Websites

Michael Zhang

New York Times Launches Tumblr for Historic Photo Archive

The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called "The Lively Morgue" to breathe new life into items in the newspaper's photo archive (nicknamed "The Morgue"). Each week they'll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection.

Michael Zhang

Stereogranimator: Create Your Own 3D Photos Using Vintage Stereographs

The New York Public Library has a massive collection of over 40,000 vintage stereographs (two photos taken from slightly different points of view). To properly share them with the world in 3D, the library has launched a new tool called the Stereogranimator. It lets you convert an old stereograph into either an animated 3D GIF (which uses "wiggle stereoscopy") or an anaglyph (the kind that requires special glasses).

Michael Zhang

Crowdsourced Panoramas Tracking How Locations Change Over Time

Picture Post is an interesting (and NASA-funded) citizen science project that turns photographers into citizen scientists, crowdsourcing the task of environmental monitoring. Anyone around the world can install a Picture Post:

A Picture Post is a 4”x4” post made of wood or recycled plastic with enough of the post buried in the ground so it extends below the frost line and stays secure throughout the year. Atop the post is a small octagonal-shaped platform or cap on which you can rest your camera to take a series of nine photographs.

People who walk by can then use the guide on the post to capture 9 photos in all directions, and upload them to the Picture Post website. The resulting panoramas can then be browsed by date, giving a cool look at how a particular location changes over time.

Michael Zhang

Camera Size: See How Digital Cameras Look Next to One Another

Mirrorless cameras are designed to be compact, but how big are they compared to DSLRs? How big are popular DSLRs compared to one another? Camera Size is a website that helps answer these types of questions. It's a simple web app that shows you exactly how big digital cameras are compared to one another and compared to reference objects (e.g. a battery).

Michael Zhang

Photos from Disposable Cameras Left with Notes in Various NYC Locations

A few weeks ago, Brooklyn resident Katie O'Beirne did a weekend project in which she left a disposable camera on a Prospect Park bench with a note asking passer-bys to snap a photograph. After getting the film developed and finding some cool photos, O'Beirne decided to continue with the project, leaving disposable cameras in a number of other spots around NYC. The resulting photographs can be seen on a Tumblr page she set up called "new york shots".

Michael Zhang

Google+ Now Has Retro Filters

The success of Instagram has shown that photo filters are very much in demand with the general population. Facebook is rumored to be working on its own retro filters, but Google has beaten it to the punch: today the company introduced a wide range of creative filters to Google+'s Creative Kit. The filters (called "Effects") include looks that mimic daguerreotypes, Reala 400 film, Polaroid pictures, Lomo, Holga, and even cross processed film.

Michael Zhang

How to Respond to Requests for Free Photography

Photographer Tony Wu constantly receives requests that ask whether he would be willing to work for free in exchange for "credit" and "exposure". Instead of a lengthy response explaining why he doesn't want to work for free, Wu often leaves the emails unanswered, or worse, ends up sending snippy responses that he later regrets. He recently came up with the idea of writing a generic and informational response that all professional photographers can respond with.

Michael Zhang

Picuous Adds One-Click Sharing to Photos On Your Website

By Martin Pannier on picuous

Unlike most videos you find on the web, images aren't very easy for the average person to share. Rather than hotlink photos from their original source, as is done for videos, most "sharing" involves downloading the photos, uploading them somewhere else, and then publishing that new version of the image. Picuous, a new service that launched today, aims to change that by bringing one-click Vimeo-style sharing to online photographs.

Michael Zhang

Celebrating Film Photography: “Camera Style” Websites Worldwide

tokyo camera style by John Sypal (see our interview with him) is a popular website documenting the analog camera culture in Tokyo, Japan by sharing photographs of cameras being used on the streets -- it's like The Sartorialist except for cameras instead of fashion. If you're a fan of the site and love browsing photos of old school cameras people use, you'll be happy to know that there's a number of similar websites for other cities and places around the world.

Michael Zhang

Famous Photos Seen Through Instagram Filters

What would famous photographs look like if the photographers who created them had been using Instagram? That's a question that's answered by Mastergram, a site that takes the work of renowned photographers and passes them through Instagram filters.

Michael Zhang

Facebook Upgrades Photos with Larger Sizes and Faster Load Times

Photo sharing is proving to be one of the main battlegrounds in the social networking war between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Facebook launched another counterattack today by increasing the resolution of displayed photos yet again from 720px to 960px, a 33% increase (last year they increased by 20% from 604px to 720px). Furthermore, the company claims that photos now load twice as fast as before.

Michael Zhang

JPEGmini Magically Makes Your JPEGs Up to 5x Smaller

JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel:

Our technology analyzes each specific photo, and determines the maximum amount of compression that can be applied to the photo without creating any visual artifacts. In this way, the system compresses each photo to the maximum extent possible without hurting the perceived quality of the photo.

You can test out the technology on your own photos through the service's website.