Websites

ViaU is a new photography service by Mariano Pastor, a 25-year veteran of the Madison Avenue photography industry whose clients include L’Oreal and Lancome.

Facity is an online photo project in which photographers from cities around the world submit portraits documenting faces found within their respective cities. The project, which started at the end of 2008 in Berlin, has grown to 88 photographers in 58 different cities, and currently publishes 10-15 new portraits per day.

You've probably seen in-video advertising, but how about ads placed in images? A company called Image Space Media wants to make sure you do.

SnapKnot is a new service that aims to make it easy to search for and compare local wedding photographers.

If you're yearning to take photos of the great outdoors, the BBC Wildlife Magazine website now offers free downloadable Masterclasses.

contacts who've faved is a web application that allows you to quickly browse through photographs that your contacts recently marked as a favorite. Simply give the application read permissions by logging into it via Flickr, and it will display a grid of thumbnails for you to enjoy. The service was created by Aaron Straup Cope, a senior engineer on the Flickr team.

The golden hour in photography is the first or last hour of sunlight in a day that photographers often aim to shoot in, since the sun's position produces a soft and warm light with longer shadows. The Golden Hour Calculator is a useful website that can help you calculate the golden hour(s) for your location, telling you exactly when the sun rises and sets.

In the future, we might be able to roam around a 3D virtual representation of our world, where everything you see was automatically generated from photographs taken at the real locations.

fotojournal is a new photoblogging service by Canadian company Robot Republic geared towards professional photographers, allowing them to showcase their work in a blog format.

Flixtime is a website launched recently by Stock photography service Fotolia that helps you easily transform your photos, videos, and text into short 60-second flash video clips.

SepiaTown is a website that lets you view historical imagery of particular locations using Google maps.

If you've ever edited your Flickr photographs using the default image editor provided by Flickr, then you've used the web-based image editing software developed by Picnik.

Online entertainer Ze Frank has an interesting gallery called young me / now me, which features user submitted "before and after" photographs.

Showzey is a web app that helps you collect and organize your photographs from various places on the web in once place.

This isn't related to photography, but it's something that I'm working on, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

Fotobabble is a newly launched service that allows you to add a short audio clip to photographs via either your computer or iPhone (using their free application).

ImageStamper is an online tool that acts as your witness when it comes to image rights.

If you're an amateur photographer looking to go pro, finding clients is often a difficult task. Snapm aims to make it easier by offering comparison shopping to people looking for high quality photography by amateur photographers.

Update: It looks like many of these courses are no longer available.

One of the best online photo editors is now completely free to use. Aviary has decided to offer its entire suite of online apps for free, including its popular Phoenix image editor.

If you're addicted to The Big Picture like we are, then you probably also wish they posted more than two or three times a week. You should also take a look at The Big Pictr, a neat website we just came across. Although it blatantly copies The Big Picture in its name and design, the idea behind the site is pretty interesting.

The humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), recently started a supplemental site, Images Without Borders, in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti.

If you've ever wondered just how much editing goes into a particular photograph, there's now a super easy way to find out for yourself. Image Error Level Analyser is a simple web application that takes a URL to a JPEG photo and returns an image showing differing "error levels" in the image. Here's an example they give: …

Looking for a neat new way to show off your photographs? Foldplay has a cool web application that can help you print and fold your very own kaleidocycle, a moving paper sculpture that turns endlessly.

Launched less than a week ago, SpiderPic is a new image search engine for those looking to purchase stock photography. The same stock image is often available through multiple agencies and varying prices, and SpiderPic allows you to compare these prices to choose the cheapest deal.

3D technology was featured somewhat prominently this year at CES, with companies unveiling televisions and cameras built for capturing and displaying 3D media. If you can't wait to get started with 3D media, you can do so right now with just two photographs.

SnapSort is a new web application that's super simple but surprisingly useful. Give it two camera models and it will give you a side by side comparison of the specs, as well as pick a winner for you. In addition, it lists pros, cons, and similar cameras for each camera.

ffffl*ckr is a new Flickr web application that's based around the idea that the people whose work you like probably also like photographs that you'd like as well. The app aims to make finding quality photography less of a chore: …

FlickrPoet is a neat little web-app built by Thomas Sturm that turns text into photographs using Flickr's API. Though the concept is extremely simple and only somewhat novel, the results can be quite beautiful.

Back in September we wrote an article discussing how difficult it is to keep digital photographs safe for a really, really long time. We mentioned that storing your images with a reliable service like Amazon is probably much safer than trying to archive data yourself, since you're probably not an expert at doing so.

Strobox is a new iPhone application that allows you to easily create and share lighting diagrams. It's completely free, and you can download it now from the App Store.

Just launched today, FocalPop is a new online marketplace that tries to harness the power of crowd-sourcing. The concept is very similar to thematic photo competitions such as Photo Friday or DPChallenge, where a keyword or theme is provided, and photographers submit suitable photographs to the competition.

If you're a tennis player in the San Francisco bay area, check out ahathereitis. This interesting new web application (though it lacks a logo and design) aims to find things for you through satellite photographs and image recognition technology.

Recently I've been working with Fotomoto co-founder Ahmad Kiarostami towards getting their service integrated into Photoblog. They're a relatively new company offering a pretty interesting service, so I thought I'd share some thoughts on what I've seen so far with you.

One of the things I often come across when looking for interesting photography to tweet about is static Flickr image URLs. People seem to like posting these images without linking back to their original Flickr pages, while I prefer linking to Flickr pages so the photographer can get the credit for the photo.

It seems like more and more newspapers are launching photoblogs on their websites. It's an awesome idea, since each of them has a constant stream of high quality work pouring in from their photojournalists. Keeping up with these photoblogs is great for both getting your daily dose of photographic inspiration, and for keeping up with the current events happening around the world.

Cambridge in Colour is a great photography resource on the web for beginners and advanced photographers alike.

Here's a useful resource I found a while back that many of you might find helpful. SLRGear.com is a website that conducts comprehensive tests on camera lenses, and publishes them in the form of diagrams and illustrations.