Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, has authored a lengthy piece for the Washington Post on what Kodak -- and whoever buys its film lines -- can learn from the fall of Polaroid. The article offers some interesting facts about, and insights into, the film photography industry: …
Tough news coming out of France this week: Sipa Press, the country's leading photo agency, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Michel Puech of the Le Journal de la Photographie reports that the filing came on November 22nd, and can lead to two possible outcomes: reorganization or liquidation.
There was some surprising news in the smartphoneography world yesterday: Amateur Photographer reported that Nokia's imaging chief Damian Dinning -- "considered the driving force behind the firm’s smartphone camera technology" -- would be leaving the company for personal reasons at the end of this month.
500px is on a tear. The service has been growing like a weed as of late, and appears to have some ambitious plans in the works. The company announced today that it has acqui-hired (i.e. buying out a small company mainly for the team's talent) the two-man development team Pulpfingers, creators of the popular iOS 500px browsing app ISO500.
Hiroshi Hiyama over at Phys.Org reports that smartphones are crushing the point-and-shoot industry, putting compact cameras in the same group as video game consoles and portable music players -- devices that are having a hard time competing against all-in-one phones. The numbers are crazy: …
Bryce Bayer, the Eastman Kodak research scientist who invented the Bayer Filter back in 1975, passed away on November 13th at the age of 83. Bayer filter mosaics are used by nearly every digital camera, allowing a single sensor to capture a full-color photograph with the help of some "mathemagic".
All good things come to an end. Bad ones do too. After denying rumors last month that it would soon be shutting down, the over-funded photo-sharing app Color has now announced that it will indeed be shuttering its service.
It seems like we're saying this every week, but the cloud photo storage industry is becoming more and more packed. Heck, even AT&T launched its own service called Locker earlier this month. The next entrant to the arena looks like it will be a photography company we didn't expect: wireless SD card maker Eye-Fi.
Respected stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha doesn't think too highly of the way Kodak CEO Antonio M. Perez is leading the beleaguered photo company: …
Creative Commons licensing is becoming a common option on major photo and video sharing services -- Flickr and YouTube, for example -- but it's not something that 500px offered -- until now. The fast-growing Flickr rival is now onboard with flexible copyright agreements, rolling out Creative Commons licensing options for all of its users yesterday.
Imagine a photography exhibition in which all the photographs on the walls are being captured by their respective photographers in real-time around the world. That's the kind of show Sony put on this past Thursday in London: the world's first real-time digital photography exhibition.
Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world, has agreed to acquire Demotix, a crowd-sourced citizen journalism photo agency that was founded in 2008. Corbis had already picked up a piece of the young agency through an investment last year, but now it has decided to purchase the whole company outright. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
In 1997, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design held an art sale to give student and alumni artists an opportunity to offer their creations to art collectors. They offered around 1,000 pieces by 86 different artists, including prints by photographers. Since then, the MCAD Art Sale has exploded in popularity.
Kodak has finally been thrown a lifeline. Yesterday, the beleaguered photography company announced that it had convinced banks to loan it $793 million in order to climb out of bankruptcy by the first half of 2013. The loan agreement comes with one big catch: Kodak must be able to sell its extensive collection of patents for at least half a billion dollars.
MyShoebox is a new photo storage and sharing service that has been making a splash after launching a little over a week ago. Its offering is easy to describe: free and unlimited cloud storage for photos that can then be viewed from anywhere. Think of it as a Dropbox dedicated to preserving and enjoying photos.
Subscription-based photo-sharing service SmugMug caused a lot of grumbling back in August by effectively raising raising prices by 67% for Pro members who wanted to retain all of their existing features. Members who didn't want to pay double their membership costs could stay at the same rate but lose their ability to price and sell prints. The story and reaction was strikingly similar to Netflix's poorly-received pricing change enacted earlier this year.
Professional photographers are often hired to capture moments in life that are memorable and emotional -- two words that aptly describe military homecomings. The number of photographers hired to shoot homecomings is reportedly growing, as more and more families are hiring professionals to document the reunions that occur when soldiers return from war.
Camera companies are doing their part to help victims of Hurricane Sandy get back on their feet. Here's something that might be great news to some photographers on the East Coast: Sigma is extending its warranty to cover damage caused by the hurricane.
Intellectual Ventures has announced a settlement with Olympus over a patent infringement battle launched against the camera maker back in September 2011. The patent-holding company, one of the top 5 owners of patents in the United States, is infamous for its "patent trolling", or making money simply by licensing patents from companies and then suing other companies for infringement.
Instagram is playing a bigger and bigger part in helping the public see and understand important events. At the GigaOM RoadMap conference held this past Monday, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared his vision of how Instagram needs to become a "big data company". TechCrunch writes, …
Yahoo made some management moves a couple of weeks ago, with VP Adam Cahan becoming head of the company's mobile endeavors and its photo-sharing service, Flickr. Cahan was previously the founder and CEO of IntoNow, a 12-week-old company that Yahoo acquired last year for $20 to $30 million.
The Olympus scandal that rocked the business world last year was one of the biggest cases of financial fraud ever seen in corporate Japan. The Economist has published an interesting piece on why Japanese capitalism might not learn from the mistake: …
Every social network has its share of spammers, but one type of fake account seems to be working particularly well on Instagram: airline accounts offering free flights. Roger Cheng of CNET writes, …
It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.
There's some pretty big news over in the cinema camera world today. RED founder Jim Jannard announced that massive price cuts have been made to the prices of his company's high-end cinema cameras (which are also used for still photography).
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.
Ever wonder what the average age of professional photographers is?
Yesterday we shared a piece by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on why Instagram isn't fit for photojournalism. Now, from the other side of the aisle, Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes that Time had great success after hiring five Instagrammers to document Hurricane Sandy: …
It seems like Kodak is having a hard time figuring out how to getting its finances back in the black. Kodak has announced its 3rd quarter financial results, and the numbers aren't pretty -- they're downright ugly, actually. Despite raking in $1 billion over the three-month period ending in September (down 19% from the same period last year), the company still posted a net loss of $312 million (up from a loss of $222M during the same period last year).
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%.
The role Twitter played during Arab Spring in early 2011 gave the microblogging service a huge boost in legitimacy and pushed it into the mainstream. Instagram may be having a similar "coming of age" experience through its role in the ongoing coverage of Hurricane Sandy.
Another sign of the times (and bad news for film-photography enthusiasts): one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the world no longer accepts film photographs. Earlier this week Nikon published a "call for entries" for its 34th Nikon Photo Contest.
The photograph seen here was shot using a tablet computer -- one that doesn't officially exist yet. Google engineering SVP Vic Gundotra posted the image to Google+ at 4:57 this morning with the caption, "Early morning walk on the beach." A quick peek at the EXIF data reveals that it was captured with the "Google Nexus 10," a tablet that'll reportedly be unveiled at a press event next Monday.
Canon released its quarterly financial results yesterday, and things aren't looking so rosy based on Q3 2012. Revenue has fallen 13% to $10.3 billion from the same period last year, and profit dropped 42% to $908 million.
Businessweek writes that Canon has lowered its sales estimates across all its camera lines, saying that smartphones are drinking its milkshake -- and it's not just Canon: …
Electronics reverse-engineering company Chipworks has published an article that discusses and reviews Nikon's use of Sony CMOS sensors in certain DSLRs: …
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.
In an interview we published this past weekend, popular photo blogger Thomas Hawk predicted that one of the major trends over the next five years will be "monetization for non-professional photographers." Paul Melcher of Thoughts of a Bohemian made the exact same prediction today: …
4K-resolution video capabilities are finding their way into more and more cameras these days, even though monitors that can display the resolution currently cost as much as one or two family sedans. Heck, even the tiny new GoPro Hero3 can shoot 4K, albeit at a semi-useless 15fps.
"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images …
When Sony unveiled its "One Sony" game plan back in March after posting billions in losses, the company highlighted digital photography as one of its three main pillars going forward. It was a bit of a surprise, then, when Sony announced today that it will soon be closing a large lens manufacturing factory in Japan as part of the restructuring efforts.
Well, that's quite a turn of events. Yesterday we reported that photo sharing app Color had denied rumors that the service would soon be shutting down. Based on the app's lack of users, we said that Color would need to find some traction -- and find it soon -- for the $41 million invested in it to pay off. Turns out they won't be needing a miracle after all, because they've reportedly already found one: the app will reportedly be acquired by Apple.
People say money can't buy happiness. Turns out there's another thing it can't buy: photo sharers. Despite raising a staggering $41 million in funding before even launching, the photo sharing app Color has been struggling to find users. Even after major pivots that changed the service's DNA, the app only has less than half a million active users.
Joby sent out a press release today warning consumers that there are counterfeit versions of its popular GorillaPod flexible tripod floating around in the wild. While that isn't too newsworthy in itself -- what gear isn't being counterfeited these days? -- it's the juicy details surrounding the release that are quite interesting. Apparently the company directly confronted companies involved in making imitations during Photokina 2012 in Cologne, Germany last month.
It was almost exactly one year ago that Olympus fired then-CEO Michael Woodford and started a chain of events that culminated in one of the largest financial scandals in Japanese history. Woodford received an incredible amount of international attention for his role in the saga, since he was one of the highest ranking executives ever to turn into a whistleblower.
Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.
Best Buy has been struggling in recent years as consumers have increasingly looked to the Internet for their gadget shopping needs. It's quickly gaining a reputation of being a place where people "try before they go home and buy online" (known as "showrooming") If you've been using the store as your personal camera showroom and are in the market for a new camera, you might want to bring your wallet the next time you visit: Best Buy is planning to extend its price match policies to online …
Hasselblad surprised the photo world last month by announcing the Lunar: a hyper-luxury mirrorless camera with an opulent exterior and a Sony NEX-7 at its core. To say it wasn't well received would be an understatement; photographers immediately mocked the camera's over-the-top design -- it's decorated with gold and precious metals -- and the fact that it will carry a price tag $5,000 more than the camera it's based on.
ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".
Here's an interesting piece of photo trivia for today: did you know that Apple's similarities with Kodak don't end with Steve Jobs modeling his career and his company after Polaroid? The ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung is strikingly similar to the battle Polaroid had with Kodak many decades ago.
