photography

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug'… Read more

For all the company's overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain... off.

I'm not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn't rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.

However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.

Take Google Browser Sync … Read more

Think of it as digital photography 2.0.

In the last decade, photography has been transformed by one revolution, the near-total replacement of analog film cameras by digital image sensors. Now researchers and companies are starting to stretch their wings by taking advantage of what a computer can do with sensor data either within the camera or on a full-fledged PC.

Some elements of this new era, which researchers often call computational photography, are refinements of existing technology. For example, some cameras can wait to take the photo only when subjects are smiling and not blinking, in effect placing the … Read more

Picnik, one of my personal favorites for editing photos online launched a new array of advanced editing tools a few hours ago. You can read about some of them from our earlier post, or the official announcement over at the company's blog. The biggest news is that many of the ones that previously required a paid, premium membership are now available to free users.

I got a chance to talk to Picnik's CEO Jonathan Sposato about the update, as well as the past and future of the company. The big topic was the looming release of Adobe's … Read more

Kingston has updated the Icons of Photography section of its Website with a new interview with National Geographic photographer Gerd Ludwig. Ludwig is the fourth of the flash memory card maker's Icons of Photography to be interviewed for the Kingston site, which also includes sections that let you submit questions to be answered by the Icons, or photos to be critiqued by these legendary photographers. While Kingston isn't the only place you can find interviews with photographers, they do conveniently have access to very high level photographers, including photojournalist Harry Benson, documentary photographer Colin Finlay, and sports photographer … Read more

Share a lot of photos online but find yourself only going back to reminisce on rare occasions? If you're a Flickr user check out photag newsletter service Photojojo's time capsule tool.

The service will send you a new message twice a month filled with photos from a year ago during the same time period. They're not just any old pictures either, time capsule will only pick the ones with the most interestingness. Each one gets links to share or view the original.

To get it set up, simply link up your Flickr account, and give it an … Read more

The uses for the Flickr API never cease to amaze me. One of them that I've been playing with for the past week is Phrasr, a service that takes several words you throw at it and spits them back out as photos from Flickr.

You can individually change each photo to better suite the word. I found it to be pretty off the mark on most words, but spot on for others. Half the fun is exploring additional photos to get a better match.

When you're done selecting your photos you can then publish the phrase to everyone … Read more

If you're looking to put together a Valentine's Day collage for your sweetie, it's mighty late to be worrying about creative gifts from the heart. So get a jump on that photo mashup (or is that car crash?) you've been planning for next year's Valentine's Day with PhotoScape, a freeware image editor that's surprisingly feature-rich.

… Read more

Photographers whose work appears online--and nowadays that's just about all of them, really--are all too aware of how easily their photos can be misappropriated. They can add a watermark on each picture, of course, but that typically involves post-shoot work with image-editing software. Canon apparently sees an opportunity to automate the process on the camera--making use of biometric data courtesy of the photographer's iris.

Read more about the patent at the Photography Bay blog: "Canon's Iris Registration Mode - Biological Copyright Metadata"