Websites

Here's a cool idea for those of you who feel that the colors you have to choose from when buying a Nikon 1 mirrorless camera are a teensy bit lacking. A new German website called Pimp Your Cam (Note: some images on the site are NSFW) will soon start selling unique, airbrushed Nikon 1 cameras and customization options through the site and at select retailers.

The site and idea is the brain child of photographer Jens Brüggemann and Berlin airbrush artist Torsten Rachu, and each design they come up with is 100% unique. In fact, if you order a design -- which, according to their press release, you'll soon be able to do from their website -- that design will be removed from the site as soon as the order goes through. Check out some of their impressive work after the break.

Photography, at its essence, tells a story. And even though the majority of the "photography" we see today tells the story of how we went to Pinkberry yesterday or what city we happen to be in at the moment, powerful photography is still very much alive because there are plenty of powerful stories. 100Cameras, like so many charities, relies on photography to tell the powerful stories of underprivileged children; only, unlike the rest, they don't put the children in front of the camera, they put them behind it.

The concept is simple. 100cameras staff members travel to countries armed with cameras. They partner with a local organization serving children in the community. For the next few weeks, they teach the children how to take photographs. Then they set those children free to capture their world and post the photos online.

For the kids, sharing their life with the rest of the world is a reward in itself, but 100cameras goes one step further. The photographs are available for sale, and 100% of the profits go back to the children's organizations.

Instagram grew to its $1 billion acquisition price through a service that's used almost entirely through a mobile app. As it continues to balloon in size, it only makes sense that it would expand onto the web to compete against the likes of Flickr and 500px. That day may be closer than you think.

If you regularly send emails containing links to your photographs, perhaps you’ve wondered whether the recipients actually viewed your …

Want to learn more about your Canon DSLR without leaving the comfort of its LCD screen? Canon has a …

Rich Kids of Instagram is a website that collects Instagram photographs taken by …

Of the 5 people to take over the job of Yahoo! CEO over the last 5 years, Marissa Mayer is making the biggest splash. Maybe it's because she's six months pregnant and firing up the "working moms" debate, maybe it's because she's worth an approximate $300 million, or maybe it's because she was Google's 20th employee who's been doing great work over there since 1999. From a photography perspective, however, the Dear Marissa Mayer movement isn't hurting either.

Idan Shechter, the guy behind Camera Size, has launched a new website for photographers who understand sizes better through visual comparisons than through specs and figures. Sensor Size is a website that offers quick visual comparisons of sensors found in popular digital cameras. Select the cameras you want to check out from a couple of drop-down menus, and the sensors are displayed in relative sizes next to each other. You can also stack the images or display them in a 3D overlay for a better view.

Postrgram is a new service that turns your Instagram and/or Flickr photo collections into photomosaics, or giant photos composed of tiny photos. The process involves a few simple steps: tell the service your username (make sure you have at least 50 photos in your stream), specify the image you'd like as the main image, and the rest is taken care of.

There's a lot of resources out there for people who want to get to know their SLR just that much better -- ranging from books to about a gazillion (that's a technical term) YouTube tutorials -- but not a lot of people seem to know about Nikon's own Digitutor website. The Nikon Digitutor offers helpful flash tutorials about all of the different aspects of your Nikon camera.

@NeedADebitCard is a new Twitter account that finds and retweets photographs of credit/debit cards that are publicly shared through the service. Apparently many people don't know that it's not a good idea to publish photos that allow anyone to see your credit card information. The account's byline is: "Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people."

Flickr announced today that it has partnered with Nokia to overhaul its geotagging …

Watch out, Flickr — Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing …

When Picnik bit the dust several months back, it handed the web-editor baton, in large part, over the the Aviary photo editor. Since then Aviary has been running on all cylinders making consistent improvements and otherwise trying to get you to forget about that one Pic-something editor -- and it doesn't look like the company will be stopping any time soon. Having launched full-blown Android and iOS apps less than two weeks ago, Aviary has now secured $6-million in capital from several different investors, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Video game developers have learned over the years that socially-shared achievements are a great way to encourage beginners to learn new tasks. Taking a page from their book, Adobe has a neat new game called LevelUp that encourages Photoshop learning using the same tricks. Available for CS5 and above, the extension encourages exploration and assigns missions to introduce features and tools that player might never have seen before. Tasks include removing redeye, whitening teeth, and replacing the colors in a photo.

It's a shame that the digital age brought with it such widespread copyright infringement and, sometimes, downright theft, but it's a reality we have to live with. Fortunately, there's a new website up on Tumblr that is looking to help expose the people who are taking credit for other's work, and in the process help to cut down on some of the blatant infringement many photographers deal with week in and week out.

We've all been there. Anybody who has ever done any work in the creative industry has had to deal with clients who have no understanding of basic business practices, or photography, or a little thing called payment. The above video was put together by the website Clients From Hell, where creatives can go and upload their most entertaining horror stories anonymously.

Everyday People is a photo project for Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World by photographer John Clanton. The goal is to meet one new person in the community every day of the year, create a portrait of them, and display the image along with a short blurb about who they are.

Typical photo books and resource books for photographers come printed and bound, which is not a bad thing. Digital as our photography has become, displaying it, or teaching people how to replicate it, are two areas in which ink on paper still rule. Dan Nguyen's The Bastards Book of Photography, however, breaks these rules, and in the process becomes both a great resource for beginners, and a re-think on book distribution and creation.

People either love or hate Instagram, but if you happen to fall into the former category then you now …

The Image Language is a simple web app that lets you “write with images”. Feed it a chunk of …

If you keep up with interesting photography projects you might have heard about the Disposable Memory Project -- a disposable camera endeavor in which people take a photo and the leave the camera sitting somewhere for someone else to pick up, the person who takes the last photo sends it in. Well, from the minds behind that comes another disposable camera project, this one with a bit of an age-y twist. Instead of sending out cameras and the leaving them lying around (only 30 of the 410 DMP cameras have returned so far) they're sending a camera to 100 people ages 1 to 100 and they're calling it The 100 Project.

Here’s an interesting, if not a little specific, idea that someone over at the stock photography website …

Getting personalized recommendations for the music you listen to became common practice many years ago with the Music Genome Project and personalized radio stations by the likes of Pandora. Up until now, however, we haven't seen anything that takes that same sort of technology and applies it to photography. That's where Flexplore comes in.

Several weeks ago we mentioned a new Google Maps feature that allows you to take virtual tours of famous locations all over the world. And now -- coming out of a partnership between design firm Dassault Systèmes, Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts -- you can take a historically accurate, 3-dimensional, online look at Egypt's entire Giza plateau online.

Well, whether or not you agree with the Gizmodo post we featured yesterday, Flickr continues to add …

Instacanvas is a new service that helps Instagram users make money by selling …

Everybody know the famous Beatles album cover of the four superstars crossing Abbey Road, but did you know that you can visit the intersection yourself and re-create the photo? Well you can, and what's more, there's a 24-hour webcam pointed right at the intersection that will capture you and your friends doing what tourists do at that intersection every week -- annoy local drivers.

The folks at Flickr don't seem to be slowing down for anything. In the fight to stay relevant as more and more competition springs up, we've seen the Yahoo! photo sharing site go through an overhaul ranging from looks to a new uploader. And now Flickr is adding two new photo sizes and a new image control setting for its Pro members.

Users of both Flickr and Pinterest will …

The United States is a diverse country, but there are few places in the US as diverse as New York City: "the greatest city on earth." In many ways The City's diversity makes it a street photographer's gold-mine, and it's this mine that photographer Brandon Stanton has been meticulously digging through over the last couple of years.

We'll go ahead and start by saying that we're using the term "photographer" lightly; in reality we should probably say "users." But there's a certain irony to calling celebrity Instagramers "photographers" that we quite enjoy. Unlike Flickr where many of the best loved users are well known photogs showcasing their most recent work, Instagram's top users are made up entirely of celebrities.

There's been a lot of nostalgia over the space program lately; as NASA is relegated to memories and museums, the general public is rediscovering why space once had us at such rapt attention. And the most recent relic to surface from the space program is a collection of never-before-seen photos from NASA's project Gemini.

Allen Fuqua loves traveling and watching movies. To combine those two loves, he visits locations around the world were scenes in various films were shot, and reshoots them for what he calls "movie mimicking". How many of these movies do you recognize?

Since late last year the photo sharing site 500px -- which even then was "growing like a weed" -- has continued to expand, grow, add features, and otherwise challenge Flickr for online photography dominance. But Flickr hasn't taken it lying down. In the past this involved a redesign to make the site more visually appealing and the addition of the Aviary photo editor. Now the improvements are beginning to improve functionality.

Google Maps is great for a many reasons that extend far beyond helping you get from point “A” to …

Now that online sharing of images and video has become so commonplace, Sony has decided that they too want a piece of the pie. And their new storage service, dubbed PlayMemories Online, is how they intend to claim that piece. Launched only a couple of days ago, the service is now available in the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan and Canada and offers 5GB of storage for free.

Over the past 4 years the New York City Department of Records has been compiling an online database made up of rare photographs of "the greatest city on earth," and now that database is available to the public. The compilation consists of over 870,000 photos ranging in subject matter from landmarks to crime scenes put together from a Municipal Archives collection of over 2.2 million photos.

On July 24th, 2010 tens of thousands of people captured a video snipped of their life that day and uploaded it to YouTube where director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott edited the lot of them together into a 95min feature film -- which you can now watch for free. On May 15th, it's the photographer's turn.

Prison is no cake walk -- and rightfully so. Inmates of maximum security prisons have often done terrible things, things that in some states are still punishable by death. But is there a fate worse than death?

Back on July 1, 2009, artist Kelly DeLay began a personal project titled “ …

Virtual Lighting Studio is an awesome new free studio lighting simulator that doesn’t …

Unhappy with Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and want to flee the photo sharing service? …

Google recently brought its Street View camera inside the White House for the …

Celebrity Camera Club is a collection of photos taken of famous people taking …

Facial recognition service Face.com has announced a new feature in its API: age detection. After analyzing a photograph of a person's face, the software returns three values: minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age, along with the confidence level of the guesses. Applications for the new technology include enhanced parental controls and targeted advertising.

Want to see how your eyes stack up against other photographers when it comes to seeing colors? Try your …

The digital photography course offered by Stanford (CS 178, which we …

DEVELOP Tube is a video channel on YouTube and …

If you've always wanted to be an astronaut photographer shooting images of Earth from a window of the International Space Station, Stratocam is an app for you. Created by Paul Rademacher, it allows you to snap your own photographs inside Google Maps' satellite view of our planet. You can also view and rate other people's photos, and browse the highest rated images from around the world.