Surf Galleries at Real Surf

I've always wanted to be a good surfer. I mean, I've gone surfing quite a few times, but I'm by no means good at it. Not living within minutes of the ocean I suppose is the major reason for this. Just because I suck at surfing though, doesn't mean I can't love looking at pictures and watching other people do it. That's why I love the Australian website RealSurf's gallery section.

The Wedding Photography Blog turned me to a New York Times slideshow of photos taken at a wedding during the recent China earthquake.

The Photo Stream (again)

There's something about The Photo Stream that keeps me coming back. I have a very low attention span, and I think this must be part of the reason. At that site, I don't have to scan news headlines—I scan photos instead. Looking at photos is something I love to do. I guess there's one part of it that bothers me a bit though and that's the photos that get posted that are ambiguous.

A photo of, say, a tennis player could be many different things. It could be that the subject of the photo won Wimbledon and the shot is of her celebrating. Or it could just be that the shot of her celebrating is the only photo available of her when it's reported that she was involved in some other non sports related activity, which is a bit problematic.

The Photo Stream solves this by providing mouseovers which give you a headline, and I think that's probably the best you can hope for.

The Chicago Tribune has a gallery up of photos of the Phoenix Mars Lander, and also some of the photos it has taken from Mars.

Tag Galaxy

As far as Flickr viewers go, there's no other that comes close in coolness than Tag Galaxy. The rough idea is that each tag is a planet (or satellite) and selecting multiple tags will eventually lead you to the pictures you wanna see. It's neat, and extremely well done.

The Haunted Pod Village of San-zhi

Carrie has some pictures of The San-Zhi Pod Village in northern Taiwan. It was abandoned, but no one seems to know why. There's also a gallery at FILE Magazine.

Greyscalegorilla, known mostly for his awesome photoblog, just finished documenting a 4 month long beard contest. The photos he took of them all, make them look like they're in a band.

The Photo Stream

The Photo Stream delivers buzz and newsworthy content to the masses through a rich, eye-opening photo interface.

Note: link was originally broken. Sorry about that

National Geographic, posted a gallery of bats last year. They're pretty disgusting.

I can't help but find Storm Trooper action figures posing, incredibly hilarious.

ArtCal is the "opinionated guide" to New York city art galleries. This isn't just about photo galleries, but they are included.

13 Great Slow Sync Flash Images

FILE Magazine Rediscovered

FILE Magazine is something I've mentioned before, but it's also something I have to say I've forgotten about. They've got an RSS feed, so there's really no reason for me to forget them. Anyway, my recent trip to the site led to finding some pretty interesting projects:

1. The Illuminati Young people illuminated by electronics.
2. Night Aerial Photography
3. Workspace Photos of workspaces. You'd think the photos would have no focus, since workspaces can be quite messy, but these photos have great composition that wonderfully captures where you work.
4. On Coal and Appalachia

Philadelphia Trash the Dress

Brides in Philadelphia that are looking to do a Trash the Dress session, might wanna take a look at the work of Allebach Photography in Philadelphia. They have more examples of their work on their blog, but I have a feeling they haven't done an "extreme" session yet with total dress trashing. Oh, and they really liked tattooed brides.

Life Before Death

The Guardian has an interesting gallery up on the web.

This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living. Life Before Death is at the Wellcome Collection from April 9-May 18

Adobe Joins the Online Photo Editing Bandwagon

Adobe lovers rejoice! You no longer have to use more powerful software on your personal computer where you store your photos! Now, you can upload your photos to Adobe and edit your files from anywhere using a less powerful Photoshop Express!

It was bound to happen. The online photo editing scene has been taking off and lots of sites now allow you to upload a picture and make some adjustments to it and save it back down again. Adobe has been mysteriously absent until a few days ago when they released PS Express. The great thing about it, is that it works really well and provides you some simple tweaking. It's probably one of the nicest Flash/Flex applications I've ever seen. The photo management portion of it reminds me of Light Room's browser and the editor is probably more like Elements than Photoshop, but that's only because you're not getting tools like the lasso, the pen tool or curves. My guess is that we'll be seeing some more improvements and maybe even some other software packages come to life online from Adobe.

Highslide for Web Galleries and Blogs

So, you've got a few pictures you wanna add to your blog, or some other gallery, and you're going to use LightBox to display them in a nice way when a visitor clicks on them. Well, don't. Try Highslide. Let your visitors open up a few side by side and compare. Best of all, it's free for personal use (like all good software should be). (Note: I have nothing against LightBox, I just think this is cooler)

PictPicture

"PictPicture is a place for photographers to upload their work to be voted on by the community. Once an image receives enough votes it graduates from the upcoming page to the front page of the site. It's a great way for photographers to get their work seen and their sites exposure. Photographers just have to register and create a profile to start submitting images."

Basically, it's a photo centric reddit. Not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just not that innovative, at least at first glance. When you think deeper about what it is, it's really a different way to do critiques, but will it work? Obviously more people are going to vote on images that are popular, because they're put right in front of them. I'd love to see PictPicture, focus their attention on creating a great photo browser that changes the way we view online pictures. Something where, PictPicture becomes the definitive way to do community driven critiques.

Not Your Ordinary Camouflage

Desiree Palmen has some great photographs of people in camouflage. We're not talking about hunters or people in forests either.

One of my favorite photoblogs (Photocritic) is back with a post about having photos in a photo gallery. It's an interesting read, even if it's not in your immediate future.

Tagmee

Ok, so real quick Tagmee is a new photo sharing platform (in the spirit of Flickr), which judging by the few blog entries I read has some great ideas. One, is the Active Footer, which helps you discover new photos and photographers by providing something new on every page load. Check it out and don't get scared—it's alright to try other sharing sites besides the mainstream ones. Who knows you might just like them better. (Disclaimer: Ok, Ok, I'm not yet practicing what I preach. My time is still being occupied by numerous other things.. I will try Tagmee out though, and maybe give it an actual review at some later date)

Library of Congress Uses Flickr

The Library of Congress has started making photos from it's archive (that it believes to be in the public domain) available on Flickr. They hope users of Flickr will help provide some more metadata for the images. PopPhoto has more

The Whale Hunt

I'm a huge fan of data visualization and unique interfaces (which I've probably mentioned before), so when I saw The Whale Hunt, my jaw dropped. Not only is it extremely innovative in the way it presents the story, it's also a great example of photography as documentary, or simply put, photojournalism.

World of Sport

Reuters has a look at the World of Sport in a 20 photo gallery.

TiltViewer

Airtight Interactive (makers of SimpleViewer), have a really great Flickr browser (photos are pulled from the Interesting) with lots of eyecandy called TiltViewer.

While it's definitely a very cool Flash application, I don't think it's going to revolutionize the way we look at photos, especially because most photos do not require that you look at them any other way but straight on. However, I could see Apple coming out with an extension to iPhoto which uses Core Graphics to do some sort of photo browser, or perhaps it'd fit better into Front Row. I think this is doubtful.

A Million Little Pictures

Art House Shop is asking you to help them out (yes, you in that corner over there--no *you*). What do they want you ask? They want you to join the A Million Little Pictures project. All you have to do is send them $16 and shoot the film in the disposible camera they give to you. The theme is "adventures," the best photo overall wins a $200 gift card, and all the photos are featured in an exhibit in a city yet to be determined. The city will be determined by finding the city with the most participants.

Update: When signing up, I got an error, though it actually signed me up...odd. Hopefully they'll fix it and you'll have no problems.

Free JAlbum Hosting

I've mentioned JAlbum before, a super customizable cross-platform photo album creator, but there's some new and exciting news from them:

Today, JAlbum releases a free hosting alternative for your pictures. With 8 million published albums, the free JAlbum software is one of the most popular tools in the world for producing web photo albums. Up until now, users have needed to have their own web site to put their albums. This new service makes publishing stunning photo albums easier than ever.

So, what are you waiting for JAlbum users, go try it out!

D3 Jealousy

Have a look at the ISO these were shot at. There's almost no real noise at ISO 1600, and it's only minor at 3200. ISO 6400, is the new ISO 800 it seems.

Shashin

A coworker of mine uses WordPress and Picasa for his personal blog and to share his photos. Naturally, being a programmer he merged the two together via a WordPress plugin. Check out Shashin, which just hit it's 1.0 release.