photography

In its heyday some years back, Polaroid was one of the crown jewels of the Boston area business scene, a luminescent union of art and technology. But that was then. Today, post-bankruptcy proceedings and in the hands of new owners, it exists as little more than a brand name. Last month came the end-of-an-era announcement that it would no longer make its trademark instant film.

On Sunday, The Boston Globe ran a pair of articles in separate sections looking at the Polaroid mystique. Mark Feeney's piece, "Instant karma," pairs the Polaroid Swinger camera with the Ford Mustang … Read more

Last month London's Metropolitan Police started a five week campaign of what they are calling "counter-terrorism advertising," which includes a poster that implores people to report photographers to the police if they "seem odd." This is very troubling to me, since I consider myself to be quite odd and my job entails shooting photos on a daily basis. Luckily, I don't live in London, but here in New York City we have a similar campaign that's been going on for more than five years and while they haven't gone as far as … Read more

Yahoo-owned photo community Flickr has launched a new program today called Flickr for Good. The site will be a place for nonprofits or other photojournalists to pool together their photography. In order to get the ball rolling Flickr has teamed up with non-profit organizer TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships (which normally cost $25 a pop) to nonprofits and public libraries to let them upload as many shots as they want to the popular photo hosting community.

Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed … Read more

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