It's almost a given for new Canon DSLRs to have an HD video recording mode, but older Canons can also capture HD video with the open source software EOS Camera Movie Record. The program allows you to shoot HD 720p video with any Canon EOS camera that has LiveView capabilities. The software runs off of your computer and captures HD video from the LiveView of a tethered camera.
Photographers can now use their iPad or iPhone to view images remotely during a photo shoot -- if they've got a Leaf or a Mamiya digital back. Today, Mamiya and Leaf announced the release of a new App compatible with Leaf backs, as well as Mamiya's DM-series and RZ33 digital cameras and backs. When tethered shooting on a Mac, the Leaf Capture Remote v 2.0 App allows one or more iPad or iPhone to function as a remote image viewer over Wi-Fi.
Here's a pretty cool idea: StudioShare.org is a website through which individuals can rent studio gear or space from each other. Members can either simply sign up to rent, or if they're a studio owner, they can sign up to both rent and to rent out their studio space. All members can rent out their gear if they wish, though it's probably a good idea to get equipment insurance first.
French company Oloneo has just released a free beta for their product, PhotoEngine. The software is a straightforward HDR creator and non-destructive editor that allows you to quickly merge HDR photos. Additionally, it has features that can adjust specific light sources in the photo, to change the white balance or the exposure. This could come in handy when shooting HDR frames that have a variety of different light sources with different temperatures.
If you've got boxes of old prints and family photos you'd like to salvage from those awful sticky photo album pages, SnapHaven will scan them for free. For a limited time, the photo storage and backup service is offering free unlimited scans for customers with an active membership -- though you'll have to pay to ship your own prints.
The Sydney Morning Herald has an amazing collection of interviews with their photojournalists, sharing how they approach photography and the stories they wish to convey through their images. Each photographer has a different focus and style, but all of their images and narrations are very inspiring. It's powerful to see so much emotion conveyed and art created through photojournalism.
Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, the same UK-based duo who created a remote-control BeetleCam to photograph wildlife in Africa, decided to get up-close and personal with some of nature's less desirable creatures. The two originally noticed mosquito larvae in stagnant water sitting in the backyard of their home, and decided they'd found their next photo subjects. They patiently set up the photo shoot, waiting for key moment when the adult mosquitoes emerged from their larval state. It's …
We wrote about Snapsort at the beginning of this year, when it was still a newly-launched, bare-bones website for comparing digital cameras. Though it was spartan, the service was useful for comparing the specs of cameras and seeing how they stack up against each other.
Looks like Facebook's recent acquisition of Divvyshot was not for naught.
Companies that help you print and make things with your photographs are a dime a dozen, but Photozini's super easy magazine creation process caught our eye.
This has been around for a while already, so many of you have probably seen it, but I just started playing around with it today and was so impressed that I had to share it here. Pixlr is a browser-based Flash application for image editing that resembles Photoshop in both features and functionality. If you're familiar with Photoshop, then you should have no trouble picking up Pixlr, which is great for situations where you're on a computer that doesn't have Photoshop installed.
DxOMark has expanded their website to include lenses in addition to camera bodies. They've tested a good number of lenses from quite a few manufacturers, with each lenses tested on a large number of camera bodies. You can then compare how certain camera and lens combinations perform against one another.
If you login to Flickr today, you should see a notice at the top of your photo pages informing you of a soon-to-be-released redesign and allowing you to preview it. The new design features the photograph much more prominently, upping the size from 500px wide to 640px on a wider page. The goal seems to be making the page cleaner and more minimalistic, with many of the icons moving to drop-down menus. There's also a heavier emphasis on geo-tagging, which appears as a small map to the right of the …
Pick&Zip is a simple web application that lets you easily download Facebook photographs with a few clicks.
Sylights (short for "Share Your Lights") is a new website that makes it easy for you to create and share lighting diagrams.
Flickr has just announced a new feature that allows you to connect your Flickr account to your Facebook account to automatically update your Facebook friends when you upload new photographs. The above screenshot published by Flickr shows what the resulting Facebook status updates look like. To get started, visit the Sharing & Extending section of your Flickr account settings to connect your accounts in a few easy steps. For those of you who are already using the Flickr app on Facebook, Flickr …
Google has a new feature that photographers may enjoy: you can now customize the Google homepage with your own photography. Visit the Google homepage, and you should see a "Change background image" link on the bottom left hand corner of the page. If you don't see this link, try logging out of Google and then visiting the page.
If you need to fix some red-eyes in a photo, but don't have an image editor handy, Red iGone is a quick and easy way to get the eyes corrected. It's a simple web-based application that requires only that you select the eyes to be corrected. After that, all you need to do is download the fixed photo.
Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.
Here's a useful tool you might want to bookmark: findexif.com. It has a super simple web interface in which you simply paste a URL to a photograph in order to display the EXIF data embedded in the image. It should work for any photograph that hasn't had the EXIF stripped out for some reason, and can be a great way for you to learn how certain images were made. Here's an example page showing the EXIF data of a photograph I made a while back.
Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in "3D" mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.
Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.
It looks like Imagelogr, a new search engine for images, has gotten off on the wrong foot. Only weeks old, the service has sparked quite a response from photographers after it became clear that the service was offering copyrighted photographs for download without any links or attribution.
Mugtug Darkroom is a new browser-based photo editor that uses HTML5 rather than Flash. It was presented at the Google I/O web developer conference yesterday to show off what's possible with HTML5, the proposed next version of HTML that's gaining steam.
Today at Google I/O, Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell showcased this demo of the HTML5 version of the magazine. Last December, SI released a mockup video of how their online version would look as an app, but this version is based on the web and can be viewed with laptop and tablet browsers. It looks like a print magazine layout, with fantastic spreads, photos, and fonts, but it also has a lot of unique multimedia features that are incorporated into the design.
Group Story is a new photo service that's centered around building photo books collaboratively with other people who photographed the same event. For example, the parents of a soccer team could pool photographs together and create a photo book documenting the soccer season.
Sony recently announced an interchangeable lens camcorder, but if you can't stand the wait until it's released, cheap gadget dealer Brando has these Vivikai camcorders that come equipped with an 8x telescope. The Chinese company, Vivikai (no relation to Vivitar) has more photos of this Frankenstein camcorder mod on their site.
Kodak made the surprising announcement today that their Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett is resigning on May 28th to "pursue personal projects." …
Today, the New York Times' Lens blog posted the end result of a global photographic project. "A Moment in Time" is an interactive collection of all the images taken May 2, 2010 at 15:00 U.T.C. by the Times' readers all over the world. By May 4, the Times estimated they had 14,000 images, and were still accepting submissions until May 7.
Kristofer Minkstein from Embed Article recently contacted us asking whether we'd like to be a launch partner for a new service they're planning to launch in a month called Embed Image. Unauthorized image use isn't a big problem for us, so I don't think we'll be using the service, but the idea was interesting enough that I thought I'd share it with all of you.
The British government recently commissioned photographer Simon Roberts to create a public photo collaboration called The Election Project. In short, Roberts is creating documentary-style photography that follows the 2010 UK General election, and he is organizing a website to which people all over the UK can submit their own photographs of local political activities.
Mopho is a new photo sharing service with a strange name -- until you realize it's a domain hack using Tonga's ccTLD, making it mopho.to.
Here's some nerdy news: Israeli facial recognition startup Face.com has just opened up its API, allowing developers to integrate its facial recognition technology in third-party websites and applications. Since launching a year ago, the company has scanned more than 7 billion photos and tagged more than 52 million faces through its Photo Finder and Photo Tagger applications on Facebook.
Y Combinator-funded photo startup Picwing started out in 2008 as a typical photo-sharing service that also beamed your photos to a fancy, $249 digital picture frame that you could use to easily share photos (i.e. baby pictures with your parents). Turns out people weren't willing to drop that much cash on a digital frame when similar products were bigger, cheaper, and similar in functionality.
Picsean is a new travel magazine that resembles Laura Brunow Miner's Pictory. Photographers submit their best photographs and stories to themes, and the best submissions are selected and featured.
photobattle.me is a fun little web application that pits two submitted photographs against each other and asks the visitor to vote on which photo they think is better. Of course it's entirely subjective, and photos can be of different types and flavors, but it's an interesting way to see what the general public thinks of your work compared to other photos.
PicTreat is a free online application that allows you to quickly and easily retouch portraits using patent-pending face detection and correction technology.
This year's nominees have just been announced for the 14th annual Webby Awards, and one of the nearly 70 categories is "Best Use of Photography".
Real time photo sharing service TweetPhoto has raised a $2.6 million Series A investment from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.
NachoFoto is a new image search engine that attempts to deliver relevant results for a specific kind of query traditional search engines haven't focused on: dynamic keywords.
If you're looking for a photographic adventure, check out Wikipedia Takes the City or Wikimedia Photo Scavenger Hunts for an event near you.
Flickr has its own URL shortening system to make links suitable for things like Twitter. However, for some strange reason, the short URLs to photographs aren't readily available on the photo pages themselves.
Earlier today, photographer Chase Jarvis announced his partnership with creativeLIVE, a free, live online class site. Each class presentations is filmed live, to an in-person audience in Seattle, and streamed on the creativeLIVE website.
In an announcement on the Google Photos Blog today, Google announced that the maximum number of albums allowed for a Picasa account has been increased from 1,000 to 10,000.
Late last week we reported that Facebook had acquired the young photo sharing startup, Divvyshot, and will be shutting the service down.
It's pretty amazing how many free learning resources are available on the web for photographers. Recently, BBC Wildlife opened their Masterclasses, and Tamron launched a video series for newbie photographers.
After nearly 5 years as the Community Manager at Flickr, Heather Champ has announced she is leaving to start an online community consultancy called Fertile Medium with her husband Derek Powazek (whom she also started JPG Magazine with).
Divvyshot, a Y Combinator funded service that launched publicly last month, has been acquired by Facebook. Divvyshot's 3 employees will begin applying their know-how to Facebook Photos and the service will be shut down within 6 weeks, leaving its 40,000 users to find somewhere else to share photographs.
Israeli startup Dropico thinks there's time to be saved in online photo management. The company has just launched its flash-based web application that allows you to manage your photographs across various web services (i.e. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc...) all in one place.
In January 2010, NASA and the University of Arizona launched HiWish, a way for the public to become involved in the effort to photograph the surface of Mars. The website allows anyone to suggest locations on Mars to photograph next, and the winning entries are photographed using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, also known as "the people's camera", aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Since the program began, over 1,000 suggestions have been received, and …
