Photub

With the release of the iTunes App Store last year, naturally there have been lots of applications submitted and available for purchase that deal with Photos. It only make sense, after all, but there are two that I'm aware of that do something that makes them stand out from the crowd. (NOTE: I have not used either as I do not have an iPhone and refuse to pay to upgrade my iPod Touch to the 2.0 firmware).

iFOTOMO is a viewer for Flickr photos that presents them in a mosaic. However, the user can pan and zoom, and upon zooming make the zoomed image the new mosaic target. It is a very interesting concept, and adds something new to the many Flickr viewers out there, at least that I've seen.

The other app that I've seen that I would definitely purchase, is Nick Campbell's ShakeItPhoto. What is interesting about this, is that it emulates an "old school" Polaroid camera in that upon snapping a photo, with the iPhone's camera, the processing is designed to take a little while to finish, but, it speeds up when you shake your phone—just like a Polaroid. You can see it in action here, and see a ton of examples on Nick's ShakeItPhoto photo blog.

Dynamic Range is Mark Boyle's awesome photography blog.

Steve Berardi has a photoblog. This time he's posted 7 Tips for Getting Sharper Photos.

Save JPG is a site that was started by 15x100, 15 Photographs by 100 Photographers, to try and save JPG in one form or another. (As a side note, 15x100 is a pretty interesting project)

In other positive news, JPG Magazine apparently has had some interest in acquisition. The interest in the site means that it'll survive at least another week, with hopes of much longer.

There's also been some interesting ideas in the comments on the Save JPG site. Comments suggesting that JPG should charge money to post to the site, but remain open to view. Something like this I feel might work, but I'm unsure what you'd actually be buying. Flickr, for instance, is a photo backup solution in some regards with a Pro account. The unlimited storage, unlimited uploads is key there.

But, what else could JPG do to survive? Could JPG turn into a generic photo sharing site, or what about the possibility of taking the community magazine to the next level and let individuals of the community create their own issues? I don't know, but the question of JPG's survival, and the form it survives in, is something I look forward to getting an answer to.

Brent Mills has a nice portfolio, mostly of eastern Asia subjects, on his portfolio at Faulty Drive. When you're done looking at the pretty pictures, be sure to check out his Photoshop tutorials and photo tips.

TWIP (This Week in Photography)'s latest podcast talks with Thomas Hawk about The War on Photography (as well as many many other things)

One of my favorite photoblogs (Photocritic) is back with a post about having photos in a photo gallery. It's an interesting read, even if it's not in your immediate future.

JPG Magazine has been quite active with their blog as of late. In late September, a Featured Member post was written with this to say:

"With so many amazing photographers on JPG right now, we thought it would be nice to make a few introductions. Here on the blog we'll be featuring some of the talented JPG contributors..."

Then in early October another post:

"With thousands of photos submitted to each issue, it's incredibly difficult to pick just sixty or so for the issue. Excruciating! We've been searching for ways to encourage people whose work we really admire who don't make it into the issue..."

Since then, there are have been lots of posts featuring photos from different themes, via the blog, as well as the addition of Featured Outtakes for different themes available to logged in users via the downloads section. Featured Outtakes are the photos that didn't make the cut for a given theme in the print magazine, but are photos that would have made the cut if the magazine was, say, 50 pages larger.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see this stuff sitting in my feed reader. I've been busy as of late, and in general browing galleries and surfing sharing sites (as well as voting on photos for themes) has not made it into my day in quite some time. However, with this new stream of posts, browsing comes to me, even if it is just a quick glance. Thanks JPG!

A coworker of mine uses WordPress and Picasa for his personal blog and to share his photos. Naturally, being a programmer he merged the two together via a WordPress plugin. Check out Shashin, which just hit it's 1.0 release.

There's been much talk about HDR in the last year and how you have to take multiple shots of exactly the same thing. Unfortunately there are times when this isn't possible, whether it be because you are tripodless at the moment, or there's some action in the shot. Fortunately, if you're shooting RAW files there's hope. (You are shooting RAW right?) Eirikso has a technique for creating HDR images from one RAW file.