“Given all the brouhaha over self-published books (or, more accurately, books on demand) I thought I’d give it a shot myself… A few days later, my little booklet arrived in the mail. What can I say? While on the outside everything looks fine (apart from the fact that the image on the cover is stretched slightly), the images inside the book look like crap.”

“Getty and Flickr have just entered into an exclusive partnership to sell Flickr images.

Here’s how it’ll work:

1. Getty editors will scour Flickr for images they deem saleable
2. They’ll contact photographers whose images are selected to see if they want to make them available for licensing by Getty Images
3. Assuming the photographer says yes, the images become available through Getty’s Flickr collection, and accessible to all their existing customers in the image licensing space

It remains to be seen how many images Getty will select, what deal they’ll offer photographers, and how they’ll select images. But people have been wondering what impact Flickr would have on the stock photography space for years, and this is a pretty interesting deal!”

From Douglas Wilson: “Polaroids taken of mostly hand-painted signs over the past four years all across the United States.”

Like ffffound (for the rest of us): “We Heart It is a social bookmarking tool for images and videos. We see many great images on blogs and websites around, and now you can put everything you saw and liked on the same page to look again whenever you want.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

Web page for Prof. Nancy Van House’s course at Berkeley: “This course brings together several approaches to visual media, with two goals: first, to use the resources of a variety of fields to understand (and perhaps anticipate) changes in the production and uses of personal photographic images (loosely defined); second, to examine the possibilities of multi-disciplinary approaches to new media and new technology. Our organizing topic will be personal photography, but that will be the springboard for discussions about new media and developing information technologies and ways of understanding them.”

“Here’s the short version: Pixish is a new site where you can create image contests.

Here’s the longer version: For Artists: You’ve got talent, admit it. You can draw, paint, take a great photo, or design something beautiful. But you need a way to get your work out there. Pixish is your chance to get published.

On Pixish you’ll find Assignments from people who need visual art for all kinds of projects. Each Assignment will have different requirements and rewards. If one inspires you, you can submit. The Pixish community can then vote up the best submissions. In the end, the Publisher who started the Assignment will choose a winner and give out any listed rewards.”

And here’s Derek’s story behind the story.

“The adage that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is truer than ever on the Internet”

“I’m a photographer. I’m also a web geek. And those two sides of my brain sometimes fight with each other.

As a photographer, I’m outraged when people grab photos off the web and use them without consideration of copyright. I’ve been fighting this “It’s on the internet, so it must be free!” ignorance for more than a decade.

As a web geek, I love the freedom of the web. I love that I can share my work with the whole world, for free. This is the great gift of the internet.

So what to do?”

“These days, we love our digital cameras. They give us the freedom to explore photography as never before. We get instant feedback on our photographic experiments and find out what works and what doesn’t; we can easily manipulate the results and correct our blunders; and to ensure we don’t miss a shot, we shoot all the pictures our memory cards will hold. When we are done, we pack our hard drives with gigabytes of images and flood the web with our work.

But this ease of use and surfeit of images comes with a price. In the analog era, when we had to pay to see what we shot, we were more careful when we took photographs. This forced a discipline that is hard to imagine today. In the words of Stephen Shore, “[Today] there seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint…as one considers one’s pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures.”

This is where our 36 Exposures Challenge — brought to you by FILE and our friends at Coudal Partners and Flak Photo — comes in. In it, we are asking you to use a film camera to explore Shore’s concept of “conscious intentionality.” Broadly speaking, we are challenging you to do two things: articulate a concept, project, or theme and then use a film camera to photograph the images to accompany it. There are, then, two parts: creating the idea and then acting on it. Sound interesting? Well, there is a catch (or two), and if you are interested, here are the rules…”

“A while back we had a roundabout discussion about the term illustration and its limitations. Bob Flynn and Jaleen Grove both pushed back a little against my impatience with the term, and the supposed tyranny of the word which I decried… Frustrated by the lack of a larger narrative in which to locate genres, careers, and achievements, I have been working on visualizations of the development of commerical images. This week I have blundered into print with one such attempt: Commercial Images: An Evolutionary Scheme, a two-page infographic that occupies a central spread in the new Modern Graphic History Library catalogue, out this week. It posits two basic strands in commercial image history: illustration and cartooning, increasingly intermingled but distinct.”

“Use a Nikon?

Or at least that appears to be the message.

I opened my copy of Outside Magazine’s companion piece of fluff, Go, this morning and was greeted by an ad for Sony’s A700 DSLR with the tagline ‘In Photography, Timing is Everything.’ The accompanying photograph was spectacular and showed a leopard about to dispatch a baboon. Dust is flying and, clearly, timing has a lot to do with the impact of this photo.

It was also very familiar.

In fact, it’s a 1965 photograph taken by John Dominis for the late, lamented Life Magazine.”

Hey folks: I’m a judge in Crestock’s annual contest this year. You can win some nice Mac stuff — check it out.

Compete for free in the biggest Photoshop contest of the year to win amazing prizes for four whole weeks ranging from iPods and MacBooks to the designers’ Holy Grail – The Quad Core Mac Pro with dual 30″ LCDs!

Here’s how it works: There are four rounds with different themes, and you can contribute one image for each round. Sign-up and submission is completely free and without commitment.

For each round we will supply a set of source photos from our image library. Your entry must be based on one or several of these photos, but you are free to do with them whatever you like. You may also use other elements in your design, as long as one or more of the source images can be recognised as a central part of your design.

“I’m a Photography Director based in New York City. While I don’t care if you know who I am or what magazine I work for, I would like to remain anonymous so I can keep my job and blog.”

“Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. The images / book covers contained in our database may be accessed via a number of categories including by Photographer, Author, Publisher, Publication Date and Designer.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“An experiment to exploit the single frames that make up an animated film and explore the emotions of the creative process. Created with 987 Polaroids and no computer compositing. By Jordan C Greenhalgh.”