The digital photography course offered by Stanford (CS 178, which we featured last year) has an awesome page filled with flash applets that can help you gain a better understanding of certain technical aspects of photography. These include understanding how various factors affect depth of field, a visual look at how phase detection autofocus works, and a simple introduction to color theory.
DEVELOP Tube is a video channel on YouTube and Vimeo that's geared towards photographers and curated by NYC-based photographer Erica McDonald. Each channel features interviews, profiles, lectures, and films about photography that are carefully selected from each website.
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.
Photo-sharing site Pinterest, the new darling of social media, has a copyright infringement cloud hanging over its head. The fact that anyone can upload and share copyrighted photographs through the site has prompted many sites -- most notably Flickr -- to ban "pinning" for copyrighted works. Up to this point, Pinterest has tried to avoid legal trouble by having a Terms of Service that places all the blame for copyright infringement on its users, but a new solution may be on the horizon: …
The first issue of Portland-based designer Ian Coyle's new online photography magazine, Edits Quarterly, is out. It features short narratives in film and photography, and the first issue is titled "Voyager". The web design is beautifully minimalistic and is an amazing way to consume images and the stories behind them.
Back in November of last year, we reported that Kodak had put its Kodak Gallery service up for sale and was hoping to offload it for "hundreds of millions of dollars". A couple months later Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and now the company has finally found a buyer for the photo sharing and printing service: Shutterfly. The sale price? Only $23.8 million. If the sale gets approved by the US Bankruptcy Court in March, Kodak Gallery's 75 million users will be transferred over to …
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.
One of the new darlings of the Internet world is Pinterest, a photo-sharing social network that has exploded in the past year to become one of the world's most popular websites. In recent days, however, there has been concern over the fact that copyrighted images can be so easily reproduced and reused on Pinterest without the owner's permission. A week ago Pinterest launched a special "nopin" HTML meta tag that lets website owners prevent "pinning" on their sites, and last Friday Flickr became …
New service called the Catlin SeaView Survey is planning to do for the ocean what Google Street View has done for land. Using a special camera, the joint venture between the University of Queensland, Google, and insurance firm Catlin Group will use a specially designed underwater camera to capture interactive 360-degree panoramic photographs. The purpose will be to carry out one of the most intensive studies of reefs ever, starting with Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It'll go into full swing …
Flickr is reportedly set to push out a number of major design updates across the photo-sharing service's website. Adrianne Jeffries of Betabeat recently met up with Flickr senior product manager Markus Spiering, who gave her a sneak peek at a number of extensive changes to the interface that will be rolling out at the end this month.
Cloud-based photo hosting service Snapjoy launched a clever web app (and marketing ploy) yesterday called Flickraft that made it easy for Flickr users to rescue their photos "from a sinking ship". With just a few clicks, the app would import a user's entire collection of Flickr photos over to Snapjoy using the Flickr API. The response was overwhelming: in just two hours, Flickr users had exported over 250,000 photos from their accounts. The app became so popular that Flickr disabled the API key …
Back in 2010, we shared that Facebook had a zombie photo problem: a test photo that we deleted from the service in October was still accessible for four or five months. Ars Technica has been following up on the issue, and reports that a fix is on the horizon: …
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).
During his lifetime, MIT engineer and businessman Nick DeWolf founded the giant electronic testing company Teradyne and designed more than 300 semiconductor and electronic test systems. In his spare time he was also an avid photography enthusiast, carrying a camera with him at all times. After his death, his son-in-law Steve Lundeen began working to archive and share the enormous body of work. Lundeen is currently publishing the original sets of photographs to Flickr at a rate of 20-50 images …
To keep itself lean and focused, Google is planning to do some spring cleaning and shut down a number of non-critical projects and services that don't attract enough attention to keep alive. One of the services marked for termination is Picnik, the online photo editor that Google acquired back in 2010. The service will remain online until April 19, after which the team will be folded into the Google+ team.
Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? Sightsmap is a simple Google Map app that takes geo data from the photos uploaded to Panoramio (now a Google service) and uses it to generate a heatmap.
Candidtag is a new service designed to make it easy to earn a little cash by photographing strangers you meet out in public. The idea is that there are people (e.g. tourists) out there who are too busy enjoying their lives to carry a camera around, but at the same time would like memories of their experiences. If you always carry your camera around, you can offer to take pictures for strangers and then give them a card pointing them to your Candidtag "collection". The client can later visit the …
Street View Stereographic is a fun little web app that creates a "little planet" (i.e. stereographic projection) using the photos from any Google Street View location you provide it.
Guess who joined in on the Instagram party? President Obama. While the White House Flickr Photostream publishes a steady stream of official images captured by Pete Souza, the new Instagram stream will be broadcasting casual behind-the-scenes glimpses at Obama's reelection campaign -- with vintage filters, of course. His username is @barackobama.
Looking for a lost camera on the web by searching for its serial number in uploaded photos is nothing new (see Stolen Camera Finder), but GadgetTrak's new CameraTrace service takes it one step further. For a fee of $10 per camera, the service will actively monitor the Internet for your camera's serial number. If it ever pops up in a photo uploaded to popular photo sharing services, you'll get an email notification. Back in August, GadgetTrak's manual Serial Search helped a photographer recover …
In August 2005, a UK student named Alex Tew launched a creative project called The Million Dollar Homepage. It was a simple webpage containing 1 million pixels that he sold to advertisers for $1 each. The idea quickly went viral, and Tew became a millionaire less than six months after launching it. The Most Expensive Picture is a new photo website that may make its owners rich in a similar way. Anyone can upload a photograph to the website, but for a price: you'll need to pay $1 more than the …
A recently discovered flaw in Facebook's abuse reporting tool allowed anyone to access private photographs of other users, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Until it was fixed today, the reporting tool allowed anyone who reported a public photograph's owner to also peruse that user's images, both public and private. After members of a bodybuilding forum discovered the security hole, they proceeded to target Zuckerberg's account and publish a number of his private photographs online.
Knowing how long to develop film for is easy if you use popular films and developers, but what if you want to use some obscure combination that isn't well documented? If that's you, check out the Photocritic Film Development Database. It's a simple service that outputs development times for 1440 different film/developer combinations. For combinations that aren't officially published, creator Haje Jan Kamps has come with a formula that estimates the time -- a formula that he says is surprisingly …
Just launched this week, Lighting Diagram is another simple web-based tool that lets photographers create and share lighting diagrams and the photos created with the setups.
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: …
Check out Google's homepage: the doodle today celebrates the 224th birthday of Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype and one of the fathers of photography (the others are Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Thomas Wedgwood). Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787, and unveiled his daguerreotype process at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, when he was 51 years old.
Earlier this month, Kodak sold off its sensor business in an effort to raise some cash to stay alive and hopefully turn things around. Now the company is looking to get even leaner by selling off its online photo sharing business. Photo sharing? Kodak? Yup, it's called Kodak Gallery. While it's not surprising that the camera maker has online services, what might be surprising is the price they're looking to sell it for: according to the Wall Street Journal, it's in the "hundreds of millions of …
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).
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".
Want to know how long it'll take you to save up for that camera or lens you've been dreaming of buying? grndctrl, an uber-simple personal finance web app, can tell you. It doesn't take any personal details, but simply asks for your income, expenses, and savings amounts. You can then provide it with a list of "rewards" that you'd like to save up for, and it will give you estimates of how long you'll need to wait.
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.
Casetagram is a service that makes custom iPhone cases using Instagram photographs. The case comes in four different templates, and cost $35 each with free shipping worldwide.
After being spurned back in early 2008, Microsoft is supposedly on the hunt to acquire Yahoo once again. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is working on putting a bid together with Silver Lake Partners, the company that Microsoft recently purchased Skype from. If the buyout succeeds this time, Microsoft will also become the owner of Flickr, which Yahoo purchased six years ago.
500px, quickly becoming known as the "Flickr for artsy photographers", has released a new iPad app designed to deliver a beautiful photo viewing experience. In just a few days the app has already risen into the top 5 free photo apps in the app store, and now serves half of all traffic seen by 500px. GigaOM reports that users spend an average of 35 minutes per visit, viewing 80 photographs in the process.
Booooooom and Adobe have partnered up for a photo project and contest called "Remake", which asks people to recreate famous works of art using 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.
By Martin Pannier on picuous …
Instagram just celebrated its first birthday last week, and now early adopters have a new toy to play with: And7YearsAgram. It's like Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule, but for Instagram instead of Flickr. The service sends you a daily email with the photographs you captured on that day the year before, giving you a fun and visual glimpse of your past (and reminding you of how fast time flies).
Kodak's website has a "Create" section stocked with all kinds of different photo projects for various purposes and occasions, from things for the home to gifts for the holidays.
Artist Jonathan Keller Keller first started taking a self-portrait of himself every day starting in 2000, and later created a time-lapse video showing eight years of his life passing in less than two minutes (similar to Noah Kalina's famous everyday video). What's neat is that Keller maintains a directory of other similar photo projects out there. All the projects either deal with the passage of time or the obsessive documentation of something.
Daily deals sites have become quite popular as of late, with Groupon and LivingSocial leading the charge. Photo Dough is a similar service that's geared towards professional photographers. Every few days the site features a new service or product that's heavily discounted thanks to group buying, allowing you to save money on things like photo editing programs, digital picture albums, and website templates.
If you're a Flickr loyalist that hasn't jumped ship for competing services, Flickr is rewarding you with a couple new tools for sharing your photos. Today the company announced an official app for Android and a new photo-sharing feature called Photo Sessions.
Microstock did a lot of damage by turning traditional stock photography on its head, but now a company called Stipple is trying to give microstock a taste of its own medicine. The company, which offers technology for tagging people and objects in photos, has launched its new Image Marketplace website for publishers who want to use photographs without having to pay for them. Instead of publishers paying the photographers or agencies for licenses, brands step into the equation by paying money to …
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.
Google Street View is neat in that it allows you to step into far away places through street-level photographs, but it's missing the fourth dimension: time. WhatWasThere is an awesome project that aims to combine the element of time with a photographic map of the world. The map includes both modern day and historical imagery, and users can contribute their photographs by tagging them with a date and a time. The site even lets you switch to Google's Street View and overlay historical photos onto …
ifttt (If This Then That) is a new service that lets you automate tasks across different social media services you're signed up for, including Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, and Facebook. All you have to do is choose what "this" and "that" are, and the service will take care of handling the task. For example, you can use ifttt to automatically send every photo uploaded to Facebook that's tagged with your name to your Dropbox account, or have it send all of your new Instagram photos to a particular …
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.
Flickr introduced a novel privacy feature yesterday called "geofences", which lets you hide the location data of photos taken in certain locations from the general public. It seems like a great idea, but blogger Thomas Hawk points out that there's a pretty big loophole in the system: …
Flickr introduced an innovative location-based privacy feature today called "geofences". It's a way of assigning default privacy settings to certain locations for geotagged photographs. For example, you can assign a geofence with a certain radius around your home, and automatically set those photos' location data to only be visible to your friends and family. Each user can have up to 10 geofences, and existing photographs are automatically updated to new geofence privacy settings.
Marc Levoy, the Stanford professor behind the "Frankencamera" project, teaches a course on digital photography called CS 178. The class website is a treasure trove for anyone looking for some great free education in photography: …
