photography

Google has acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high-resolution cameras and uses them to take aerial photographs.

The search engine giant announced the move Friday on its LatLong blog about Google Earth and its other mapping efforts. It didn't disclose terms of the deal.

"We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road," Product Manager Stephen Chau said on the blog. "Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or … Read more

Google Earth users now have a really neat layer to play with, straight from the folks at NASA. It comes in the form of new astronaut photography, satellite imagery, and a mode called "Earth City Lights," which shows the entire globe at night. The real standout, however, is the selection of shots from space. Many of these were taken at interesting times on the Earth's landscape like volcanic eruptions, massive forest fires, dust storms, or the unusually thick ice on Lake Michigan during the winter of 2003. Each shot can be blown up and comes with a … Read more

iStockphoto, the Getty Images "microstock" subsidiary that sells low-cost imagery and video, will announce Monday plans to raise prices and therefore photographer revenue next month along with a number of promotional activities.

The company sells credits that give customers rights to use contributors' photos in materials such as advertisements, Web sites or brochures. The higher the resolution, the more credits an image costs, and the credit cost will increase from $1.20 to $1.30 on August 19, said iStockphoto Executive Vice President Kelly Thompson. (Credits are cheaper in bulk.)

Because photographers get a proportion of the credit … Read more

How many naked people can you fit on a shrinking glacier? According to a report by Reuters, New York photographer Spencer Tunick plans to find out next month when he teams up with Greenpeace to shoot another in his long series of nude photos of large groups of people. Tunick will hold his shoot on a Swiss glacier the weekend of August 18 and is seeking volunteers for the Greenpeace shoot. The Reuters report says that volunteers can register at www.greenpeace.ch/tunickglacier, but when I checked it, that was a dead link. If you want to offer up … Read more

We all goof, but we don't all do it as visibly as CNET TV star and executive editor Molly Wood, nor do we often relish fessing up. Molly does both with wit, charm, and FotoTagger, a handy digital-photography freeware tool for annotating digital photos via movable captions.

Read Molly's hilarious confession, Anatomy of a Buzz Report screwup, to see why FotoTagger has become her "new favorite thing." While you're at it, try it out.

It might not have sails, or an anchor, or a mizzenmast (isn't that a great word?) but this Jeep is probably the most legitimate pirate vessel you'll see all day, unless you happen to be logging onto Crave from the beaches of Tortuga. This vehicle was spotted by blogger Andy Carvin on the roads of Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago. I like to think it's driven by a swashbucklers' rights lobbyist. (Special interests, my foot!)

Almost equally awesome is the license plate holder, which says "TOO CLOSE FOR CANNONS" on the top and &… Read more

On our weekly Real Deal podcast today, Tom and I covered online photo sharing. It's not so much a comparison of the dozens of good photo sites we know of, but rather an overview of the issues for people confused about the whole space. Topics covered: Various services. How to pick a site. Privacy and copyrights. Online editing. And listener questions.

See also our Newbie's Guide to Flickr.

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.

Getty Images, which made a name for itself as a stock photography clearinghouse, announced Wednesday it has purchased Pump Audio, which licenses independent music to advertising and media clients. The price of the acquisition, according to a release from Getty, was $42 million.

This is the most recent in a series of moves on Getty's part to expand beyond photography and into the digital media sector. Last month, it launched a new division in the company to license video footage and other multimedia content, and over the past few months has chalked up a string of acquisitions, from amateur photography site Scoopt … Read more

This seems like a lot of money to do some time-lapse photography, but if you're an aspiring science teacher it will undoubtedly produce better footage of plants growing than the reel-to-reel films we were subjected to in grade school. This all-in-one system from Harbortronics can also provide a lesson in alternative energy because it runs on solar power.

The package includes a Pentax K110D Digital SLR, two 2GB memory cards and an automatic shutter controller for $2,300, according to Uncrate. Let's hope the photos look better than the system itself, which resembles a camera stuck in a … Read more