juggernaut, finally selling it to Getty Images in 2006 for a whopping $50 million. Now, as both Getty Images and iStockphoto are mired in a licensing controversy, Livingstone has a new stock photo business that may rock the boat even more.
A new controversy is brewing in the world of stock photography. Just last month, it came to light that Getty had agreed to license 5000 of its stock photos to Google while paying the creators of the images a meager one-time fee of $12. Now, one of Getty's most successful stock photographers is claiming that his account is being terminated in the aftermath of the first hoopla.
One of the big stories in the business world today was that Nikon's stock took a historic fall of nearly 19%. The company is weighted so heavily in the Nikkei Stock Average that the news had a rippling effect across the market, causing most Asian shares to drop.
Paparazzi photography is a topic that has come up quite a bit in recent days, with most of the stories putting the camera wielders in a pretty bad light. Joerg Colberg over on Conscientious has a thought provoking piece on how photographers' rights seem to be trumping basic human decency -- with the blessing of our culture.
For the first two years of its young life, photo sharing darling Instagram focused primarily on delivering its service to smartphone users. Although demand would have likely been great, the company's founders decided to hold off on a browser-based component in order to become one of the pioneers of mobile photo sharing.
"Deadly sniper shot through the lens." That's the title of a photoblog entry published over on Reuters last week by staff photographer Goran Tomasevic, who's covering the deadly conflict in Syria. The photo above was accompanied by the text, "A tank fired a couple of shells onto the top of the building and rubble fell down around us."
In late 2012, Photoshelter surveyed around 5,000 photographers to find out the industries outlook on 2013. Some of the findings were pretty interesting.
It looks like the Jessops name will be sticking around, even if the company's 187 physical locations won't. After going into administration (read: bankruptcy) a few weeks ago, and announcing that all stores would be closing, we thought that was it for the once-great UK photography chain.
Twitter and Dropbox aren't really known as premier destinations for sharing photographs online, but both companies are taking steps toward changing that. Both companies unveiled new features today that are geared toward making photo sharing and viewing through their respective services an easier and more enjoyable experience.
