Flickr arguably contains the largest collection of photographs on the internet. It grew up, virtually out of nowhere, and was scooped up by Yahoo several years ago. Since then, it’s growth has been tremendous. While many pro shooters I talk to seem to prefer other, less known services which cater to professional photography needs, Flickr is undoubtedly the joint for the hard core enthusiasts and hobbyist shooters. It’s fun to explore the site and to watch what people are taking pictures of. Now you can watch in a brand new way. » MORE

If you’ve ever wanted to print a wall poster from your photograph, the only option (unless you have a very large format printer) is to take it to a lab to have them print it out.

Now you can do it on a standard 8×10 printer using an online service called Blockposters. » MORE

One of the most revolutionary aspects to digital photography is not the way in which we shoot or edit pictures, it’s the way we share them.

Though you can still print out everything you shoot just like we used to in the days of film, generally speaking those days of making 4×6 prints of every shot you take and gluing them into a photo album are gone. Get with the times. This is the digital era, man. » MORE

View Exif data like camera model, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and metering mode in your Firefox browser with the FxIF Firefox extension. Once you’ve got it installed, you just need to right click on any image and get the Properties of the image. In addition to your regular width, height, and alt text information, you’ll get the Exif data also. Of course, the Exif needs to be intact, so it won’t work on every image, but it should work on most full sized Flickr, Photobucket, or Pbase pictures for example. Anything that hasn’t been heavily edited should still have Exif.

Click here to download.

You may have noticed the term “Creative Commons” applied to online photographs a lot lately. What is it? And why does it matter?

Protecting your copyright online is a tough thing to do. It’s easy to take a picture off the internet, no matter what you do to try and protect it. Disabling right clicks, setting as a background image, displaying it in Flash, it’s all been tried. Anyone who wants it bad enough however, can get it. Fighting it only makes it worse, so here’s what you do.

If you’re going to share your pictures online, you run the risk of people taking them. End of story. If you size them appropriately however, thiefs will only be able to do so much with those pictures. As a rule of thumb, I like to keep online photos below 800×600. These will print at 4×6 at a stretch - but even at that print size they’ll be pixelated.

Now that you’ve resigned yourself to sharing them, you can advise people as to how exactly you want them shared through a Creative Commons license. Don’t be fooled into thinking that CC is a way of protecting yourself. It’s not. Not really. But it does explain in very clear terms how you permit your work to be used. It’s an extension of regular copyright, and falls into the “open source” method of thinking.

If you license your work under Creative Commons, you tell people that it can be taken and used, but only under certain conditions (sometimes very specific). The best idea is to ensure that it is licensed non-commercially to avoid being taken advantage of by businesses or corporations looking to use your image free of charge. All licenses require attribution (they need to credit you) and you can also specify if you allow modification, or require the image to be shared-alike.

If you don’t want any reproduction of your work whatsoever without your express permission, indicate that it is All Rights Reserved instead of using a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is for sharing, not blanket protection.

You can find out more about how to license your own work and what the licenses mean at the Creative Commons website.

Here’s an interesting concept - a photo sharing site for pictures taken when they weren’t supposed allowed to be. Strictlynophotography.com is a fairly new service whose sole intent is to highlight (queue Homer drooly voice) “forbidden photographs”. It’s a neat concept - because we as photographers are often so worried about where we can and cannot take pictures, and in doing so we are constantly pondering the legality of our shooting. NO MORE!

From their website:

From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you’ve ever wanted to see that you’re not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty.

Check it out - and start your forbidden journey into photographic liberation!

Up until now, Firefox might have been a contender for the mightiest browser on the market, thanks to it’s extensive extensibility, but one of the things that Firefox has lacked so far is any kind of color management. That means there is no way to get color consistency on popular photo sites like Flickr, Pbase, Shutterfly, DeviantArt, etc.

Making sure the color looks the same from editor to sharing app is important for us. Certain other browsers let you do this, like Opera, so it’s certainly been a shortcoming of Firefox up until this point.

Now, thanks to the nice folks at Mozilla - with the newly released Firefox 3 beta you can activate color management (which is turned off by default). Just get into the address bar and type:

about:config

Then search for this line:

gfx.color_management.enable

…and set it’s value to ‘TRUE‘. After this is done, restart Firefox and BAM, you’re browser is using the ICC color management profile it inherited from your camera (or your editing software). You can download Firefox 3 Beta 2 from here. Remember, at this writing - version 3 is still in beta… so not all your extensions may be compatible.

We were talking a little earlier about Flickr Places, which seems to have now gone live - you can visit the new section of the site here.

So far I really like what I see. It’s easy, however, to forget that these pictures are not sorted by their timeliness. My first search was Beijing (it happened to be linked to from the front page) and I was immediately struck with a photograph from a riot. It took me a second to realize that while this was certainly shot in Beijing, it was actually an 18 year old picture from a riot in 1989 and though it was featured as the most prominent picture on the page, it wasn’t recent.

My second search was for home. Ontario, Canada… which produced some beautiful shots of familiar locales, complete with a map of the area, groups that are pertinent to the region, and even some weather information in the particular cities.

Every page even gives you a little reference point on a world map at the very top. It’s all quite slick, and must easier to navigate through than their “World Map” view. Check it out and let us know what you think of Flickr’s new feature.