Photographers Matt Kloskowski and Scott Kelby have a new website which will air a weekly show about Nikon gear and Nikon related photography tips. This is a little strange, if only because it seems like one big advertisement for Nikon… and basically, that’s what it is – because the site is in fact sponsored by Nikon. Still, all information is good information, and these guys are giving it away. So what if they make me want to buy that D700 in the process?

While we all love Nikon (except for those who don’t, for some reason) it’s clear that DTOWN will focus mostly on gear, which is fine – as long as you don’t expect too many DIY tips or third party gear tutorials.

What I would love to see is a show like this one, but unsponsored – an independent photography studio just talking about the tricks of the trade. I love studio photography, but have only been exposed to it in school – so that kind of insight would be really welcome. The problem with most photographers these days is that most pro’s don’t like to discuss their tricks, methods, and workflow – because that’s their livelihood, and they would rather keep it to themselves. In my vast exposure to the photography community, if I’ve discovered anything it’s that the photography community is fairly insular. That’s changing though, mostly thanks to the internet and attemps like DTOWN.

Initially I really enjoyed sitting at my computer clicking through photographs and judging them with a harsh YEA! or NAY! vote… and the inspiration of the JPG photo contest themes was like a school project, taunting you to get involved with the community. For many people it was a reason to get out there and take pictures, in the hopes that it would be chosen for print.

Unfortunately, a few issues dogged JPG from the beginning, not least of which was their website which made it difficult to browse photos and built a community of like-minded photographers. Having said all that, it was still hugely fun.

You will be missed, JPG. The official word is posted for prosperity after the jump.

Today is a particularly sad day for all of us at JPG and 8020 Media.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success. As a result, jpgmag.com will shut down on Monday, January 5, 2009.

The one thing we’ve been the most proud of: your amazing talent. We feel honored and humbled to have been able to share jpgmag.com with such a dynamic, warm, and wonderful community of nearly 200,000 photographers. The images on the website and in the magazine were adored by many, leaving no doubt that this community created work of the highest caliber. The kindness, generosity, and support shared among members made it a community in the truest sense of the word, and one that we have loved being a part of for these past two years.

Something you should likely do before their site goes down is to head over there and download all the issues in their PDF form, especially if you don’t have any of them in physical form.

You should likely also remember to bookmark their Flickr forum, which will of course remain open.

Photosynth is a product being worked on by Microsoft Live Labs, and about two years ago they unveiled a tech demo upon the world which got everyone excited. In a nutshell, the application gathers photos from a source and using an advanced set of algorithms it creates paths between these photos allowing you to browse around geographically local environments, almost like a 3D virtual world. It was really cool, but now they’ve gone and outdone themselves.

The next generation of Photosynth (which technically really hasn’t had a generation yet since it’s unreleased) employs even more techniques to smooth the transition between photographs, including color correction and steadying effects. Here’s a video of it at work…

Now all they need to do is combine this application with a rich source of photographs, like Flickr or Pbase, and they might really have something. Maybe this is why Microsoft has been so persistent with their desire to acquire Yahoo (owners of Flickr) lately. One thing’s for sure – Microsoft really doesn’t have a great photo service of their own to draw from, at least not yet, but when they do – Photosynth will surely try to take advantage of it.

While there are tons of neat applications for use with the service, Flickrvision is a relatively new and unique one – which allows you to watch (in roughly real-time) photos as they are uploaded. It even swings you to the location on the map from where this photo was uploaded.

What a nice way to worldly culture. :)

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

You simply upload your image (the larger, the better – so shoot it at the highest resolution) and then chop it up on the site.

Once done, you can download the individual images, and piece them together yourself after they’ve been printed.

It’s not the most graceful solution for doing a large print (the connection lines are still going fairly evident upon close enough inspection) but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

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.

What most of us do is store our images on our computer, and print only those that we really like. The remainder of our pictures we email or post to websites which offer photo sharing features.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite photo sharing sites. Some are strictly pay, some have a free option, and they all offer a variety of features.

• Webshots
  Share your pictures through photo messages, online photo albums, custom prints and gifts.
• Snappages
  Fully flash built interface with 3D slideshows and an image editor.
• Fotki
  Free unlimited photo hosting for blogs, 9 cent prints, and photo contests.
  
• Shutterfly
  Free unlimited storage, 12 cent prints, as well as calendars and photo books.
  
• PBase
  One of the oldest and most trusted of these sites, PBase is not free, but has a really nice gallery and excellent community.
• Flickr
  Arguably the most popular and widely used photo sharing site these days, a free and unlimited Pro option with geotagging and 15 cent prints.
  
• Smugmug
  Unlimited photos, unlimited storage, but no free account if you want to share with others.
  
• Exposure Manager
  Nice site with a focus on branding and sales. Unlimited storage and uploads, with an FTP option.
• PrintRoom
  Geared toward serious shooters and pros, PrintRoom lets you create a web storefront for your photos.
• PhotoBucket
  This one has been catching on, and offers 1GB storage on their free account, and 5GB on their pro with unmetered bandwidth.

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.

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!

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.

Flickr was a smart acquisition by Yahoo – a photo sharing website that really emphasizes the social aspect of the web. It’s one thing to have a place to share photos with your friends. Flickr seems to place more value creating tools that let you share photos with the rest of the world. The upcoming Flickr Places will highlight that strength.

In 2006, Flickr added the function for Geotagging. Currently, Flickr has over 30 million geotagged photos – and according to sources the site receives a new geotagged photo every second. With all this geographical location data, Flickr has decided to do something interesting with it (beyond the ability to see the photos on a map).

The result is Flickr Places, which are pages that show the most interesting photos for a location (they call them iconic photos), the most common tags for the photos, and the most heavily trafficked photo groups. Flickr creates a separate Places page for each geographic location, organized using a human-readable URL, and they look like this one (for San Francisco):

At launch (which should be any day now) it will drill down to city level, but Flickr expects it to be able to drill down further in the future. Places will also be accessible via the Flickr API. [via O'Reilly Radar]

One thing that could easily seperate DMX from other services is price. Flickr’s $25/year isn’t bad – and I don’t mind paying it for a great service, but DMX could compete on a price level. They could also compete by tightly integrating Photosynth.

The Digital Memories Experience team (DMX) is helping people make deeper connections with those they care about. We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control). And we want to make it easy and fun to enjoy your photos and videos, whether that is on the PC in your office, the Media Center in your living room, the XBox in your entertainment center, or on your mobile device when you are out and about.

Seadragon is in the business of networking images into a mosaic of human experience. The Microsoft Live Labs application called Photosynth is a step towards that goal. Photosynth uses Seadragon technology to weave pictures together that it finds online (from sources like Flickr, Pbase, etc) and automagically connect them to one another, creating a three dimensional quilt of photographs. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the architect of the technology, shows off the product at the 2007 TED conference:

It’s a mind-blowing task, and moreso because if it’s ever realized to it’s fullest potential, it could critically change the way we view information (whether it is text, pictures, or video). For a demo of Photosynth, visit the Microsoft Live Labs website and try it out. (Thanks, Clyde)

This little trick works on both Windows XP systems and in OSX almost exactly the same way, you just need to make sure the shortcut (or alias) gets into the right location.

Follow the steps provided below and you’ll be uploading to your Flickr account in no time.

Windows XP

After installing the Flickr Uploadr, you need a copy of the shortcut to it. You can either create one by right clicking the Flickr Uploadr in the Program Files folder, or copy the shortcut if it made one on your desktop.

Place the shortcut in the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions

Now simply go into Lightroom and when you highlight an image (or multiple images) and click EXPORT, you will have a brand new option in the Post Processing portion of the Export dialog box.

You can select it and when you finalize the export, Flickr Uploadr will launch and automagically bring in that set of pictures for you – ready to be uploaded to your Flickr account.

Mac OSX

Find your installation of the Flickr Uploadr (should be in the Applications folder) and make an alias of it. Take this alias and move it to the following folder:

Users > [YOUR USERNAME] > Library > Application Support > Adobe > Lightroom > Export Action

Now, just like above, when you go to the EXPORT option in Adobe Lightroom, one of your post-processing options is “Flickr Uploadr”.