Art.com is "the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-end wall art." Zenfolio offers "online photography presentation and sales solutions for professional photographers and enthusiasts." Knowing that, Zenfolio's acquisition by Art.com announced earlier seems like a match made in sales heaven.
Facebook summoned a group of tech journalists to its Menlo Park headquarters this morning to unveil the latest products its legions of programmers have been hard at work building. The major announcement was a new search engine called "Graph Search," which will allow users to run extremely powerful search queries on the social networks database of 1 billion members, 1 trillion social connections, and 240 billion photos.
Jamie Livingston isn't a household name. And even though he has his own Wikipedia entry and has had his story told many times over the years, it's as moving today as ever. Jamie was a New York-based photographer, film maker and circus performer who became famous by taking one polaroid picture every day for the last eighteen years of his life.
Businesses aimed at dealing with an increasingly digital photography world are popping up all the time. Beyond just retro photography apps and lo-fi attachments that make it seem like you're shooting with an old camera, the problem now becomes how to prevent those photos from disappearing into binary oblivion.
Polaroid has a solution on the way, and you could always print them yourself, but if you want to get smartphone prints made and sent off right now on the cheap, Flicpost may be your best bet.
We're used to Google frequently improving things on its end -- most recently adding pan and zoom to Google+ -- but a constantly improving Yahoo! is a fairly new thing.
After numerous improvements to Flickr and a new Flickr app, Yahoo! has turned its photographic eye on Yahoo! Image Search. From here on out, you'll be able to search all of Flickr's creative commons images straight from Yahoo!
Here's a creative project by visual artist Andrew Knapp and his puppy (all dogs are puppies... no matter how old) Momo. Remember those 'Where's Waldo' books that used to keep you unendingly entertained and frustrated in the waiting room of your local doctors office as a kid?
If you're looking for a fun and cheap gag gift that's somewhat photography related, check out Paper-Kit. It's a simple, and easy-to-use web app that lets you turn your portrait photos (probably better described as mug shots) into nifty 3D heads that you print, cut, and assemble yourself.
We’ve shared a few pretty cool cross-section light painting projects before, but none of them were ever very... shall we say... cheery. Both projects -- 21:31 and Andy Leach's hologram photo -- were created using the same eerie video of human slices from the Visible Human Project. But for those who wanted to toy around with cross-section light painting and re-creating 3D light objects in their photos, that’s all they had.
Well, not anymore. Photographer Hugo Baptista has put together a Vimeo group called "Cross Section Objects for Light Painting". It contains a number of videos that you can load onto your tablet or smartphone and use to create 3D light painting objects.
When it comes to figuring out our car's life expectancy, we've come to expect a little bit of community involvement. Sure, the car company will tell you that your truck is supposed to last X-number of miles, but if the majority of real owners online disagree, we tend to side with them. But why stop at your car? Why not see what users are reporting about your camera's life expectancy?
If you're a Flickr user, you can currently snag and open a Christmas present from the service a few days early. The photo sharing service -- which has been undergoing a renaissance as of late -- is currently handing out three free months of Pro membership. Simply log in to find a link to the present on your home page, or visit the Holiday Gift page directly.
A major event occurred today in the creative industry landscape: Adobe has acquired Behance, a juggernaut portfolio-sharing service used by many photographers to showcase their work.
Scoopshot is trying to transform the way companies purchase photos and the way freelance photographers find work. In August, we reported that the startup had launched an app that allows smartphone users to easily sell their photos from their phone. Since then, the company has paid out more than $300,000 to participating photographers, and reports that over 60 of its users have earned more than $1,000 by selling their phone photos (one user has earned more than $23,000)
Now, the service is setting its sights on a different group of photographers: professional freelancers. It has launched Scoopshot Pro, a service that connects photo buyers with photo makers for commissioned projects.
In the world of cloud data storage, Dropbox is one of the 800lb gorillas fighting for your files. In recent days, it has been making big moves to become more of a player in photo storage and sharing. After all, everyone needs a safe place to keep their digital images, right?
The company's latest play came today in the form of an acquisition: Dropbox has acquired fellow cloud-storage company Snapjoy -- a business based around aggregating photos from around the web and from your various devices.
Lytro's groundbreaking consumer light-field camera made a splash in the camera industry this year by making it possible to refocus photographs after they're shot. However, the cheapest model for the boxy device has a price tag of $399, and the reviews have been mixed so far.
If you'd like to play around with your own refocus-able photographs without having to buy an actual Lytro device, you can actually fake it using a standard DSLR camera (or any camera with manual focusing and a large-aperture lens).
We reported in the middle of last month that Eye-Fi was planning to launch a new cloud-based photo sharing service with the name Circ. That day has arrived: the wireless SD card maker has officially launched the service into private beta. Unlike other cloud services, which cap storage space for free accounts -- 5GB is a popular limit -- Circ doesn't. Rather than limit free accounts by storage, Circ is based on the number of devices used. A free account lets you sync 2 devices, while a $50/year paid account allows up to 20.
If you want more feedback about your photography portfolio than what your friends, peers, parents, and keyboard critics provide -- and you're willing to drop some money on a professional review -- you should check out Eyeist, a new disruptive service that's trying to bring high-quality portfolio reviews to the masses.
If you've always wanted your photography prominently displayed in New York City's Times Square, Google can help make it happen -- as long as you're okay with adding some text to your picture and participating in a marketing effort. To show that its new line of Chromebook laptops is designed for all kinds of users, the Mountain View-based company has launched a new campaign called For Everyone. It's a giant photo gallery that invites the world to upload photos that answer the question, "who are Chromebooks for?"
500px is on a tear. The service has been growing like a weed as of late, and appears to have some ambitious plans in the works. The company announced today that it has acqui-hired (i.e. buying out a small company mainly for the team's talent) the two-man development team Pulpfingers, creators of the popular iOS 500px browsing app ISO500.
Twitter has introduced the ability to share interactive photographs directly through the microblogging social network. Images that have a rich content layer added on via services like Stipple and ThingLink can be displayed in-line through Twitter's website with all their extra goodness intact.
It seems like we're saying this every week, but the cloud photo storage industry is becoming more and more packed. Heck, even AT&T launched its own service called Locker earlier this month. The next entrant to the arena looks like it will be a photography company we didn't expect: wireless SD card maker Eye-Fi.
Are you a Canonite who's sick of hanging out in the same forums as photographers who pledge allegiance to other brands? If so, that's kinda sad -- why can't we all just get along? -- but Canon has something new that's perfect for you. The company has just launched its own official online forum, giving photography enthusiasts a new place to "ask questions, get answers and share experiences with peers."
Zack Arias is a professional photographer based in Atlanta who runs a popular personal blog with a sizable following. He's also runs the photography equivalent of Dear Abby.
Flickr has quietly rolled out a great incremental update to its photo-sharing service. Individual photo pages now display a number of EXIF details under a new section labeled "Additional Info", found in the column to the right. With a quick glance, you'll be able to see the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and focal length that a photographer was using when he or she snapped any photo.
This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users' photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user's photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
The role Twitter played during Arab Spring in early 2011 gave the microblogging service a huge boost in legitimacy and pushed it into the mainstream. Instagram may be having a similar "coming of age" experience through its role in the ongoing coverage of Hurricane Sandy.
Clemson University is apparently ditching film photography and going digital. The public South Carolina-based school has just turned to government surplus auctions to unload its analog gear, and the equipment is being snatched up for ridiculously low prices. The lot of 9 "excellent condition" Hasselblad 500 EL/M medium format camera bodies seen above was just sold for $1,200, which comes out to about $133 for each camera (granted, there are some taxes and processing fees tacked on).
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held her first earnings call yesterday, and it appears that stockholders were pleased with the company's latest quarter figures: the stock price has been soaring since then. Among the areas that Yahoo sees promise in are Flickr and mobile, as well as a combination of the two.
Shutterfly is making a habit of gobbling up photo sharing services that camera companies no longer want to run. Less than half a year after acquiring Kodak Gallery from Kodak for a meager $23.8 million, Shutterfly has now taken another photo site off the hands of a company very similar to Kodak: Fujifilm. The Japanese imaging company has agreed to dump its photo sharing and printing business SeeHere into Shutterfly's lap, shutting down the service on November 8, 2012.
If you're a photo enthusiast who uses Pandora for personalized music listening, you'll feel right at home using Art.sy. Just as Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to offer automated music recommendations, Art.sy has an Art Genome Project through which 20,000 images of art from 275 galleries and 50 museums have already been digitized, analyzed, and stored.
What if there were an up-to-date live stream of photos from any location on Earth, allowing you to see whatever is happening "right now"? Well, there is: Worldcam is a simple web app that's designed to do just that. Simple provide it with two pieces of information: city and location. City is pretty straightforward, but location is the cool one; you can type things like businesses, buildings, parks, and more.