Photo 2 Text

Photo 2 Text is a way make your photograph a piece of ASCII art. This isn't actually a new idea, and you can find tons of tools and libraries to do this if you search, but this site is a quick and easy way.

A few years ago, I wrote a program to do something similar given a bunch of text. It worked best on smaller images and produced color output by way of HTML. A sample of it's output using an outdated version of my resume can be seen as an image of Tux the penguin.

Flickr Color Selectr allows you to search for images on Flickr based on the primary color within the image.

Since today seems to be all about flickr toys, there's no reaon not to mention flickrvision, which is a (some-what) live view of flickr, viewed on a map. Flickrvision takes advantage of the geotagging feature found in Flickr.

flickrSLiDR, makes it easy to add Flickr slideshows of your images to your site.

I Think We Can All Relate...

"I Undo", from What the Duck comic strip is something we can all relate too, even if you aren't a pro photographer—just maybe not in a wedding sort of way.

Original Founders Leave JPG Magazine

Being a watcher of JPG Magazine's community, (and recently a contributor) it was interesting to learn that the company who runs it, 8020, has lost the 2 founders Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. This seems to be due to differences in the back story of the magazine, though it seems as though the JPG's about page has very briefly summarized Derek and Heather's involvement in the beginning of the magazine. I think it's important to read the real story and understand where the magazine really came from, but not let the situation destroy the magazine. Let's just hope that 8020 doesn't further ruin a great thing.

It wouldn't be fair to not mention 8020's response to the whole thing.

Update: JPGMag's Unofficial group on Flickr, has some interesting comments. Most notably the number of "I'm cancelling my account." Obviously, they don't realize that Derek still owns a portion of JPG and won't benefit from this at all...

Also, The Wayback Machine has the old About page.

DPReview Gets Acquired by Amazon

DPReview was just acquired by Amazon.com.

Congratulations DPReview! But, please, please, don't stop writing great articles and reviews!

Qtpfsgui

Qtpfsgui is an free software (as in freedom, but also as in beer) application for creating HDR images. It's available for Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and Windows. Aside from the name, which seems to stem from the GUI toolkit it uses (Qt), and pfs (the set of commands it creates the gui for) it looks promising and is definitely a cheaper alternative to get into HDR imaging. I'm looking forward to taking a look at it soon.

Pete Radocaj, our in-house photographer at work, has posted about Product Photography and It’s Importance in eCommerce on our company's blog.