Websites

For those of you who partake in any sort of nighttime photography, it’s no secret that light pollution can be the bane of your existence. Thankfully, there’s a neat, simple online resource that can help you better prepare to avoid this enemy of great Milky Way photography.

It’s called Dark Sky Finder, and it’s an easy-to-use website that gives you an up-to-date, radar-style view of what light pollution across the United States looks like.

When it comes to understanding how depth of field, focal length and other variables are affected by different film/sensor formats, it can get confusing. Fortunately, Reddit user redblue has created an incredibly useful interactive resource that will help you better visualize the factors at play by letting you change variables while swapping sensors sizes and seeing the effect in real time.

Following in the footsteps of the New York Times' Lens Blog, The Washington Post has launched something called In Sight: a photoblog focused on presenting the world through visual narratives.

SMWH.RE is an Instagram-based web app designed for those experiencing a slight bout of wanderlust. The well-designed app is simple: it brings the gorgeous landscape photography you see online into the realm of possible vacation destinations by displaying photos alongside their accompanying geographical location and a short description.

As much as Photokina is about cameras, lenses and accessories, camera companies are certainly not limited to these things where the trade show is concerned. Leica proved that today with their new online platform, Leica Fotopark.

There's a new website that aims to rid the world of ‘un-liked’ Instagram photos. It’s called No Likes Yet and although its name may sound slightly condescending, the goal of the website is anything but.

As cloud-based storage options expand in size and numbers, the battle for browser-based photo editors is equally under way. One of the newest and most impressive to the game is Polarr. It's currently available to use as an open beta and features a number of advance tools and resources for making sure you can efficiently edit your images from within the browser.

Online client galleries have been there for some time now, but many photographers either neglect this powerful tool relying on ol’ school DVDs and USB drives for image delivery, or simply are not aware of the options that would suit their particular business.

As a beginner, mostly part-time, photographer I was looking for an affordable photo gallery service to give a try. The main problems I wanted such a tool to solve were: a) deliver images quickly after the shoot; b) impress my clients with a personalized website and thus, make them want to refer me; c) make it easy to share the photos.

On Instagram, if it looks like you, and talks like you, and posts like you, it may not actually be you. A new wave of spam bots are apparently avoiding detection by Instagram's filters by copying real people... picture for picture, word for word.

About a year ago, we linked out to what we then believed to be the first 360-degree interactive panorama ever made of Pyongyang, North Korea. That interactive image was shot by photographer Aram Pan, but it was only the beginning.

Since then he's expanded in a big way, shooting over 40 interactive 360-degree panoramas all over the mysterious country for the DPRK 360 website and Facebook page.

Instagram is a wonderful social network with simplicity built right into its infrastructure. But while simplicity may work for the masses, there are power users out there who would like to make the most of the photo-sharing network using third party options -- options that just got a bit more tempting thanks to the introduction of Picdeck.

Picdeck, a new web app for Instagram users, hopes to bring an interface similar to popular Twitter app TweetDeck to Instagram, letting users make the most of their square-cropped image streams.

Typically, colorizers focus on famous images. Photos like the V-J Day kiss photo from Times Square, or historic portraits. Honk Kong resident and Photoshopper Victor Liu's focus is more specific. His new project is all about Hong Kong, and he's hoping that his colorized images will encourage others to rediscover the city's past.

Dave MacLean from the Center of Geographic Sciences has put together a pretty awesome resource for space photography lovers. He's created an interactive map that lets you browse through over 650 photographs taken by ISS astronauts on Expeditions 40 and 41.

500px has been working on something special for its users. After months of hammering away at keyboards and staring at screens, the 500px team has officially launched its new Groups and Discussions section, both of which are currently in beta.

It turns out the average Instagram image looks a bit like a dirty piece of cloth, and we arrived at this Earth-shaking conclusion courtesy of a surprisingly addictive web app called Metagramme.

Whether or not you’re conscious of it when watching a movie, the sounds and soundtrack play as significant of a role as the actual imagery. Sadly, none of the standard photo sharing options allow us still photographers the luxury of framing our visual message with melody... until now.

A fairly new and interesting platform called Ubersnap is looking to change this music-less status quo.

Dropbox is a Go-To for many photographers. Whether they're storing their photography, sharing albums with clients or, ahem, sending files to the press, more often than not it's Dropbox they use. And starting today, anybody not using Dropbox's Pro offering has a whole lot more reason to do so thanks to a steep drop in price, a big jump in storage space, and a bunch of new features and functionality.

Earlier today, B&H officially launched a new online resource called the Canon Lens Experience. It’s a dedicated microsite that takes a comprehensive look at the various lenses Canon offers, presenting unique and interactive features that demonstrate the various capabilities.

Even more interesting is the series of interviews which features 15 well-respected photographers from different fields, each of whom talk about their experience as a photographer and how their respective Canon gear have helped them make the iconic shots they’ve captured.

Photoshop is a wonderful resource, full of creative potential; to help streamline that creative potential, Adobe has included an insane amount of shortcuts that allow you to easily apply effects, swap tools and perform actions. There's just one issue... there's too many of them to keep track of.

With so many shortcuts for so many different things, it’s sometimes hard to remember the shortcut you need the moment you need it -- unless, of course, you're using Cheetyr.

It was just over a year ago that we told you about Pics.io, a platform that promised to bring the RAW editing and photo organization capabilities of programs like Lightroom to your browser.

Well, after a year spent mostly under wraps and unusable, Pics.io is officially in public beta and ready for the world take it for a spin.

GIF YouTube is the YouTube-to-GIF converter we've all been waiting for... well, GIF lovers at any rate. It uses the ‘do one thing well’ mentality to very easily and effectively turn any YouTube video into an animated GIF of your choosing.

Update: Major changes have been made after learning a majority of the online coverage of this updated was incorrect.

Tumblr users post approximately 130 million photos every day. And starting this week, they will begin to sort through every single one of them for various brands and items, with the help of Ditto Labs.

Photo sharing and portfolio building sites, if you'll allow us a cliché, are a dime a dozen. Once you strip away the marketing speak they act in much the same way, with the differences are few and great work is often buried under an avalanche of work that's just 'okay.'

It takes a lot, in other words, to really break the mold -- which is what makes the August platform/app such a breath of fresh photo sharing air. Part respectable art gallery, part photo sharing and discovery platform, it offers a unique and incredibly fulfilling experience for both creators and consumers.

TL;DR: If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again. Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.

I started using Dropbox back in 2009 and have always loved the service. Over time, I kept moving more and more files to my Dropbox folder and eventually had to upgrade to the Pro plan to keep up with the space requirements. In particular, I moved there all of my photos in order to be able to view/share them online and also to have them backed up.

In April of this year, a hard drive in my laptop was running low on space so I decided to use the Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature to unsync some large directories from the laptop. Because there was never any problem with the service and also because it’s already the year 2014, I thought it might be about time that one can trust a cloud-based storage service and use them as a sole backup of their files. Boy, I was wrong.

Who Pays Photographers? is a Tumblr dedicated to demystifying at least some of the compensation standards held by many editorial clients throughout the world.

Just got your hands on a drone and can't wait to use it to shoot aerial photographs? First, make sure you only use it where it can legally fly. If you're not sure where to look for this info, there's a new website designed just for you.

It's called Don't Fly Drones Here (DFDH), and is an interactive map that shows off limit areas of the US by shading them in with red.

Want to make sure you can upload your travel photos quickly from your hotel room? Hotel WiFi Speed Test is a service that can help you plan ahead when you're roaming the world with your camera.

One of (if not the) main challenges Lytro faces as it attempts to bring light field photography into the mainstream is the fact that there aren't a lot of places you can actually experience the 'living' images where they're, to use Lytro's vernacular, alive.

Most places just don't support viewing of the interactive images, and while Lytro has taken some steps to remedy this in the past, the company just took what amounts to a giant leap.

Just a few years ago, Flash websites were all the rage. Now, Flash is a dying technology due to its inefficiency across the board. But, despite being less relevant than ever and incompatible amongst a plethora of devices and platforms, some photographers still insist on having a flash website to show off their work.

Thus, in an effort to ensure that the use of outdated technologies is diminished, Google is now passive-aggressively calling out Flash websites before visitors even click on the link.