The holiday season is upon us, so it was perfect timing for photographer Oliver Blackwell and his wife Catherine to get in touch with us to tell us about their new ides/service GoldBug: an online store that sells beautiful classic SLRs made even more beautiful by plating them in 18 carat gold. And what's more, they're willing to plate yours if you send it in!
First Lady Michelle Obama is turning to Instragram in order to organize a meet-up/photo walk and give the world a tour of the White House gardens this weekend.
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.
Narcissism and obsessive personal documentation are all fine and good, but sometimes you just want to buy and sell stuff. A new site promises to make that considerably easier to do just that through Instagram by restricting searches to postings with a #forsale hashtag and providing a simplified transaction system.
You can worry all you want about photos being stolen via Flickr, but maybe someone will like your photo enough to buy it... and put it on the cover of a platinum-selling rock album... and boost you overnight from the fuzzy border of hobbyist/professional to a high-profile career as a portrait and fashion photographer.
New York Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota may be running as a law and order guy, but apparently the "law" part doesn't cover intellectual property.
Turns out nine of the images used in a recent Lhota campaign ad -- an ad meant to illustrate what a mess the Big Apple used to be -- were taken without permission from Flickr users, several of whom are not too happy about it.
Flickr's recent attempt at a major website redesign didn't go over very well with many of its users, so now the Yahoo-owned company is taking the feedback it received to try again. A help page on the Flickr website reveals that a new photo page is currently being rolled out across the service.
"You should've seen it! I was that close to the dude's teeth!" No doubt there was some pretty excited talk going around a South African seal colony recently, after a young pup narrowly escaped a shark attack by balancing on the great white's nose.
Irish wildlife photographer David "Baz" Jenkins captured the decisive moment in an image that's quickly gone viral worldwide.
"The Internet is riddled with watchful eyes," begins the description on the homepage of Cryptstagram, and the creators of the site intend to do something about it. Put together by folks at The Barbarian Group, Cryptstagram is an online tool that lets you use uploaded images to send secret, encrypted messages.
The standard Instagram clichés are so... well... cliché that they're an accepted part of our lives now. Photos of food and selfies are so much a part of our day-to-day existence that I'm only a little ashamed to say I did the former last night (birthday cake pic...) and the latter is now in the dictionary.
But Instagram clichés go beyond the selfie and the food pic, and that's why @Satiregram exists: to point out and make fun of all of the photos we see filling up our Instagram feeds every day.
Having already racked up more than 3 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is ready to spread some photographic love soon with a full-on Instagram presence, according to Vatican sources.
Australian wedding photographer Mark Tolson often finds himself needing to share huge image galleries with friends and clients, but the current options out there didn't suit him. So, he created his own.
Here's an interesting project that captures, in one fell swoop, just how many of us are connected through the social life suck network known as Facebook. Called Faces of Facebook, it's a website/webapp that compiles all 1.2 Billion+ Facebook users' profile pics into a single static-like image, in which each picture is a different colored pixel.
Prestigious agency Magnum Photos says it is about to roll out a paid membership system in hopes of turning illegal downloaders into paying customers. The move comes a little more than a year after the agency did away with watermarks on its main site, reasoning that they did little to discourage determined downloaders.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
It's hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.
But get ready, because Google isn't done yet. Another update has been pushed Google+'s way, and this time it concerns your RAW photos. Or, more specifically, how good they look when they're automatically converted to JPEGs for viewing.
Art directors Andrew MacPhee and Bart Batchelor are intimately familiar with Getty Images' massive stock photo library. Over the course of their careers, they've had to dig through tens of thousands of photos to find ones that would do for whatever campaign they were working on.
But for every "right one" they found, there were hundreds of "wrong ones." And for every hundred "wrong ones" there were at least one or two that were downright hilariously absurd. It seemed only right that these ridiculous stock photos be shared with the world: thus was born Getty Critics.
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If you feel like you've been lacking for inspiration lately, you're about to strike the photographic gold mine. In celebration of their 125th anniversary, National Geographic is launching PROOF, a photography blog all their own that is already full of great content -- and it's only been running for 2 days.
Once in a while we stumble across a great archive of public domain or creative commons imagery that just blows us away. Sometimes it's historical photos, other times beautiful photos from space, but this time around it's neither.
Thanks to the US Geological Survey's Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr, we now have access to over 1,200 gorgeous macro photos of bees and other insects.
For some reason, corrupting photos has become something of a thing recently. From the Gliché App for iPhone we shared a few months ago to Doctor Popular's glitched ethereal double exposures, people are trying more and more to turn digital corruption into art.
Well, if you're curious and want to give it a shot yourself, developer Georg Fischer has a quick and easy solution for you.
Snapseed's team has been hard at work since their company was acquired by Google last September. They've already put new photo filters in the Google+ app and some auto-enhance tools in Google+, and now they're working on something even grander: turning Google+ into a full-fledged, browser-based photo editing tool.
It might not be quite a trend yet, but associating sound with photos isn't new either. Whether we're talking about interesting photographs created with sound (like Martin Klimas' paint photos) or about a camera that captures both sound and light, the idea of pairing sight and sound in photography has come up before.
Mhoto is a company with an idea along those same lines, only instead of capturing the sounds happening at the moment you take a photo, the company's tech creates music based on a photo.
The dust has barely settled from the Instagram policy fumble, but it looks like parent company Facebook might be in for a similar upheaval.
The company's recently proposed changes to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy -- which were supposed to take effect on the 5th -- have been delayed after users and privacy groups alike have voiced serious concerns.
We've run across some neat web apps in the past -- be it the Face to GIF app that lets you create animated GIFs with ease using your computer's webcam, or something a bit more practical like UT's enlarging and denoising app.
The 'Average' web app definitely falls on the less-practical side of things. It allows you to easily combine any number of Flickr photos from a set or tag into a composite average of them all.
Facebook today announced a new shared photo albums feature that allows multiple users to contribute photographs to a single album. This makes it easy to aggregate memories from events that were captured by different photographers. It also likely dampens the prospects of the countless collaborative album startups that are vying for a piece of the photo sharing pie.
There's an awesome little subreddit that has been getting a lot of press coverage as of late. It's called ColorizedHistory, and is a 20,000+ person strong community of "Amateur Historians" who are interested in the idea of creating high quality colorized versions of historical black-and-white photographs.
NYC Grid is a website run by Paul Sahner that explores and documents New York neighborhoods, "street by street and block by block." One of the awesome reoccurring features on the blog is the before-and-after section, which features pairs of photos showing identical locations but shot decades -- or sometimes over a century -- apart.
It seems like new and improved camera gear pops up every couple of weeks these days, leading to an endless cycle of discover, buy, sell and repeat. Well, if you're the kind of person who always wants to have the newest gear around, and you're constantly selling off your old gear on eBay to make it happen, the website has just officially announced a new feature that will make your life much easier.
Called My Gadgets, the new eBay feature can keep track of all of the gear you own and let you know about how much you can expect to make when you sell it, making it that much easier when it comes time to upgrade.
Photographs may have become depressingly common in your world, but there are still vast chunks of the globe where images are rare and powerful. A new charity is hoping to fill some of that void by offering portrait sessions and prints in impoverished areas, funded by the sale of prints by noted photographers.
When the term model is thrown around, there's a fairly typical image that probably comes to mind for most people. In the male department, six-pack abs or a clean-cut look might fit the bill. And the female department more often than not involves the descriptors tall and slender.
Modeling agency We Are Unlike You isn't interested in any of that. Like the UGLY MODELS agency we shared with you a little over a year ago, they are more interested in representing unique "characters."
Heather Champ is a well-known personality in the online photo community. For almost 5 years she served as Director of Community at Flickr, after which she co-founded JPG Magazine with her husband Derek Powazek. Now she's embarked on her next adventure: a weekly email newsletter dubbed "Favorites."
I'm serious, they don't. They don't know that they don't, but they don't. If you grab a co-workers iPhone and they have 2500 photos on the camera roll, then you know they don't. They'll just keep taking photos and assume "the cloud" or whatever is backing it up.
For a time, it is.
Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros has turned to Instagram to create its latest music video, encouraging fans to upload clips that can be melded into an evolving visual interpretation of the song "Stormur."
Earlier this summer I was asked to shoot a campaign for Airwick USA to highlight the many uses for their new color changing candles. It was going to be a summery outdoor shoot involving two distinct ‘looks’ for the images; one with the candles being used at night time, and the other where they were being used during sunset or dusk activities.
Over the past few years, University of Minnesota researcher Ali Swanson has captured millions of photos of the animals of the Serengeti thanks to hundreds of camera traps set up as part of a project called Snapshot Serengeti.
There's a slight mystery of sorts taking place in the stock photo community at this time. Stock photo service stock.xchng, reachable at sxc.hu, has been down for days now without reasonable explanation. The website is run by HAAP Media Ltd., a Getty Images subsidiary based in Hungary, and offers free-to-use images and illustrations to the masses.
Since Microsoft launched their Bing search engine a little over four years ago in mid-2009, one of its characteristics that set it apart from search giant Google was the featuring of a lovely image that changed on a daily basis.
Featured images ranged from landscapes, animals, people, and more. Today, online photography community 500px has announced that they are collaborating with Bing to power the search engine's daily photo display.
Sure, the vast majority of photos created these days never live beyond a few seconds on an LCD screen. But it's still true that one of the ultimate compliments you can pay to an image is that you'd like to hang it on your wall.
Thinking about that and the steep prices demanded for gallery work, photographer Duncan Wright decided the photography world could use a little more of a sharing ethic. So he created Big Print Marketplace, a Tumblr site that helps photographers trade prints with each other.
In what could be called an interesting move, popular online retailer Amazon has announced that they're launching the "Amazon Art" marketplace effective immediately, bringing more than 40,000 artistic works from various dealers and art galleries to you with one click.
More than 4,500 artists' works are in the collection, and featured are scores (almost 6,000 pieces at the time of this writing) of fine-art photographs from the likes of Melvin Sokolsky and even Andy Warhol (priced at a whopping $200,000).
Over the years, we've featured some truly stunning examples of time-lapse photography, but we certainly don't consider ourselves a curator of the technique. If you happen to be looking for such a service, the new website Primelapse has got you covered.
There are many cloud storage services out there, some offering a decent amount of space for very little in way of cash. Unfortunately, most aren't built with photographers and other visual junkies in mind. You can upload and store most file types, but viewing them is another matter.
StreamNation is different in that respect. Targeted at photographers and videographers in particular, the site not only lets you upload RAW files, but view and download them on the go as well.
The launch of Android 4.2 in October of last year brought with it the ability to create special 360° panoramas called "Photo Spheres." But as cool as these panoramas were, there was no real way to share them with the exception of a widget Google released a few months back.
Yesterday, all of that changed when Google announced a brand new Google Maps website called Views, built from the ground up for the Android community and their many un-shared Photo Spheres.
There's something to say about the curious nature of journalists. Some spend all of their hours researching a particular subject, others go out into the field to experience first-hand, and some others quit their job and take up coding classes.
Wait -- what?
It's true. Just ask Benji Lanyado. This once full-time Guardian writer and contributor to other publications decided to quite literally quit his day job to pursue building what he thinks is the next big thing in stock photo buying and selling.
As higher resolution photography (and photography in general) has become ubiquitous, photo sharing and storage websites have had to adjust to keep up. From increasing storage capacity and file-size limitations to launching "spectacular" redesigns that offer beautiful browsing experiences, everybody is adjusting in their own way.
The latest player in the photography sharing game to make some big changes is SmugMug, who announced and launched a major overhaul earlier today.
When Yahoo! launched the new Flickr at the end of May, not every part of the website got the "spectacular" treatment. One of the sections of the site that has been lagging behind the rest were the Groups pages, and Flickr has finally decided to bring them up to speed.
In 2011, photographer Giles Duley stepped on a land mine while working in Afghanistan. Originally a celebrity portrait photographer who had been turned off to celebrity culture by the people he was photographing, he had always hoped to return to portraiture.
That's why, during his 46-day fight for his life in intensive care, it was to portraiture that his mind turned, and a project took shape.
How do you take the next step after rising from humble newspaper shooter to chief official photographer for the White House? You start sharing pictures of your lunch, of course.
At least that's the strategy for Oval Office documentarian Pete Souza, who opened his new Instagram account Wednesday with an image of healthy snacks aboard Air Force One.
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.
LensRentals is at the height of its popularity and still growing. About a week ago, we shared some stats that more than proved this, showing how a company started by one man and $5,500 dollars in 2006 is now a 42 person operation on track to bring in $13 million this year.
But if you think that LensRentals has reached a point where it is content to rest on its laurels, you would be wrong. The company has just launched a brand new site, LensAuthority, where it will sell off the used gear it is constantly turning over through the main website.
Although drone photography might lead you onto some sticky legal ground in some states, it is nonetheless often quite beautiful. It makes sense that those who have spent good money on drones are eager to put that money to use, and now they have an Instagram-like social network on which to share their results.