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.
Do you always laugh and squirm when you look back at official school pictures from "awkward years"? You're not alone -- take a peek at the Awkward Years Project and you'll see what we mean. The project was started by a Utah-based graphic designer and photography enthusiast named Merilee, who's collecting then-and-now portraits to show people who have blossomed since their awkward teen days.
Photography has made inroads into all sorts of industries. For instance, the Snap Fashion app we shared a couple of weeks ago lets you take photos of clothes and then shows you where to buy them. But the most recent interesting application we've run across comes to us via a company named Shloosl, who will copy your house key for you using nothing more than a couple of smartphone photos.
Attention photojournalists: As if times weren't tough enough already, a new startup wants to replace your work with Twitter-based crowdsourcing.
It wasn't long ago that Flickr rolled out its massive redesign -- met by both boos and cheers -- that entirely changed the way you experience the photos sharing site. Now it's 500px turn. The premium photo sharing platform just announced its own redesign, focused around larger photos and a Focus Viewer feature that offers a "stunning full screen experience."
After a couple of months in beta, the photography review site DPReview is finally announcing the official launch of an online store that bears the website's stamp of approval. Named GearShop, it's a specialty camera store that will stock its shelves with only DPReview recommended and approved products.
News photographers have a potentially valuable new tool with Covertimes, a new website that congregates images of front pages from newspapers around the world.
There's a brand new service in town that's looking to help out those photographers who choose to share their images for free with the online community. Powered by Creative Commons, the new website Dotspin uses a hashtag and voting system to determine a photo's quality and give the photographer a chance to earn credits towards rewards such as restaurant gift cards.
Camera equipment has long been attractive to the eyes of thieves. After all, it's generally portable, pricey, and a piece of cake to sell through channels such as Craigslist. In Northern California, robbers have begun targeting photojournalists at gunpoint in order to snatch their gear.
Developer Trevor Sehrer, a Google engineer by day, has been working on a website that aims to help combat the theft of photography gear. It's called Lenstag, and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.
Yahoo can't seem to catch a break where Flickr users are concerned. Just as everyone is coming to terms with the redesign that stirred a bit of an uproar on the Flickr forums, the company has introduced a new toolbar at the top of every page that has users upset yet again.
We received a new press release out of the Nikon camp this morning, and although it didn't announce any fresh cameras or lenses, it was eager to share a different creation with us: My Nikon World. My Nikon World is a brand new Facebook app that seeks to "Challenge photographers to shoot, share and learn," mostly through friendly competition.
It's the Internet age, and the lot of us have some form of website or blog. With 130 million monthly active users sharing an average of 45 million photos per day, a good chunk of us are also Instagram users. What do you get when you put the two together? Embeddable Instagram pictures and videos, of course!
Where popular culture is concerned, YOLO might be the new Carpe Diem. The acronym, which stands for "you only live once," has become increasingly popular over the past several years after its first known mention in the NBC reality show The Average Joe back in 2004. Now, almost 10 years later, it's broken into the photography industry with the new site PhotoYOLO.
Yesterday we shared some news coming out of photographer Vincent LaForet's camp that the website service liveBooks -- which is used by many photographers -- was quite possibly on its way out. This after a month of silence and "knowledgeable sources" indicating that the US branch of the business was all but shut down.
A few hours after that news broke, however, we found out what was really happening: liveBooks has been acquired by the online event marketplace WeddingWire.
The leading photography portfolio service PhotoShelter (also known for their sales and marketing tools for photogs) today announced the launch of their overhauled and much improved portfolio sites and tool suite, dubbed 'Beam.'
Presently in beta, Beam is an API-based platform that promises to allow photographers to "showcase their images at their best on nearly any device." Not only that, Beam is designed to be flexible, allowing for rapid expansion of template designs, tools, and the inclusion of third-party integrations.
You've heard us mention the US Department of the Interior once before, in reference to Travis Roe's awesome Grand Canyon lightning strike photo that went viral a couple of months ago. One of the department's goals is to get people interested in visiting different areas of the United States, and they do this by sharing some of the most beautiful photos they come across.
Roe's photo went viral after the Interior Department shared it on their Facebook page, but if you really want a great overview of beautiful US imagery, the department's Instagram account is the way to go.
There are many ways to create GIFs of all sorts of things. Some tutorials on making more complex GIFs (like this one) we've even shared with you. But what if you just want to create a quick selfie GIF? Something you could record on your computer's webcam? Well, the new webapp "Face to GIF" has you covered.
There are several very popular hashtags that make their way around Instagram daily, and one of them is #nofilter. It's the hashtag that proclaims to the world that they're seeing what you saw---no ifs, ands or earlybirds.
But, of course, not everybody that uses the #nofilter hashtag is being honest, and so a Tumblr blog has been created that seeks to expose all of these 'filter fakers.'
Google's Plus social networking site -- now in its second year -- has received a series of updates that are expected to make photo sharing on the service a bit more convenient, and a bit less painful. That's according to Google's Jon Emerson, who has posted some updates to Plus on his very own Google Plus page as of Friday.
New York City offers a plethora of photographic opportunity. Massive architecture alongside a vibrant and diverse population makes for plenty of work for photographers of all types. But have you ever thought about the myriad signage and typography that New York has to offer?
Matthew Anderson and Daniel Hunninghake did, and so they created NYCType back in 2007 to highlight it. The site brings together photos of New York City's signage under once virtual roof.
Most stock photography websites and agencies work the same way: photographers upload their work, set prices, and let clients browse for what it is they're looking for. If the client wants a photo of a family on the beach, they'd better hope someone came through. And on the other end, the photographer has to hope that they're putting work out there that people will actually want to use.
Advertising creatives Cassandra Nguyen and Grazina Snipas' new website PicoImages does away with that model, replacing it with more of a "stock photography to order" sort of system.
Once you've lived somewhere long enough, it's easy to fall into a photographic rut. We're not talking about a running low on creativity (read this if you're dealing with creative burnout), we're talking about running low on places to shoot.
Photographer Darren Johnson ran into this problem, and was frustrated at the amount of work he had to put in to track down new photography locations online. That's why he created ShotHotspot: a new website that intelligently uses sites like Flickr and Panoramio to find and rank photo hotspots in your area.
I feel stupid. I admit I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. I have to use my index finger when figuring out clockwise vs. counter-clockwise; it wasn't until recently I found out that capers are the buds of a flower and not teeny tiny olives; and I made it all the way to my sophomore year in high school before discovering the name of the book is "Catcher in the Rye" and not "Catch HER in the Rye."
You may never take local birds and weeds for granted again after spending some time with Meet Your Neighbors, a photo project aimed at documenting the huge variety of the biosphere one species at a time.
Photo printing services are popping up all the time these days. This makes sense: as the number of photos we take increase exponentially, more and more companies are attempting to save them from falling unnoticed into digital oblivion.
One such company is Piccolo, a small two-employee start-up with an interesting premise: the photos you make an effort to share are the ones worth printing. And it's around this premise that Piccolo has built its fully-automatic service.
For a while now, Canon has offered online resources to available teach those who may be unfamiliar with, well, taking photos. In what could be called a welcome addition to already-available resources, the company has launched what they call 'Canon EOS 101: Photography and Videography Basics'.
Photographers need clients, and clients need photographers (even if they don't always think they do). The issue is that most clients have no idea how to find good quality local photographers; they have no place where they can find reviews, look through work and pricing, and compare photogs side-by-side. In lieu of other options, many amateurs in particular get work through a quality website, cold calls and word of mouth.
Photographer, developer and Google+ founding member Chris Chabot is trying to streamline this process with his new website Snapsation: an online marketplace where clients and the photographers they need can do business.
Unsplash is a new Tumblr creation by the folks over at ooompf that allows photographers to share a set of images for free (in exchange for exposure, we assume) while simultaneously allowing those in need of high-quality imagery a place to find it.
If you ever find yourself on the cover of the local paper, you may want to stay away from the 'arms crossed' power pose. It may not seem that common, but a new Tumblr blog begs to differ, and it's doing a great job of it.
The Tokyo Skytree is a massive broadcasting tower in Sumida, Tokyo, Japan that currently holds the title of world's tallest tower and second tallest structure. Measuring in at a completed height of 2,080 feet, the broadcasting tower -- which also doubles as a restaurant and observation tower -- gives visitors a stunning 360-degree view of Tokyo.
But it wasn't enough for the folks behind the project to let people come up, gawk and take their own pictures. They decided that a view like this had to be documented professionally, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week; which is why there are 12 Nikon D3S's equipped with Nikkor AF 35mm f/2D lenses arranged around the tower at all times, keeping tabs on the city below.
Traditionally, a photographer's post-processing workflow does not include a web browser, but rather, tools like Lightroom and Aperture. Pics.io is hoping to change that, and is working to bring serious RAW picture editing and collaborating to the web browser.
The start-up, founded by three Ukranian entrepreneurs, uses WebGL technology (which, in short, allows web browsers to harness the power of a computer's graphics card) to make the online tools they offer a reality. The mission? Get more people to dabble into RAW photography by offering easy access to editing tools.
The modern web was made for photographers; it's such a visual medium where beautiful images have an incredible impact. Text, or copy, is still important for SEO considerations and for those visitors that want to spend more time on your content. Video is fantastic, and many photographers have the capability to produce great videos with their current equipment.
But unlike still images, by its nature video demands time -- you need 30 seconds to watch a 30 second video versus a quick glance at a photo that usually communicates the entire message.
With the availability of a whopping 1TB of storage space now available to users on Flickr, it wasn't long before someone out there found other ways to put 1TB of storage space to good use. That is to say, the uploading of files other than images.
That's just what Redditor rlaw68 has done, allowing the user to upload packaged files by essentially tricking the Flickr servers into thinking you're merely uploading an image. The process involves putting two files in one folder, a GIF image (though some users have been able to do this with other image file extensions) and an archive file (such as a .zip or .rar), followed by combining them to create what only appears to be an image file.
When Flickr launched its site-wide redesign this past week, one of the things that saw a quiet revamp was the default user avatar. The company hired Greek designer Charis Tsevis to upgrade the original default icon -- an expressionless gray and black square face -- to something more colorful.
I recently began contributing to Stocksy United (AKA Stocksy), the new(ish) stock photography agency that is headed up by Bruce Livingstone of iStockPhoto notoriety fame.
Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion today, but that's not the only major move the company announced. Today Flickr users were also treated to a "spectacular" redesign. The service has been upgraded in major ways, and has been given a brand new look and feel.
Here's a tool you may not have heard about but may useful at some time in the future. It's called Clipping Magic, and it's designed to remove backgrounds from user-uploaded pictures.
The concept is rather simple, you upload an image, mark the areas in the background you don't want in red, and mark the areas in the foreground you do want in green. The website's algorithm takes over and (hopefully) produces a background-free picture. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But how does it fare when used for an image with a background you actually want to remove?
Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the majority shareholder and chairman of Leica, has apparently purchased a 25.1% stake in photo sharing and contest website I-SHOT-IT, reports Leica Rumors.
500px is sponsoring us for the next week and a half to promote its new Portfolios, which we covered back in early April. As part of the partnership, we're running a photo contest for the next 10 days in which 10 people will have their accounts upgraded to the new portfolio system.
The most common files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive (and, we'd guess, just about any cloud storage service) are photos. As such, the company has decided to give its cloud storage service a facelift by providing a couple of highly-requested photo-centric features.
Buying and selling used photography gear usually involves either driving to your local camera shop or hunting down the right product on website such as eBay or (if you're really brave) Craigslist. But Australian photographers just got a different, photography centered option thrown their way.
Dubbed Digital Camera Exchange, the new website gives photo enthusiasts a place to sell their gear to others in much the same way they would on big auction sites such as eBay.
Here's an interesting Tumblr we stumbled across that, for all intents and purpose, is trying to do the impossible. The 9 Film Frames Tumblr tries to sum up movies, capture their essence, by pulling out and arranging just nine frames.
Pi.pe is a file synching service that came about as a way to move photos and other media between the may cloud storage and sharing services out there. In the year or so since it launched, over 50 million files have passed through Pi.pe's servers as users took advantage of the service to backup, transfer and share thousands of photos. And now, we can add "print" to that list.
Back in early 2010, we received an e-mail asking us to join an up-and-coming photography blog that was trying to bring all of the best contributors, content creators and experts from the world of photography under one roof. It was described as a "photography website that should have been around for the last five years or more" and it was called Pixiq.
At the time we decided to stay independent, but many big-time photographers and photo bloggers took the offer and jumped on the train -- a decision many are undoubtedly regretting: Pixiq was suddenly taken offline today by its owner, Sterling Publishing, just days after the company sent its contributors a warning.
When people living in the same city look up into the sky, they likely see the same clouds and colors, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Exactly how different are these perspectives? In a recent project called Same Sky NY, photographers living in New York City came together to find out.
Taking all of your photography gear on the road with you can be a burden, not to mention risky. But even if you don't want to break your back carrying it all or risk having it stolen, your options are limited. Not all cities have shops that rent out gear, and smaller shops may not have the gear you want and/or need.
Thankfully, there's a new peer-to-peer solution in town that should greatly increase your odds of finding the gear you need, no matter where you're headed: it's called CameraLends.
About a month ago, we shared the news that the George Eastman House had become the first photo museum to join the Google Art Project -- essentially making their archive of over 400,000 photos and negatives available for your browsing pleasure online.
Along those same lines, another collection of over 20,000 "rare and significant materials" is being brought to the World Wide Web. Launched earlier today, the Balboa Park Commons is an online archive that brings together over 20,000 digitized materials from seven different San Diego museums.
Actor Jeff Bridges has been nominated for six Academy Awards for his work on the silver screen. In 2010, he walked away from the award ceremony clutching a statuette after winning the Best Actor prize for his role in Crazy Heart.
When he's not playing various characters in front of a camera, Bridges is well known for his interest in being behind the camera. He often serves as an unofficial behind-the-scenes photographer on Hollywood movie sets, documenting what things look like from an actor's perspective.