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.

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]

Microsoft wants to jump into the online photo and video sharing game, competing with sites like Flickr, Youtube, Rezzer, Smugmug, etc. It’s an obvious move for the Windows Live time, and one that most people saw coming a long time ago, but one that was outlined in a job posting this week. The question however, is whether or not Windows Live and their “DMX” or Digital Memories Experience team can produce something which will tempt users away from their tried and true services.

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.

With ever growing multitudes of images collecting online from millions of sources, when one steps back and tries to envision the whole picture, it’s understandably rather difficult. How do these endless numbers of photographs relate, or network to one another? It’s a daunting question, but one that a firm headed by developer Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who created a technology known as Seadragon. was willing to take on with the help of Microsoft, who acquired them last year.

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)

If you use Adobe Lightroom to edit your pictures, and Flickr to share them with the world, there’s a nice way to combine the two into a single workflow using the Flickr Uploadr – a tool from Flickr that (on its own) helps automate the process of sending pictures to your Flickr account. You just need to set it up with your account information, and away you go.

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”.

Digital photography has not only taken over from film but it has enabled many people to take many more (and therefore a great number of saleable) pictures. With instant in-camera feedback, and with access to tools and software that may have previously been limited to pro photography studios, more amateur photographers are creating better photos, faster. One outlet for selling your photography to stock websites. There are numerous stock websites that let you display your work for prospective buyers who will pay for the use of those pictures. All these services are free to join.

iStockphoto

One of the premiere stock photography sites on the internet is iStockphoto (it’s the first to come up on a search for the term). They currently has more than 2 million images to choose from and garners another 15,000 or so every day. iStockphoto gets good search results for many terms on Google, Yahoo, etc. Unfortunately, however, they do not have an FTP server (meaning you need to upload your photos via the website). You can earn 20-40% commission on your work.

Fotolia

Fotolia has over 2.5 million photos in the database and is growing quickly. They do allow you to FTP to their server, and commission is 50-80%, and get fairly good results on image search engines as well.

Dreamstime

My third suggestion is Dreamstime which is slightly newer to the stock photo scene. They also provide FTP access, and offer 50-65% commission.