Nokia's film shot on a phone

It was only a matter of time. After a professional fashion shoot done using an iPhone and Sony announcing that it has a 16 megapixel sensor ready to go in its camera phones, a film shot on a mobile phone had to be next. Nokia has taken that honour.

It’s called The Commuter and it has been filmed in its entirety using Nokia’s brand spanking new N8. And to prove just how serious they were about their camera technology (it’s a 12 megapixel number with a Carl Zeiss lens and a Xenon flash), they recruited Dev Patel, Pamela Anderson, Ed Westwick, and Charles Dance to the cause. Oh, and it has been directed by an up-and-coming groovy duo, the McHenry brothers.

There’s a behind-the-scenes video of the video so you can see how they got on, too:

I’m just wondering how good the phone bit of this phone is…

The Nokia N8 is available from Nokia from 15 October. The film premieres towards the end of the month.

RHS Young Photographer of the Year winners

In July, I got a bit excited about the Royal Horticultural Society Young Photographer of the Year competition. I thought that it offered a great incentive to get young people taking photos, and to get them out in gardens and parks and looking at the world around them. But enough waffle. The results have just been released. And these kids can put to shame quite a few far more experienced photographers.

Young Photographer of the Year (under 18) went to Sam Kaye

Children’s Photographer (under 11) went to Anastasia Kapkin

To see the runners up and commended entries, mosey on over to the RHS site.

Hot under the collar

City Hall in Paris has managed to create a bit of a commotion. It’s gone and done something that just isn’t very French. (The Brit in me wants to say ‘just isn’t cricket’, but that wouldn’t really be cricket.) It has censored an exhibition. Yep, Paris, that bastion of artistic liberalism, has been told that Larry Clark’s retrospective—Kiss the Past Hello—at the Musée d’Art Moderne is unsuitable for under-18s.

Now, Clark has always cut close to the bone. (He was the director of the 1995 film Kids, let us not forget.) His photographs are gritty, explicit, and provocative. I’d even describe some of them as stomach-churning. But they’re mostly images of under-18s. I can’t claim that these photographs are especially representative of my teenage years, nor those of my friends (I definitely wasn’t pregnant and addicted to heroin at 16), but they do portray the lives of some teenagers. So part from their intrinsic brutality, are they actually that shocking for under-18s?

Untitled, 1971. (Courtesy of Larry Clark, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London )

One of my friends pointed out that if you want shocking or potentially exploitative, you only have to flick through a newspaper or turn on the evening news. It isn’t as if young people are cocooned from obscenity, drug abuse, violence, or sex and that this exhibition is exposing them to some previously unknown of unvisited horror. This is, or was, someone’s—many people’s, in fact—reality.

As my Ma, who is some sort of bastion of social liberalism herself, put it: ‘When you were 15 I’d rather that you were hanging around a gallery than doing things with boys in the backs of cars. Besides, the pictures hardly glamourise taking drugs or having sex.’ Oh no, these pictures hardly inspire you to shoot up in a dingy council flat in a dodgy area of Brixton. They probably do the exact opposite, in fact.

Speaking of achieving the exact opposite, there’s nothing more attractive than forbidden fruit, is there? How many under-18s would’ve attended the exhibition if it weren’t age-restricted and how many are now looking up Larry Clark on that there intergoogle-fandango, especially after Liberation emblazoned its front page with a slightly raunchy image from the collection on Thursday? In 1960, the publishers Penguin were taken to court on ground of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Which book shot to the top of the best sellers’ list? Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Kiss the Past Hello runs from from 8 October 2010 until 2 January 2011, at the Musée d’Art Moderne, 11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116, Paris.

World's first 16 megapixel mobile phone sensor

The megapixel race among camera phones continues as Sony just announced the world’s first 16.41 megapixel back-illuminated CMOS sensor for mobile phones. While the sensor’s specs may rival, and exceed, those of some point and shoot cameras, it remains to be seen if it will actually result in higher quality images.

Keep in mind that a high megapixel count isn’t the only ingredient in the recipe for a crisp photo. If the small sensor doesn’t retain high light sensitivity or benefit from a proper lens module, the only thing those 16 megapixels will capture is an unaware public obsessed with pixel count.

However, Sony claims to have improved on high sensitivity and low noise in developing this new sensor. New and improved technology, or marketing ploy? We shall see next year as Sony plans on shipping these sensors in January of 2011.

Read Sony’s press release for more details.

Ten Scintillating Street Shots!

Well, they’re actually street and reportage, but then I wouldn’t be able to have my alliterative cake and eat it if I included that detail in the title. One of the most frequently explored areas of photography is what we might class as reportage, or street photography (if the photo has a street in it somewhere, obviously).

A street shot can be a historical document, a candid snap presenting us a slice of life, or a carefully thought out, tidily composed architectural piece.

Or, apparently, hundreds of HDR images of pigeons.

Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that good street photography is hard to do well – the best images have that little sprinkling of magic and catch your eye – so I thought it’d be nice to put together a small selection of street and reportage shots, old and new. Hopefully this mix of old historical images and more recent (as in “more recent than 1920″) street photography will inspire you to get out there and find that elusive killer image.

Remember, think laterally, not literally!

1 – One Simple Day in London

One Simple Day in London by Miodrag Bogdanovic mitja

2 – Untitled

Untitled, by Thomas.hwluxx

3 – Palmers Mysetery Hike

Palmers Mystery Hike

4 – Palmers Mystery Hike

Palmers Mystery Hike

5 – Untitled

Untitled, by Ocularis

6 – Ocean Wave Hotel

Ocean Wave Hotel

7 – London Bridge Tunnel

London Bridge Tunnel by Martino's Doodles

8 – The girl in the street

The girl in the street by **fly**

9 – Foggy Day on the Streets of Brussels

Foggy Day in the Streets of Brussels by Ben Heine

10 – This is London calling Bokehistan. Will you accept the charges?

"This is London calling Bokehistan. Will you accept the charges?" by Rogvon

All photos used in this article are used as ‘fair dealing‘. If you have strong reservations against your photos appearing on Small Aperture, please contact us, and we’ll get them taken down. Please support the artists creating these photos by clicking on the photos to take a closer look at their work!

More album cover grief

What is it with album covers and disputed photographs? Hot on the heels of the Vampire Weekend fiasco, the astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing Dido for using the image of his 1984 spacewalk on her ‘Safe Trip Home’ album. He’s after unspecified damages from Getty Images, Sony Music, and Dido (or Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong, to give her her full name) for using his ‘persona’ without permission.

Thing is, he’s not physically identifiable in the image; he’s no more than a white blob. But he’s pretty famous for making that spacewalk and you can figure out it’s him with a bit of brain power. So does he have a leg to stand on? I honestly have no idea. You’d've thought that with all the money that is ploughed into the technical legal aspects of producing an album, some lawyers might’ve considered this one.

Headsup to The Guardian.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Lightroom 3

…and shouldn’t be afraid to ask.

When it comes to photo editing software, Haje is convinced that Lightroom 3 is the best programme out there. I’m probably not that far behind him when it comes to cheerleading for it, either. (Take a look at my review over on Small Aperture if you need convincing.) Still, we’ve a fair few questions about it that we’d like to put to the team that developed it.

Guess what? Adobe is giving us the opportunity to pick the brains of a member of Lightroom 3′s development team. Seeing as this is too good a chance to pass up, we thought that perhaps if you’ve any burning questions about Lightroom that are giving you sleepless nights, you might like to let us know.

We can’t promise that we’ll be able to put all of your questions to Our Man At Adobe, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get. So, whatever it is about Lightroom that you’re desperate to know, drop your question in a comment (before Wednesday 13 October) and we’ll do our best to get you an answer.

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© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Anything you'd like to know about Lightroom 3?

When I was writing our review of Lightroom 3, I realised that I was amassing a list as long as an elephant’s trunk of questions that I’d like to put to the team who developed it. You know: ‘What was your starting point?’ ‘What’s your favourite feature in the programme?’ ‘What snack-food sustained you when you were up against a deadline?’ All the important things about a piece of software. Lo and behold, when I asked them, the lovely people at Adobe said that I could put my bizarre and possibly mundane series of questions to Tom, who worked on Lightroom 3.

Now of course I’m slightly worried that my obsession with snack-foods and other banalities might drive the poor guy to distraction or the entire exercise will descend into a debate on the superiority of peanut M&Ms over chocolate ones. But I think I have a solution! If you’re the people reading the interview, what is it that you’d like to know? If there’s something about Lightroom that you’ve never been able to figure out or something you’ve always wanted to understand the theory behind, now’s your chance! Drop your question in a comment (before Wednesday 13 October), and I’ll do my best to put it to Tom.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to ask your specific question, but unless you ask, you’ll never know! Over to you…

Our October Photo Competition!

Hello Lovely People. We’ve a little treat for you. We thought that you might like to have a go at a monthly photo competition. We’ll set a theme or technique, you submit a picture to our Flickr pool, we choose a winner. If you’re really lucky, we might even try to rustle up some prizes. What do you say? Interested?

Thought you might be.

Cos it isn’t autumn all over the world, we thought that we’d avoid the cliched ‘Autumn’ theme and instead go for a technique this month. I’ve been obsessing over long exposures recently, so I’d like to see what you guys can come up with using a slow shutter speed that can dazzle and impress me.

You’ve between today and Wednesday 27 October 2010 (that gives you three weeks) to submit your, what will doubtless be stunning, entries here.

We’ll try to decide on a winner before Wednesday 3 November. If you’re the lucky person with the super-groovy winning entry, we’ll show it off here on Small Aperture and send you a copy of 365 Photography Days, which has some gorgeous inspirational shots in it.

Any questions? Ask away.

Being a competition, we have had to draw up The Rules. Sorry. I know it’s not that exciting, but it’s got to be done.

• If you decide to enter, you agree to The Rules.
• You can’t have written for Small Aperture or be related to either me or Haje to enter.
• One entry per person – so choose your best!
• Entries need to be submitted to the right place, which is the Small Aperture Flickr group.
• There’s a closing date for entries, so make sure you’ve submitted before then.
• You have to own the copyright to your entry and be at liberty to submit it to a competition. Using other people’s photos is most uncool.
• It probably goes without saying, but entries do need to be photographs. It’d be a bit of strange photo competition otherwise.
• Don’t do anything icky – you know, be obscene or defame someone or sell your granny to get the photo.
• We (that being me and Haje) get to choose the winner and we’ll do our best to do so within a week of the competition closing.
• You get to keep all the rights to your images. We just want to be able to show off the winners (and maybe some honourable mentions) here on Small Aperture.
• Entry is at your own risk. I can’t see us eating you or anything, but we can’t be responsible for anything that happens to you because you submit a photo to our competition.
• We are allowed to change The Rules, or even suspend or end the competition, if we want or need to. Obviously we’ll try not to, but just so that you know.

Nikon offers a leg-up to budding photographers

Breaking into a creative market professionally can be utterly soul-destroying. I’m sure that the bitter tears of frustration shed by budding actors, artists, musicians, photographers, and writers could sink a fleet of battleships. (My family has probably contributed more than its fair share; we’re a mixture of actors, musicians, photographers, and writers.) Over at Nikon, though, they’re trying to ease the course for at least one up-and-coming photographer.

They’ve just launched the Nikon Foundation. Through something that seems to be part-competition and part-interview, they’re offering a three month paid assistantship to fashion photographer John Wright. If you’re in your final year of a photography-based course at a UK or Ireland higher education establishment, you’re eligible to enter.

You’ll need to submit a portfolio of between five and 12 images and tell the judging panel in a letter of 500 words why you’re the best person for the job. Get it right, and you’ll have a three month paid assistantship and £4,000-worth of Nikon equipment as your prize.

What are you waiting for? Hurry over to the Nikon Foundation website right now!

Always keep your eye on the ball

Sports photography isn’t all glamour: there’s getting frozen on a football pitch in February, withered at Wimbledon, and soaked at Sandown. Then there’s getting hit by a ball struck by Tiger Woods. It’s what happened to Mail on Sunday photographer Mark Pain yesterday.

Woods mis-struck his ball in the rough and it careened straight towards Pain and his Nikon D3S. Pain held his nerve and snapped his shot before the ball thumped into his camera, bounced off his chest, and dropped at his feet. Then he made a swift exit.

It might’ve been down to Woods’ play, but I’m not sure I would’ve hung around, either!

Thank you to Bits and Pieces for the headsup, and head to the Mail online for more.

The photo is obviously Mark Pain’s. I’m not that much of a golf buff, really. And I don’t read the Mail.

Sometimes, copyright is upheld!

Sometimes, the law does come down on the side of the photographer. The fight might’ve been bitter, bloody, and protracted but a young photographer has just reminded a porn peddler from Texas that you can’t use someone else’s image for commercial gain unless you’ve come to some sort of agreement with her or him.

Back in 2006 a 14 year old Lara Jade Coton snapped a self-portrait showing her in a black ballgown and top hat—all rather tasteful—and submitted it, and a few others, to Flickr. That’s not so unusual. How many of us have self-portraits on Flickr? A little bit more unusual, though, might be finding that your image is being used to market a pornographic DVD.

In the grand copyright scheme of things, whether or not the image was being used on a pornographic DVD is probably neither here nor there (although I am intrigued by the implications of using an image of a minor), just that the image was being used commerically without permission from the photographer or model. Doing what I’m sure anyone else would do, Coton wrote to the producers (TVX) and requested that they stop using her image. They were less that co-operative. There’s a surprise.

Would our young photographer give up because a nasty man sent her a nasty email? Of course not. Granted, it did take three years of legal wrangling but finally Coton was awarded $129,173.20 in damages. It wasn’t quite the $434,000 that she sought, but hopefully it’ll make people think twice about using people’s photographs commercially without permission.

Headsup to El Reg, with more details available here and here. And if you’re unsure on your picture rights, you can check out our quick and dirty guide.

Wordpress Amazon S3 CDN plug-in

First of all; you kids are going to have to forgive me for a non-photography post; I’ve coded a brand new thing which I’m rather excited about, and I figured I’d share it with the world.

Basically, I had a rather unique problem: I’ve been using Donncha’s rather awesome WP Super Cache for a long time. Then, in a moment’s weakness, I switched the Photocritic blog to W3 Total Cache. Mostly because I quite fancied using their Amazon S3 cache. The problem here was that the W3 Total Cache plug-in doesn’t play nice with Total Cache. Which is fine, I thought. But I was wrong: It turns out that to get the most out of W3 Total Cache, you need oodles of memory. Within minutes of me turning off WP Super Cache and turning on W3 Total Cache, my server was on its knees, begging for mercy. Then it crashed.

And I decided to come up with a better solution.  

A bit of background

It should probably be mentioned that for the past two years, Photocritic (and Small Aperture, my Travel Blog, my company website, and a couple of other small sites) are hosted on a single server, hosted by Slicehost. They’re lots of awesome, but you basically pay by the size of RAM available to your ‘slice’ of the server. Which is a bit sucky when you run WordPress, because WP is pretty memory-hungry. For the past few years, as mentioned, I have been running WP Super Cache, along with a nasty little hack of a plug-in which would serve (most) of my image assets from Amazon S3.

My original plug-in was buggy as hell; add a link to an image, and it went haywire. A slightly malformed image tag, and it would break the page. Not very pretty.

Anyway, so I tried to install W3 Total Cache, and whilst I like its completeness and flexibility, my server simply didn’t like it. Of course, I could have tried to tune the server to the plug-in, but considering that my nasty hack of a S3 plug-in and WP Super Cache actually had better results… I figured it was time for a new idea.

What is a CDN?

Without a CDN, your server works itself into an early grave by having to serve each image to each user. Even on a relatively simple site like Photocritic, there can be 40-50 assets on a single web page. Multiply that by a thousand web pages and ten thousand visitors, and it all adds up.

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Basically, it’s the idea that if you have a server serving the same things over and over again, it may make more sense to get some other server to do it.

On Photocritic, for example, a page might have about 50 images on it. Your browser will first load the HTML page, then realise that it needs to fetch each of these 50 images, too. So, in effect, it does 51 requests to my server: One for the HTML, then one for each of the 50 images. This takes up a lot of bandwidth and server processing power.

With a CDN, your server only has to worry about the dynamic parts of the page: the HTML coming out of WordPress

A better idea, then, is to only serve the requests you really need to. Like the HTML; because this changes from time to time (every time someone leaves a comment or I post a new post, a lot of different pages change slightly). Images, however, change very rarely.

So, by using a CDN, what you’re doing, is serving the HTML page, and telling your browser to go fetch the images from somewhere else. In this case: the Amazon S3 service.

You could, of course, upload your images to S3 manually, but this loses you some flexibility, and makes posting new posts a pain in the arse. Also, if all your posts include direct links to S3, and you decide to stop using them (or using a different solution later), you’re buggered.

Where does caching come into all of this?

When you look at a WordPress page, a lot of things happen in the background. The server has to load in the blog settings, then the theme (that’s the design of the page). Then, it has to pull in all the comments, the categories, all the bits and pieces in the sidebar, etc.

To a webserver, that’s actually quite a lot of work: Every time you ‘render’ a page, it has to do dozens of calls to a database to put the page together. Like this:

Without caching

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this: you have to render the page: If you don’t, nobody would be able to see anything.

The challenge is this: How often does the page actually change? I update my blog perhaps a few times per month. In addition, there are about 30 or 40 comments per day. That means that about 95% of the times somebody loads a page on the Photocritic site, it is identical to the last time somebody loaded the page. So why am I abusing my server by having to re-create the page each time somebody wants to look at a page?

Of course, I don’t have to: this is where caching comes in. WP Super Cache does this bit for me, but the way it works is interesting. The server basically skips the whole ‘page generation’ bit, and serves static HTML pages instead.

If there isn’t a cached version of a page, the user has to wait a little bit longer than usual whilst the cached version is being generated. Once it’s finished, they get the static version. The next visitor visiting the same page will get the cached page, served much faster (and with less strain on the server):

The red bit is where a cached version of a page is created.

How caching and CDN work together

Caching and CDN solve two different challenges of serving web pages:

Caching takes care of all the database requests needed to render a single HTML page. Instead of having to render each page every time someone loads the page, it gets rendered once, and then served to my users many times (until the cache ‘expires’ – I have mine set to refreshing the cached pages every hour or so – or when the page changes).

The CDN takes care of the static assets, so the server doesn’t have to serve the same image files again and again. By offloading this job to another server, my server has to deal with 80-90% fewer requests per page load.

Together, these two solutions dramatically improve the user experience of my WordPress blog, but it also means that my server can handle more traffic, responds faster to requests, and becomes cheaper.

Enter the WP Kamps Amazon S3 CDN!

So I sat down, threw away my original plug-in (which was called “S3 Hack” for an excellent reason: it was a hack, never meant for long-term use), and started afresh.

The logic in the plug-in works a little something like this:

Logic diagram for the S3 CDN plugin v0.1

Or, if you are more of a list person:

1. It captures the entire page
2. Finds any image tags
3. Checks the SRC attribute of the image tag
4. If the image referred to runs on Photocritic …
5. … checks if the image exists on the S3 CDN cache …
6. … and replaces the URL with the CDN version if it is found
7. If the image isn’t found, it tries to write the file to the S3 CDN
8. Then returns the HTML page with the relevant URLs re-written

Sounds pretty simple, yes? And it is, of course. But it works incredibly well; The image assets are served from Amazon S3, the HTML files are served from the database (or WP Super Cache, if they are cached).

Can I try it?

You’d be crazy to, because it’s an early beta version. But if you fancy it, knock yourself out.

To install it:

• Get an Amazon AWS S3 account
• Download WP Kamps Amazon S3 CDN Plugin
• Open the S3-replace.php file, and edit the preferences near the top of the file
• Upload it to your Plugins folder, then activate it via your WordPress
• If you are using a caching solution; Clear your cache.

… And that’s it, really. Your image files will now be served from the Amazon S3 CDN solution.

Version history

v0.5.7 – Adds a database layer to avoid extraneous calls to S3 to check whether the files are there.

v0.2 – Re-packages the 0.1 release with fewer extraneous files.

v0.1 – First release of the plug-in.

FAQ

Q: How do I update an image in the CDN?

A: At the moment, you can’t. All you can do is delete the image from the CDN manually. You can also delete all the files off the CDN; it’ll re-build over time, as people are requesting your files.

Q: How can I turn it off?

A: Just disable the plug-in, and clear your cache – your files will be served from your own server again, and you can safely delete them from your S3 account.

Q: I need help…

A: At the moment, I haven’t got the capacity to offer much in the way of advice, I’m afraid. In due course, I’m hoping to be able to create proper documentation and an admin configuration screen within WordPress so you don’t have to edit your files manually.

Huge thanks go to…

… W-Shadow for his ‘How to filter whole pages in WordPress‘ article.

… S.C Chen for his PHP Simple HTML DOM framework, which is included in this plug-in

… Donovan Schönknecht for his PHP S3 library, also included as part of this plug-in.

… Matt Kane of CleVR and BeeTight fame, for pointing me in the right direction for a couple of tricky questions I had right at the beginning of starting to develop this thing

What’s still to come?

• Admin panel to change the settings of the plugin
• Automatic creation of buckets in S3
• Configuration test

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Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

© Kamps Consulting Ltd. This article is licenced for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a license. More info.

Another day, another photo-sharing website

I’m intrigued: just how many photo-sharing websites can the market bear? Today, the answer is ‘At least one more.’ Or so Olympus thinks, anyway. It has just announced details of its latest addition to the mix. It’s called [ib on the net]. Obviously Olympus’ marketing peeps were so convinced that we’d be bowled over by all the lovely functions offered by the site that a catchy name was just not that important. We’d better look at what it can do then, shouldn’t we?

The idea is that you should be able to take your photos, then upload them to the site, share them, store them, and print them in one streamlined process. So far, so good. What’s more, a group of people can upload their photos to one shared area: when you celebrate your niece’s third birthday everyone at the party can share and see their photos in one place. And a photo book can be made from everyone’s pictures, not just yours. That’s rather dandy.

Right now, it, okay, [ib on the net], offers 2GB of free storage, but it’s in beta and it is only available to people in the USA or Japan. That means I’ll continue to use other photo-sharing sites if I want to use my photos creatively. Who knows how it is going to alter. Maybe I’m just being cynical, but I can’t see it taking over the world quite yet. What do you guys think? Have Olympus hit on something here, or are there enough means to share, store, and print your pictures?

Facebook updates photos features

Recently, I wrote an article about Flickr reaching the five billionth photo milestone. What I didn’t mention in that article was how Facebook is seeing monthly photo uploads at 2.5 times the pace of Flickr’s annual uploads. That’s right… Facebook users upload approximately 2.5 billion photos per month. With that many photos circulating the Facebook community, it’s no wonder that the social media giant has just decided to roll out some new features regarding user photos.

Hi-Res Images

Facebook has always been a place where users can share quick snapshots of their lives, usually taken with point-and-shoot cameras or mobile devices. After all, most people don’t even own a dSLR. The standard resolution for Facebook photos is currently 720 pixels, so you can see why it’s a big deal that they’ve just upped the resolution to a whopping 2048 pixels.

Users will now have the option to upload images in either standard or high-res quality. But that’s not all. There will also be a “download” button located underneath each photo, allowing users to download any of these high-res images in JPG format. Before, anyone with half a brain could have just as easily right clicked and saved as, but this extra button makes it that much easier for people to download your photos.

Light Boxes

While increasing resolution to 2048 pixels already does wonders for the quality of user photos, Facebook has gone one step further and will be implementing “light boxes” as well. This means that every time you click on an image, the photo will load on top of a darkened version of the content you were looking at, giving each photograph (especially the high res ones) an elegant feel.

Tagging

Another feature that Facebook will be implementing is bulk tagging. Currently, you can tag a friend in a photo, but each image must be tagged individually. Bulk tagging is just what it sounds like. Now, you’ll be able to view a list of thumbnails of all the pictures in an album where you can tag your cousin Larry’s goofy mug in multiple pictures, all at the same time. This definitely makes tagging less of a hassle and much more efficient.

Flash Uploader

Last, but not least, Facebook will now use a Flash-based uploader when adding pictures. This should increase reliability and speed. Users with newer computers and fast internet speeds may not see much of a difference, but it should be noticeable to those with older computers and crummy connections.

How does this affect photographers?

Well, you’ve probably heard this many times over the last year or two, but Facebook isn’t quite the ideal place for photographers to set up their portfolios anyway. Their terms of service have a history of not being entirely photographer-friendly (although they have improved a bit), but allowing users to upload high-res versions of their photos sounds like trouble to me.

Of course, if you only have a small tight-knit group of friends on Facebook, then realistically you don’t have much to worry about. Personally, I feel safe in saying that my friends don’t quite have an interest in “stealing” my pictures so they can sell or misuse them in any way whatsoever.

But like any other online community, a photographer always takes a risk simply by uploading his or her work, whether it be Facebook or Flickr. There’s always going to be that slight chance, and the only way to prevent it is to not put any of your work online at all. Strong arguments for either side can be made, and I’m sure this topic will be up for some heated debate. It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few weeks as Facebook rolls out its new features to the rest of the planet.

(via Inside Facebook)

10 ravishing rain-filled shots

It’s raining here in London. Actually, it seems to be raining pretty solidly across Britain today. It’s creating havoc at Celtic Manor where the Ryder Cup is being hosted. However, interference with sporting events aside, rain can make for some pretty awesome photos, so I’ve been poking about the Flickr-webs to see what flashes of gorgeousness are lurking amongst it. These are they. Enjoy!

1 – Dark Rain

'Dark Rain', by kirainet

2 – It was raining and just finished

'It was raining and just finished', by lrnirjhar

3 – Maple Leaf in Rain

'Maple Leaf in Rain', by Greg from Maine

4 – Paris in the rain

'Paris in the rain', by epic steve

5 – Peyto Lake Rain Storm

'Peyto Lake Rain Storm', by HDRob

6 – Rain washed rose

'Rain washed rose', by epicnom

7 – I wish it would rain dawn

'I wish it rain dawn', by Onironauta

8 – Collecting rain drops

'Collecting rain drops', by ZaIGHaM-IslaM

9 – Rain on the window

'Rain on the window', by hausstaubmilbe

10 – It Might Rain

'It Might Rain', by A guy with a camera

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DropMocks: Photo-sharing in its simplest form

I just came across a new photo-sharing site, and it’s so easy to use it makes navigating Facebook feel like learning quantum physics. There are no titles, no captions, no text at all. Just images. And it’s free. So, what’s this addition to the plethora of photo-sharing sites already out there?

It’s called DropMocks and it’s just as it sounds. You drag and drop your images from your computer right into the browser’s window to create a minimalistic photo gallery. You don’t even need to create an account, unless you want to keep track of your “mocks.” And if you do want to create one, it’s as simple as logging in with your Gmail address. Once you’re done dropping in your photos, you’ll be given a URL to copy and share with your friends.

The site’s uploader currently supports only Firefox and Google Chrome browsers. However, your gallery can be viewed by friends using any browser at all. And since it was created using HTML5, DropMocks is completely mobile friendly.

“Bleh, just another photo-sharing site,” you say? Not so quickly, my friend. What makes DropMocks different from all the others is its simple minimalistic structure. It literally took me 30 seconds to make my own gallery of 15 photos. Yes, you’re not able to add a description of the picture or view stats about how many times it was seen. But that’s not the point here.

Minimalist photo-sharing. Room enough in an already crowdedmarket?

You’ve all heard the phrase, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ Well that’s what DropMocks is going for. Your images should speak for themselves, and nothing looks better than a crisp clean photo on a plain white background.

If you want to title every single picture and describe where and how you shot it, then Flickr or Smugmug or even Facebook is for you. But if you just got home from a trip to Greece and you want to show off your photos in a beautiful art-gallery style, what better way than to spend five short minutes uploading your pics and posting a link or emailing it to your friends and family?

However, keep in mind that this is not a replacement, nor should it be, for photo-sharing giants like Flickr. And while its minimalistic structure is its main appeal to photographers such as myself, I’m interested to see if DropMocks’ features will increase along with its popularity. Too many features and it becomes lost amongst all the other photo-sharing sites.

In the meantime, feel free to take a peek at my sample DropMocks gallery, or make your own and post the link in the comments section below so we can see yours.

From found photographs to found cameras

Maybe you’ve been there before. You’re at a pub with some friends on a Saturday night. You’ve got your digital point-and-shoot camera in your pocket or bag, and as the beer starts to flow easier with each pint, you start snapping pictures like a twelve year old girl at a Justin Bieber concert.

But unlike the twelve year old, you’re completely obliterated. A few hours and eight tequila shots later, you stumble out onto the streets, leaving something behind on your barstool. It’s not that any of those 127 pictures you took that night are worth a damn, but still… you lost your camera and some memories of you and your friends in a drunken stupor. (Well, I guess they’re not really memories if you don’t remember them. Evidence, perhaps.)

In the past, you’d suck it up and deal with it. What else could you do but go and buy another camera? Well now, my friends, there’s hope. Two years ago, a Canadian guy, Matt Prepost, started a blog with the intention of reuniting lost cameras with their hopeless owners.

Finders of lost cameras can go to www.ifoundyourcamera.net and send in four or more photos taken from the memory card. Prepost will then upload the pictures along with details of where the camera was found in the hopes that its owner will visit the site and claim the camera.

Since its creation, the site has over 400 posts for lost cameras and has seen almost five million visitors. Cameras have been found and reported from California to Italy to Indonesia, and while only a few dozen have been claimed to this point, the site has potential to help reunite hundreds of camera owners with their long-lost photos.

Being a victim myself, I love the concept behind this site. However, my camera was stolen in Barcelona rather than being misplaced in a neighbourhood bar, so it’s highly improbable that the thief will be sending in my photos of a Cruzcampo-laden Carnival trip to Cádiz anytime soon. Jeez, come to think about it, do I even want to see those pictures, anyway?

Memory cards from space!

Ever wondered how durable an SD card is? Could you drop it in the sea? How about hit it with a hammer? Spatter it with paint? I don’t fancy doing any of those things to my memory cards, but Samsung has come up with a fairly novel way to test its SD cards’ durability, and you fancy getting involved, you have the opportunity to, too.

100 SD cards are going to be attached to paper planes and then dropped from a meteorological balloon, 30,000 metres above the ground. No, Samsung doesn’t need help folding the paper planes; what it needs help with is the content of the SD cards.

Want to see one of your pictures (or a film, or a message) sent 30,000 above sea-level and come back to earth on the wings of a paper plane? Then pay a visit to the project website. You can upload your snippets of gorgeousness there.

Launch day is in mid-October, and takes place at a secret location in Cambridgeshire. How very James Bond.

If you’re lucky enough to retrieve one of the planes, and they might get as far as Siberia, there are picture instructions telling you how to test the SD card to see if it survived, and where to re-upload the images to prove that it did.

For a good giggle, there’s the promotional video, too. Take a look:

Found photographs

No, I haven’t found a stash of mysterious photographs in the attic of the Small Aperture Mansion. (Although, it is altogether possible there are heaps of photos up there. I should take a look.) I suppose it was more a question of, if I were to find a suitcase bulging with prints of no known provenance, what exactly would I do with them? I got thinking about this when I used a Polaroid print quite randomly as a bookmark. (My usual bookmark of choice is a train ticket.)

You see, I follow a blog called Forgotten Bookmarks. The guy who runs it owns a secondhand bookshop and he documents the postcards, the recipes, the newspaper clippings, the receipts, and all the odd things that turn up amongst his stock. Unsurprisingly, the largest category of forgotten bookmarks is photographs. And some of them can be very sweet indeed. Go take a peek.

But you can probably follow my train of thought.

So, what to do with these hypothetical found photos of mine? There are quite a few websites out there devoted to cataloguing found photographs. Let’s start with a big hitter. Flickr has not one, but two found photo pools: Found Photographs and The Museum of Found Photographs. How much information you get with each picture depends on who submits it, but it’s a fun way to while away some time!

Look at me was started by Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu when they found a few photos lying in a Paris street in 1998. From those few pictures, there are now 634. It hasn’t been updated in yonks, but it isn’t exactly as if things have gone out of date on it.

Time Tales was a project started by Astrid van Loo, a photographer, and Dick Dijkman, a webdesigner. I love the design on this site. It’s arranged according to the suspected decade of the photos, and whatever information that can be gathered from the picture is displayed, but nothing that amounts to speculation. You can even send a small selection of the images as e-cards.

The picture that started it for Lost Photo Gallery

The Lost Photo Gallery all started when a guy found a passport photo in the street. And then another. And then another. The site has grown from just passport photos, but it still reminds me of the film Amelie.

There are other takes on the found photo ideal out there: some guy has catalogued his finds from filesharing at Found Photos, and someone tried to set up a forum to help learn more about found photos at Lost-and-Found-Photos. That seems quite dead, though. Somehow, though, letting these pictures just be seems okay, too.

If you’ve ten minutes to spare, go for a browse and let yourself wonder who these people were and the kinds of lives that they lived. (But be careful, because some of the pictures aren’t always entirely safe for work.)