Google is a media behemoth. The company mastered search back in the nineties and has gradually worked to engulf just about anything else you can do on the web (or your phone) ever since. Usually I hate this type of activity, please reference Microsoft or NewsCorp as examples of companies earning my ire, but I still see puffy little hearts whenever I think of Google. I suspect my school girl crush probably has a lot to do with things like the Life Magazine Photo Archive.
Life Magazine was started in 1883, but it probably would have gone the way of Beadle’s Monthly or Potter’s American Monthly had it not been acquired by Henry Luce in 1936. Luce was a media titan in the early part of the 20th century. He owned Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated and it was figured that one in five Americans read one of his publications every week. He bought Life not for its general interest content, but for its intriguing name. He turned the weekly into what is regarded history’s greatest fount of photojournalism. The way in which the magazine covered the biggest stories of the 20th century made it the best selling magazine of all time.
If you were a photographer in the 20th Century, you dreamed of being in Life the way young ballerinas dreampt of dancing in the New York City Ballet. Life made words mere modifiers of the image. The New York Times points out this week that while text may have been secondary to the image in Life, it is necessary to the storytelling in this millennium. Google has done fantastic job of bringing these images to a world-wide modern audience, but without context, some of the relevance is lost.
While there is no easy way to browse content, it’s hard not to love what Google has done. Here are a few of the notable images you can find with a little digging on Google’s Life Magazine Archive: Read more
I have a deep love for all things lomographic. It goes completely against my desire for perfect pictures, but totally for my desire for cool and wacky things. The White Stripes have partnered with Lomographic and created viciously cool versions of the Diana and Holga cameras. I would love to own one of both of these, but at $180 price tag, I just can’t justify it. That’s a really huge mark-up, but zang, those are really cool cameras.
In conjunction with Charmed Labs, we’ve just announced a public beta for the GigaPan robotic camera mount. Here is the Carnegie Mellon press release regarding the announcement on September 26. This first model is capable of capturing multi-gigapixel, explorable panoramas with most compact digital cameras. Introductory pricing for the beta device is $279. We’re looking for people to help! If you’re interested and have time to capture lots of panoramas in the next couple of months, please apply here no later than October 19. Applicants will be informed by October 26.
For the photographer looking to save a few thousand dollars on Photoshop, FotoFlexor has added even more tools to it’s online photo editor including Morph, Smart Resize and Insert-A-Face.
This is from a press release, but it sounds pretty cool:
FotoNation.net www.fotonation.net, the FotoNation spin-out company for Internet imaging products and services for the digital photography market, announced today that they are supporting the “America at Home†book project. In association with Nikon, FotoNation.net is providing 100 Nikon COOLPIX S51c Wi-Fi digital cameras to the professional photographers involved in the project. Produced by Rick Smolan, the creator of the well-known “A Day in the Life of America†book series, “America at Home†is expected to include several million photos—the most extensive record of American home life at the beginning of the 21st century.
Each of the 100 professional photographers involved in the “America at Home†book project will receive a Nikon COOLPIX s51c featuring Nikon’s newest Wi-Fi sharing technology, which allows photographers to instantly send images wirelessly via email or upload photos to Nikon’s new my Picturetown photo sharing and storage site (www.mypicturetown.com) powered by FotoNation.net.
Lots of photographers use sites such as Collages.net and dotPhoto.com to sell their work, but some pros like to do it themselves. The latest in boxed options is PhotoStore, which at $295, let’s you build your own store to sell your prints.
MediaStreet has added bluetooth technology to their latest digital photo frame. Users will be able to transfer images from their bluetooth equipped phone directly to the eMotion Bluetooth Digital Picture Frame without using any cables. The frame will also feature a slot for the most common digital memory types and a USB 2.0 input for jump drives. Very cool.
Efotolab.com update their site this month to give professional photographers more product and selling options. Besides updating their efotoloader software, the company has also added post-production tools to allow customers to watermark and resize images life on the site. It also features new products such as offering high end printing choices on several types of pro papers.
Fans of onOne Software’s popular Photoshop filters will be happy to know that the company has released the upgrades for Photoshop CS3. If you purchased your software after December 18, 2006, you’ll be able to upgrade for free on most packages. Check out onOne’s website for more details on upgrading.
