Instagram may be home to a wealth of aesthetic and legal offenses, but it can also be a tool for promoting our better instincts, as a recent movement involving relief for victims of typhoon Haiyan attests to.
The idea isn't entirely new. At one point, photographer Allen Murabayashi experimented with re-imagining famous photos as if they had been taken with Instagram to dispel the thought that filters and a square crop often somehow "improve" a photo.
A popular iOS and Android app that promised to generate torrents of Instagram likes and followers for its users also swiped thousands of passwords for the service, and is now being called a massive scam.
Back in July, we shared a viral "Dance-Lapse" video put together by former Microsoft exec Karen Cheng that showed the amazing progress she made learning to dance in one year.
If you're Maroon 5 or the like, you get to commission photo shoots for your album covers and boost Terry Richardson's bankroll.
No doubt feeling pressure from certain other social media sites raking in the dough, Google announced Wednesday a slew of new features for Google+ intended to enhance the way users share, organize and tweak photos.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
The dust has barely settled from the Instagram policy fumble, but it looks like parent company Facebook might be in for a similar upheaval.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
