This Week in the World looks at the past week’s most interesting stories out of the photo world.
A photographer who found a camera in a thrift store that still had undeveloped film in it found the original owners of the camera in a matter of hours on Facebook.
Another week, another controversy about photo manipulation: An op-ed in the New York Times questioned statements made in a previous blog post by Deborah Needleman, the editor of their own monthly fashion magazine, T, about “adding some fat to [the model] with Photoshop” in regards to the latest issue’s cover model. (via Pop Photo)
A Swiss research group created a 180-degree compound eye camera in response to a similar camera made by researchers at the University of Illinois. (via PetaPixel)
Dust off that old Flickr account: the photo-sharing site recently revamped its interface and gifted its users a free terabyte of space. (via DP Review Connect)
Speaking of Flickr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently ticked off a bunch of photographers when she said, in explanation as to why there was no longer a “Flickr Pro,” ““There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore.” This made several people very upset, so Mayer redacted her statement.
Getty Images recently announced the inaugural Cotour by Getty Images Portrait Prize for “emerging photographers with fewer than five years industry experience.” (via British Journal of Photography)
It’s like a retro version of Vine: Check out the GIFTY, a camera that captures and prints GIF-like animations in one convenient flipbook. Unfortunately, it’s not yet for sale, but let’s keep our fingers crossed. (via Gizmodo)
Rumor has it that Flickr and Vimeo could be majorly integrated into Apple’s iOS 7.
Leica teased a new “Mini” M-Series camera that would be sized somewhere between the M and the X2.
And in case you missed it . . .
T.J. and Michael recreated Nadav Kander’s portrait of filmmaker David Lynch.
We geared up with the Olympus Stylus XZ2.
And Canon Discover Days are back!
Have a great Memorial Day weekend!
It’s worth noting that the only glowing reviews of the new flickr are what might charitably be called “in-house,” or lifted from press releases. However, the “feedback” help site (http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157633547442506/) at present has 23,000 almost entirely negative comments from actual flickr subscribers, and a good many of those are ferociously, vehemently negative. Complaints center around the look and feel of the main page, usually described as being suitable to sites for smart-phone snapshots, the slow, slow, SLOW scrolling view of photos, the bugginess of the views of individual photos, and more. Almost no one likes it. Plus it now has ads. Plus there was no warning to users that this would happen. Plus a new, difficult to understand price structure. And much, much more. Read the complaints for yourself. Many serious users are deserting flickr for a French site called ipernity, much like the old flickr, as well as other places. Other users, like me, are waiting to see if flickr pays any attention to the complaints before we jump ship.
Thanks for the feedback, Jim. This is good information. I’m interested to see if Flickr will make adjustments based on negative feedback, or if people will simply get used to it, as they do with every iteration of Facebook. Photographers might be a bit more technically sensitive to a shift in a social media interfaces than the average people. However, it is getting people to talk about Flickr again, which was probably partly the point. Personally, I kind of like the new Flickr, but I also haven’t been using it nearly as long as some people have.