Photography

When crowdsourcing goes well, an army of contributors collectively can create impressively large-scale works such as Wikipedia's online reference site and iStockphoto's vast library of images that can be licensed relatively cheaply.

But there's a flip side, as iStockphoto is seeing this week: when you enrage your community of contributors, the wrath is on a correspondingly large scale.

On Tuesday, the Getty Images subsidiary announced a new payment structure for those contributors whose photos, videos, and other content it sells. But many fear the new plan--based on the contributor's performance during the previous year rather than the total images sold--will mean a significant cut in their payouts in 2011. iStockphoto stands by its forecast that the change will benefit most contributors, but in the meantime, those contributors lashed out in thousands of overwhelmingly negative forum posts in two days.

The clash offers a glimpse into growing pains that can come with a new generation of Internet businesses. The Web made iStockphoto possible, providing a global network to harness legions of amateur photographers and to reach countless customers. But when it's time for change, that structure and scale adds challenges that conventional companies don't usually face.

Reworking an ordinary company requires buy-in from employees and customers. For a companies such as iStockphoto, Digg, or eHow, though, the large group of people who supply the content also must be persuaded to make the change.

Pay cut? iStockphoto photographer Cat London, aka Stray Cat, is one of many who fears the worst from iStockphoto's new compensation plan, expecting to see her royalty rate to drop in 2011 rather than increase from her arduous work to rise through iStock's ranks.

"My math ain't good, but I know that 30 percent is lower than 40 percent, and I know when I've been cheated out of something I worked my ass off for years to get," said London in a forum post. … Read more

Google issued Picasa 3.8 on Tuesday, hybridizing the desktop software by building in elements of its cloud-computing service for photo editing.

Picasa, used for editing, cataloging, and uploading photos to the Picasa Web Albums site, now incorporates all the editing abilities of Google's Picnik online photo-editing site, according to the blog post on the Google Photos blog. The update to the software is available for Windows and Mac.

In addition, the new version has a slick movie mode that uses face recognition to hold a subject's face steady as the rest of the photos change. It's … Read more

Laudably, camera makers are steadily improving how rugged and weatherproof their products are. But there are limits, and being in a flaming car is one of them.

So discovered Swedish photographer Petra Hall and her fiance, whose Canon EOS 7D didn't survive when the MG convertible it was in caught fire inexplicably. It and the 24-105mm lens attached were reduced to a camera-shaped mass of scorched, bubbled plastic.

Happily, no humans were injured in the fire, according to Hall's account of the fire. Gear fetishists, though, might want to avert their gaze before seeing the traces of the red band around the rim of the lens indicating it once was one of Canon's high-end and expensive L-series models.

But here's the happy ending: the SanDisk CompactFlash memory card survived within the camera, and necessary photos were retrieved with no trouble once the card was extracted from the camera body's remains.… Read more

Adobe Systems issued a release candidate for Lightroom 3.2 on Tuesday that fixes dozens of bugs, lets users publish photos to Facebook, adds automated optical corrections for dozens of lenses, and supports Pentax's new medium-format digital camera among other models.

Accompanying the software is a corresponding release candidate for Camera Raw 6.2, the Photoshop module that uses the same engine as Lightroom for converting raw files into more broadly supported, compact formats such as JPEG. Adobe skipped the Lightroom 3.1 number to synchronize the two related packages' release numbers.

If you want to fetch the software, … Read more

It's a fair question for photography enthusiasts uploading their latest shots to the Web or backing up an archive: where do you set the JPEG quality slider?

Sure, a higher setting means more quality but bigger files, but beyond that vagueness, it's a question without easy answers. Happily, at least for those using Adobe Systems' Lightroom software for photo editing and cataloging, there's an answer coming.

That's because Lightroom plug-in programmer Jeffrey Friedl is adding some quality automation tools to his image export software. Earlier this month he posted an analysis of Lightroom's JPEG photo quality … Read more

With the last roll of Kodachrome slide film ever to be manufactured by Kodak now developed, a major chapter of the film photography era is winding down. Dwayne's Photo Service of Parsons, Kansas, is the only lab left in the world that still processes this type of film, and it plans to stop processing Kodachrome on December 10. Kodak itself had previously farmed out what remained of its in-house film processing business to Dwayne's in 2006.

Kodachrome wasn't the first color film, but it was the first successful commercial film based on a subtractive process; earlier additive processes used filters, … Read more

It's easy to see how the iPhone 4's high-definition 1280x720 video would be a handy feature. It's an entirely different thing to see just how impressive it can be in the right hands.

In this case, those hands belong chiefly to Michael Koerbel and Anna Elizabeth James, students at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, who wrote a short video called "Apple of My Eye." Koerbel recorded it with an iPhone 4, and James edited it on the same hardware with Apple's new iMovie app--all in less than 48 hours. … Read more

For photography gearheads who want detailed tests of lens performance, a significant new option is joining the likes of SLRgear.com, Photozone.de, and Digital Photography Review.

The new kid in town is from an established player in camera measurements: DxO Labs. The company, which performs detailed tests of cameras and sells software for editing raw photos, is revamping its DxOMark site to offer lens tests as well as the earlier image sensor tests.

It's got some significant differences over established reviews sites. First, it adds a parameter the others lack, transmission, which measures how much light actually makes it through the lens. For example, Canon's EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens actually has an effective maximum aperture more like f2.1, DxO's tests show.

Second--and this is the bigger difference--the tests show how each lens works on a wide range of camera bodies; existing lens sites typically run tests just on one or two bodies. Seeing how a lens works differently on different bodies can help inform prospective buyers whether a high-end lens is worth its premium on a lower-end camera, or how well an existing lens collection will work on a new camera body. … Read more

Signifying the gradual spread of a new generation of memory card technology for cameras and videocameras, Transcend on Tuesday announced its first SDXC card, a 64GB Class 10 model.

The Secure Digital memory card family has a relatively long and prosperous lineage. Its second generation to today's prevailing SDHC incarnation comes with capacities of up to 32GB, but SDXC (Extended Capacity) starts there and goes to 2TB, offering faster data transfer speeds, too.

Transcend didn't announce availability or a price, but don't expect it to be cheap. SanDisk's slower 64GB Class 4 SDXC card costs about $220 right now, and Panasonic's 64GB Class 10 SDXC card costs about $500.

Another Transcend competitor for cost-conscious buyers, Kingston, announced its 64GB SDXC card earlier this month with a $500 price tag, too. Expect prices to drop gradually as more SDXC cards and more products that use SDXC arrive on the market. … Read more