photography

Stephen Shankland of CNET.com has been writing a number of stories about "geotagging"--that is, organizing photos by location. This can be done manually on a site like Flickr; you drag your photos onto a map and thereafter they stay associated with that location. This can be handy if you're looking for pictures of, say, the U.S.S. Constitution, it makes as much sense to look for photos by location as by keyword. And, if the keywords aren't obvious or unique, it may make a lot more sense.

That said, manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightly convoluted workflow as the technology stands today. … Read more

As a member of the press, I'm accustomed to being the token partygoer taking awkward photographs of the room. Not so much at Flickr's "24 Hours of Flickr" party in New York on Thursday night, where there were so many cameras being whipped out that you'd think it were Times Square.

"I'm stuffing my face with cake, and then I look up and someone's taking a picture of me with chocolate all over my mouth," one mildly uncomfortable attendee told me.

The event, held in a cavernous studio space in Manhattan'… Read more

I was standing on the floor of the PhotoPlus Expo show with Phil Ryan this morning, looking at some huge, holster-style camera bags and complaining about the lacks of bags designed to wrap around, rather than pile atop, a woman's hips. Serendipitously, I ran into the Shootsac booth, crowded with femme photogs, about twenty minutes and two aisles away.

The Shootsac is a flexible, basic-black padded neoprene case designed specifically to hold lenses. It's got six vertically oriented pockets for stashing your optics, plus a velcro-attached flop-over cover that you can replace with any number of attractive alternatives. … Read more

The Fashionista blog noticed this new camera for White Stripes or vintage camera fanatics.

Meg and Jack White of the White Stripes have partnered with the Lomography Society, an international experimental-photography organization, on two reproduction cameras.

The purpose of the limited-edition cameras is to take "an analog look at life in the Digital Age," according to a statement on the White Stripes Web site.

I suppose this is a follow-up to their Digital Age release of the Icky Thump album on USB flash drives.

The "Meg" for $180 is a semireplica of the Diana camera from the 1960s. … Read more

Vuvox is a handy slide show service we've taken a look at before, and yesterday it launched a new tool called Cut-Out Express that lets you cut away at pictures to add embedded photo slide shows. Like the rest of its tools, you can add shots from your hard drive or pull them in from other services like Flickr, Picasa Web albums, or any old RSS feed with photos in it. What makes Cut-Out neat, though, is its lasso tool, which intelligently lets you wrap around a shot like you would using a high-end photo-editing application. It doesn't have a "magnetic" mode, but there's a helpful vertical and horizontal line that tracks the pointer to help you guide around whatever you're lassoing.

The end result is a pleasingly cheesy open area where your photos will fade from one to the next--sure to be a hit with the social-networking crowd, or people who feel like having a little fun with shots of friends, family, or celebrities. Speaking of which, I've embedded a Cut-Out of a Steve Jobs keynote after the break using pictures of historically faked Apple products (via Macrumors Guides). The service also recommends you do the same with your pet's mouth, billboards, and graffiti. Cute.

On a side note, if you're planning on using Vuvox for photo sharing with your family, the service has a neat feature that lets you privatize your content channel. So unlike a service like Flickr, there's no registration or mutual friendships necessary on your recipient's behalf to see your pictures, while they remain unseen by everyone else. All you need to send out is the URL. Unfortunately this can't be done toggled on individual slide shows (yet), but you can add a separate public channel, letting you group together slide shows you'd like to keep separate from your openly shared work.

[via Go2Web2]… Read more

Photo sharing sites like Flickr, Webshots (a CNET affiliate), Zoomr, SmugMug, and others provide a cheap (usually free) and easy way for users to share their digital pics with friends, family, or the site communities at large. There's always a slight delay, however, between downloading pictures from your camera or cell phone and actually getting them published to those sites. If you're a Flickr user, you can eliminate that delay completely with Foldr Monitr, a free utility that automatically uploads images from specified folders on your hard drive to your Flickr account.

Foldr Monitr works nearly as simply and effectively as its description promises. After installing and running the app, you'll need to "authenticate" Foldr Monitr with your Flickr account. Clicking the "Authenticate" button in the Foldr Monitr interface will load the Flickr authorization page, launching your default Web browser if it's not already running. After authenticating Foldr Monitr on the Flickr Web site, you're not finished. Click the "Finish Authentication" button in the Foldr Monitr interface to complete your login.… Read more

If you're into panoramic photos there's a cool place just for you. It's called viewAt, and it's a really slick panoramic photo service where you can browse through other people's panoramic photos, and upload your own. If you've ever checked out panoramic shots on other photo services, you'll know they're hard to enjoy unless you have a large, widescreen monitor. Even then, you're missing out on the experience of actually looking around like you would in real life. viewAt attempts to solve this problem with its specially designed Flash viewer that … Read more

The latest addition to Canon's compact dye-sub printer line, the Selphy ES2 follows last year's ES1 by adding a few new bells and whistles to the same 4x6 printer engine.

The most notable bells include an upgrade to a 3-inch LCD from the ES1's 2.5-inch model and a redesigned physical interface. Whistles include new photo effects, frames and clip art selections to add at print time.

Since it uses the same combo ink/paper cartridges, it costs the same 28 cents per print. It should also spit out prints in roughly 69 seconds. And like the … Read more

Picnik is launching a new premium subscription service tomorrow morning. $24.95 gets you a year of access to a slew of advanced effects and fonts. Many of the premium effects have been available during the service's beta testing period, but there are some new ones that do a pretty incredible job of taking a drab photo and making it look special.

The biggest thing premium users will notice is over a dozen effects that aren't available in the standard version, and seven brand-new ones. According to CEO Jonathan Sposato, the No. 1 request from users is more … Read more