This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Agency Filadélfia’s short for Câmera Clara follows a Brazilian photographer to Denmark to meet the man who represents the omnipresent bane of his career: stock photography.

"At 1000memories, we have a particular fondness for old stuff (if you can’t tell by our homepage). That’s why we’ve always liked Instagram. It celebrates the old, vintage aesthetic of the film photos of yore. But there’s a lot of history behind the photo filter that many folks are not aware of—in fact, none of the photo apps you know today would exist without the vintage photography that inspired them. So we set out to hack the formula to recreate the look of the analog Instagram filters using the technology that inspired them in the first place—vintage cameras and film."

"really deep appeal of Instagram…It changes the way I look at the world around me.<br />
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I’m not a super visual person; I do not normally take a lot of photos. But now I am, & do. Whenever you join a new social network, there’s this sudden, gentle pressure to be more interesting. In the case of Twitter…a pressure to post ever-more-cool undiscovered URLage. In the case of Instagram, it means posting ever-more-nifty snapshots. And this in turn means that I’ve begun looking at the world around me anew. I used to walk around my neighborhood blissfully — or stressfully — ignoring my surroundings, while staring at the sidewalk (or, ironically, my iphone). Now I find myself spotting unusual bits of graffiti, or patterns that fall trees make against the sky, or how super strange the robot is on Yo Gabba Gabba when my kids watch in the morning. Or that blue door on the brownstone in the picture above: How did I not notice how pretty it was? It’s like my third eye has opened up!"

Make your Instagrams real. Create a lovely pack of magnets in seconds.

New Haven, Conn. — Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

Learn Photography: Online SLR Camera Simulator!

Four years ago, a Chicago real estate agent stumbled upon a box of negatives. Little did he know that he'd discovered Vivian Maier.

stolencamerafinder uses the serial number stored in your photo to search the web for photos taken with the same camera.

Here comes the qualification: most photojournalism is functional in nature. It has more in common with surveillance tapes and scientific photography than art or entertainment.

The final roll of Kodachrome film, a widely-lauded quality colour film, is to be developed in Kansas.

If you want to "trickle" your photos into Flickr instead of dumping in dozens of pictures at one time when your contacts will only see at most 5 in their "Photos From" tab, this is your tool.<br />
Instructions: Just upload your photos as private and add the tag "flickrtrickle" to them. Then visit this page and I'll pull your 5 oldest (by date posted) trickle photos. Hit the button and I'll update the date posted to the current time, remove the tag, and make the photo public. This way you can trickle in your photos as you see fit.

Pummelvision flashes your life before your eyes using photos from around the web.

Follow this step by step post processing guide to give your photos a dark lomo style effect with high contrast, blue tones and vignette burns. The effect is based on the popular lomographic technique and is similar to the processing effect used in many fashion shots and advertisement designs. Overall this effect does a great job of adding impact to a plain photography with cool colour casts and unusual saturation.

Of course, you can click for the ultra-hi-res version of this picture, but can you tell what's going on here? Water drops in space, of course, become perfectly spherical -- a plenisphere, even -- in a completely zero-gravity environment. And perfect spheres have beautiful optical properties. Let's zoom in and take a closer look.

"After Photography" examines the myriad ways in which the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way we receive visual information, from photographs of news events taken by ordinary people on mobile phones to the widespread use of image surveillance. In a world beset by critical problems and ambiguous boundaries, Fred Ritchin argues that it is time to explore the possibilities created by digital innovations and to use them to understand our rapidly changing world.Ritchin investigates the future of visual media as the digital revolution transforms images into a hypertextual medium, fundamentally changing the way we conceptualise the world. Simultaneously, the increased manipulation of photographs makes photography suspect as reliable documentation. In the tradition of John Berger and Susan Sontag, Ritchin analyses photography's failings and reveals untapped potentials for the medium.

Flamingos have many extraordinary qualities, but until now they have never been considered to be performance artists. Now, thanks to this amazing aerial photograph of a flock of Caribbean flamingos in the Mexican province of Yucatán, we may have to think again. Some believe that the birds' ability to arrange themselves into the shape of a flamingo (albeit a rather inelegant one) is evidence of divine intervention. But like all flocking behaviour, it is simply the best way to avoid predators and to find the best place to feed. Still, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for photographer Bobby Haas, who managed to grab just one image before the birds dispersed.

Granted, one of the documented reasons for Instagram’s spartan feature set is the size of the team. As noted in the Quora article, the team allegedly spent a year working on the foundation for what became Instagram. But it was in an eight-week period that Instagram was designed, developed, and deployed. They could have waited another eight weeks and added a bunch more features, but they didn’t. I think each omission is interesting.

Do you want to see an amazing macro photo of a ladybird climbing along a flower, both covered in dew? Of course you do: http://bit.ly/beG7tH

My buds over at LIFE.com asked me to come up with a list of common mistakes folks make when starting out with a camera in their hands. Okay. No shortage of material here, right? And they came to the right source, ’cause I’ve made every mistake, basic and advanced, that one could possibly think of. Hell, I’ve even invented some mistakes. But they did a nice job, matching historical photos from the voluminous LIFE library with my ramblings. They also edited, well, some of my more irreverent language, which, this being my blog, I include below:-)

But I don’t have many tricks in my Lightroom photo-doctoring bag. In fact, everything I was doing I had learned from a brief demonstration by Tyler Stableford, an outdoor sports and adventure photographer who uses Lightroom to make his photos just a bit more dazzling.

One hotly anticipated feature rolling out in next week's iOS 4.1 update is the new HDR (high dynamic range) option in the iPhone's built-in Camera app. The results are subtly improved and realistic looking photos, as opposed to the fake, over-processed look that is often the hallmark of HDR.

The video above describes two techniques for changing color in your photos with Photoshop. The first involves using the color replacement tool/brush to effectively paint on a new color, and the second involves the more complicated method of manually selecting the object and manipulating its light and color values.

We consistently hear from the Argo-bloggers that the most difficult part of blogging is the visual component – telling your stories in pictures as well as words. It’s hard even before we get to the many legal and ethical pitfalls that most folks haven’t been trained on how to avoid. But we also know how incredibly valuable images are for storytelling, comprehension, punctuation, humor, delight and many, many other things. So each blogger has to figure out a strategy for acquiring and using images.

Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the joy of books – reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them.
Holding a finished book with your name on the cover is a truly amazing feeling; it’s one of those experiences everyone should have. As software people, designers, and publishing professionals at the top of our game, we realized something both incredible and obvious:
there’s no good reason why it should take tons of time, technical skills, big bucks, or friends in high places to publish a book. Or a zillion books, for that matter.

Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,400-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging.

Photosynths are a 3D-like space from (tons) of your photos. They're free to create and here's how to do it.

The only rule in photography is that there are no rules. However, there are many composition guidelines which can be applied in almost any situation, to enhance the impact of a scene. Below are ten of the most popular and most widely respected composition 'rules'.

As I write, I keep coming across these important tips and saying to myself, "Man, this is what people REALLY need to know. I should pull them out into a special list at the back of the book called, 'The Best Photography Tricks of All Time,' so people can't miss it."

So that's exactly what I'm doing. Thought I'd send you the list as it stands today, so you'd have it when you unwrap that shiny new digital camera that you get as a gift. (Most of these apply to consumer cameras, not S.L.R.'s.)

While the general guidelines of good photography apply to every type of camera, a cameraphone does have specific features and flaws you should keep in mind when snapping. After two years of documenting scenes of my life with my phone, here are some lessons I've learned for getting better photos from your cameraphone.

Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 8 is the leading photo-editing software for Mac, combining power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos. Make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in creative ways, and easily manage all your photos. Works great with iPhoto!

An amusing 25-step guide to investing in camera equipment:

"An investment of $3,195 would have meant you'd have been all set for 3–5 years, perfectly free to concentrate on taking pictures. The expenditure would have amounted to between $1,065 and $639 per year for a very rewarding and renewable hobby. It would have represented a savings of approximately 400 hours of shopping time, $6,575 in cash, and much needless agonizing over trivialities.

Anyway, George, I apologize again for recommending a D700 and two basic lenses even though you're just starting out. No doubt you will want to learn your own lessons, and make your own progress through a succession of gear, just as most photographers do.... as you can probably deduce from the above, my initial recommendation to you possibly isn't quite as flat-out mad as it might on the surface appear."

Which bits of London get photographed the most? http://bit.ly/aDHEEY

"Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day."

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."