Ascii Street View is a web app by programmer Peter Nitsch that converts Google Street View panorama photos into ASCII art in real time. Load up the app and type in your address to see your location displayed as colorful characters. There's also a "green" option that produces images that are reminiscent of The Matrix.
Ever since Google+ was launched in June 2011, users have gushed over the beautiful mosaic view for photos uploaded to the service. Earlier this year Flickr redesigned its photo pages with a similar design, and today Facebook has followed suit. Photo pages on Facebook are being upgraded with larger photos and the same mosaic view that's becoming so popular around the web. Users can also click specific photos to "highlight" them, or give them a larger piece of real estate on the page. The …
If you're interested in the subject of lighting, check out Guess The Lighting. It's a website by professional portrait photographer Ted Sabarese through which he shares photos he finds -- including iconic images, advertisements, magazine covers -- along with his guesses and sketches regarding how the images were lit.
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.
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 …
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 images like they say they did. Was It Viewed? is a website that helps you easily make your links trackable. Simply provide the link and your email address for notification purposes, and the app will generate a special link you can send out. Whenever the link is clicked, you'll receive an email notification informing you of the fact (along with some details about …
Want to learn more about your Canon DSLR without leaving the comfort of its LCD screen? Canon has a series of "on-camera tutorials" that you can load and watch on most of its latest DSLR models. The video tutorials, which cover everything from AF modes to multiple exposure shooting, are meant to be loaded onto memory cards and viewed on-the-go using your camera itself. To find your camera's tutorials, find and click its model on this products page, and then select "On-Camera Tutorials" at the …
Rich Kids of Instagram is a website that collects Instagram photographs taken by young people who "have more money than you". It's a filtered look into the lives of people who zip around in private jets and receive Porsches as presents.
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 …
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 feature. The new maps and satellite images will offer increased coverage (e.g. bye bye photos in ambiguous blobs of land), detail, and zoom. The company isn't turning its back on Open Street Map completely, though: the old map tiles will still be used in areas that aren't covered by Nokia's commercial maps.
Watch out, Flickr -- Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing app has quietly updated its website to include commenting and liking on individual photo pages. Previously the website was "read only", and any interaction with the social network was limited to its mobile interface. The new website, which also features larger images and a slick blue theme, suggests that the company may soon be breathing down Flickr's neck by expanding beyond mobile. However, it still noticeably lacks …
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 …
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 …
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 have a wearable option. That's right, you can wear your favorite Instagram shots. The company that makes this happen is called Instapparel, and it's easy enough to use: just authorize the website to access your Instagram account and you're off to the races. You can customize the size of the shirt, choose between color and cream, pick the size and placement of your photos, and then buy the whole …
The Image Language is a simple web app that lets you "write with images". Feed it a chunk of text, and it turns each words into the top image result on Google Images. The image above shows what this paragraph looks like when fed through the system.
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 …
Here's an interesting, if not a little specific, idea that someone over at the stock photography website Dreamstime put into action earlier this year: a stock photography site dedicated entirely to Facebook timeline photos. Timeline Images is exactly what it sounds like it is, a collection of cheap stock photos optimized for your Facebook timeline.
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 improvements to try and make itself more appealing to existing users and, perhaps, some older users that have moved on to other sharing options. Their newest improvement has to do yet again with photo sizes, only this time it's not the maximum display resolution in the lightbox, but rather how Flickr are bringing that same resolution to regular photo pages.
Instacanvas is a new service that helps Instagram users make money by selling their photographs as canvas wall art. Users can display their images through the "online gallery space" on the site, and sell their images to buyers as canvas prints without having to do any extra work. Instacanvas acts as the middle man, doing all the printing and shipping, and takes a 20 percent commission from sales. The prints start at $40 for a 12x12-inch canvas and go up to $80 for a 20x20-inch one.
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 be happy to know that the two companies have decided to collaborate. Because of the high volume of Flickr photos that end up pinned (often without any credit), the companies have decided that it would be in the best interest of photographers and users alike to add a "Pin It" button on the Flickr site. In this way photographers who allow their photos to be pinned are properly attributed, while Pinterest users can now share photos with a few easy clicks
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 point "B" -- and their newest feature is especially interesting. Dubbed "photo tours," the new Google Maps feature allows users to take 3D tours of 15,000 different, well-known landmarks; all of which are highlighted when you follow a special link from Google.
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 "Clouds 365" with the goal of shooting a photo or video or clouds every single day for a year. After completing his goal 365 days later, he decided to keep going. He has now amassed over 1000 days of documenting clouds, and his popular website (which receives millions of visitors each year) was recently nominated for a Webby Award. In case you're wondering what DeLay does on cloudless days: not all the photos show actual …
Virtual Lighting Studio is an awesome new free studio lighting simulator that doesn't require any installation -- you use it directly in your browser. It offers a large number of options for customizing your setup (e.g. number of lights, light type, gel, positioning) and the result is updated in real-time on the virtual model's head.
Unhappy with Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and want to flee the photo sharing service? Instaport is a super-simple web app that lets you download all the images on your Instagram account onto your computer as a single Zip file.
Google recently brought its Street View camera inside the White House for the Google Art Project's documentation of the artwork found within. In addition to displaying the art itself, the website also features a Street View-style museum view of the White House, allowing you to walk around inside virtually. Earlier this year Google did the same thing for photography mecca B&H Photo Video in NYC.
Celebrity Camera Club is a collection of photos taken of famous people taking photos.
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 hand at Color, a simple browser-based color matching game that tests you in how quickly you can match colors. It starts with simple matching, but soon moves onto more difficult challenges involving multiple colors. Be sure to leave a comment here reporting on the score you get!
