When I heard that Flickr is nearly ready to add video capabilities, I felt a bit queasy. Flickr is the leader in the photo sharing arena by a large margin. The main reason it reached critical mass was because of the community it built around the photos uploaded by users. It is also one of the harder sites to monetize since display advertising clashes with photo viewing and there isn’t enough text content for contextual advertising to work. The $24.95 Pro memberships (which can be given as gifts *wink wink*) keep Flickr from being a total money-sink.

Photos require a large chunk of bandwidth to serve up to the millions of Flickr users, but that is nothing compared to the overhead of video. This is probably a moot point considering the company is running off the pipes of it’s owner, web pioneer Yahoo.

While there are good and bad reasons for Flickr to add video, I don’t think they can compete in such a crowded video-sharing marketplace. Did Vimeo, Viddler, Revver, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Veoh, and the all mighty YouTube leave anything for Flickr to improve upon? It looks like Flickr will have a long, uphill battle to even catch up to the middle of the pack.

Flickr has a huge community around photos and what they need to do is offer more photo related services. Many artists on Flickr have an account at 3rd party sites for selling prints of their work. Flickr could offer fine-art prints from members that opt-in to sell their photos with the service. This way Flickr would tie the browsing and buying experience together and could make a small profit off of each transaction. An example of another art site doing something similar is DeviantART.com (see my prints.).

DeviantART lets users upload as many photos as they want with no file size limitations, just like Flickr. Every member is eligible to opt-in to the standard print account which allows them to sell their art work and receive a cut of the profits. A Premium print account is available for $24.95 a year and offers more print customizations and a higher share of the profits from a sale. These are not run-of-the-mill snapshot prints like at Walmart or Costco. DeviantART does high quality work. The beauty of this is DeviantART can set a base price which includes a tiny profit with every transaction as well as helping out it’s communities. When community members profit, the company profits as well.

Flickr needs something like this! How could such a megasite sit back and watch it’s users point potential customers off to make a purchase? This is money that they are letting go by under their noses. And what do they plan to do with video anyways? Nobody has figured out a successful way to monetize video.

Flickr already has an intuitive interface for uploading, tagging, and browsing photos, why can’t they add selling photos to that list? I feel offering a way for the community to profit off their work while helping Flickr earn it’s keep makes everyone happy. This is way better than adding the latest me-too feature that is already pervasive throughout the web.

Thanks to the Flickr Interestingness widget on my Netvibes page, I stumbled across two Flickr members with gorgeous work.

First up is Sakura who does a lot of floral macro work. What really makes her photos stand out is the bright, vibrant colors that are usually blurred into the background. She sells prints of her photos at Imagekind.

Next I stumbled upon JayJuice who drew me in with her pictures of minimalistic urban landscapes. I love how she can find beauty in an everyday scene. Prints from JayJuice are available at Red Bubble.

If you are looking for photographic inspiration, take a look at the rest of the galleries these two offer on Flickr.

Photographing the unboxing of a product is a big deal in the blogosphere. Kristina must have picked up on this fact because this year for Valentines Day she wanted to take a picture of me opening every single gift that she gave to me.

The Goods. All lined up and ready to be unwrapped. I really liked the alligator box which required me to rip out it’s teeth in order to open it.

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Sigma dropped a doozy of a lens today. The 200-500mm f/2.8 super (dooper?) telephoto boasts being the first lens in the world to maintain such a large aperture throughout the entire zoom range. A dedicated lithium battery pack is required for focusing and zooming operation and an included accessory extender turns this lens into a 400-1000mm f/5.6. Sigma went with a military color palette instead of the typical black. But perhaps the most startling property of this lens is that it weighs 34 pounds! Talk about a back breaker.

Price? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. I guess it wasn’t made for people like me who take photos of flag football and spiders in my bathroom. Oh well it’s not like I need another lens.

Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution used motion sensitive cameras to capture the wildlife along the Appalachian Trail near Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. The goal of the project is to document animal traffic on the nearly 600 mile stretch of the 2,175 mile trail that runs from Georgia to Maine.

Most of the pictures were taken at night due to human traffic during the day. Animals depicted
vary between black bear, deer, coyotes, and even a rare Bobcat. It is awesome to see local wildlife captured in their natural settings along a trail I hiked as a kid.

See the Washington Post photo gallery, ‘Animals at Night‘ or read more about it.

(via Dad)

All season I have been photographing the University of Maryland boys and girls Filipino flag football team. I learned a lot along the way and took over 1700+ photos on the day of the big tournament. All of this was in hopes of capturing a winning shot for the Canon Football Photo contest! The grand prize wins a trip to the Football Hall of Fame where the winning photo will be displayed in addition to a trip to the Super Bowl in February. The submission deadline is December 2nd, which means I need to pick the 10 best shots to submit in a hurry!

So here they are on Facebook, the 29 best shots. Let me know which ones are your favorite so I can narrow down a winner. If you don’t have a Facebook account, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments of this blog entry with links to your favorite ones.

I will appreciate all of the feedback I can get.

Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of photographing a fashion show hosted by the Filipino Cultural Association, Chinese Culture Club/Chinese Student Association, and the Korean Student Association at the University of Maryland. My Sigma 70-200mm came in handy as their was very little light (even though there was a bright spot light on the models) forcing me to shoot at 800 ISO to get shutter speeds fast enough to freeze the action. There were three other DSLR shooters there that night, and they all had external flashes.

Equipment aside I was happy with the photos I captured from a seat in the front row at the corner of the runway. I snapped 540 pictures filling up my two compact flash cards for a total of 1.5 gigabytes. Next weekend I’m going to be shooting flag football games all day Sunday. I think we’re going to need a bigger boat card.

You can see the keepers on Facebook (1,2,3) but here are some of my top picks:

This past Sunday I joined the boys and girls FCA flag football teams for their weekly practice. I was taking pictures, they were working out. This marked the second outing with my new sports lens and I had been reading up on football photography tips that I wanted to try out after the first practice I attended.

At the end of the three hours that I was there I snapped off 342 photos. A lot more were keepers this time around thanks to two simple tips I picked up. First, I set the auto focus to the center point which meant the camera would only focus on things in the dead center of the frame. Before I was getting lots of background objects near the edge of the frame in focus leaving the action blurry and out of focus. Since I was trying to fill the whole frame with the action, only having a center focus point didn’t bother me. The other thing I did was bump up my ISO speed from 100 to 200. This allowed me to use a smaller aperture which resulted in a deeper depth of field. In English, this means more of the subject would be in focus which decreased my chances of getting something blurry.

Besides football there was also a cute chihuahua that was literally the size of my hand. It provided for a few good dog shots to break up the monotony of sports photos. In between water breaks I also took some leaf macros from a small, nearby tree.

The worst part of taking so many photos is processing them all. I quickly rushed through them in Picasa resorting to just cropping and sharpening before pushing them out on the web. I have no idea how others find the time to carefully tweak their images in Photoshop. Picasa is by far my favorite photo app because it is so simple to use and quick to get through a ton of photos. Google really needs to get Picasa onto the Mac because iPhoto is a pain to use.

You can see all of my photos from Sunday in Album 1 and Album 2.

Canon announced two new super telephoto lenses for their EOS DSLR line today. The first is a 200mm f/2L prime (right photo) with image stabilization and an ultra sonic motor (USM) for focusing. USM lenses usually provided faster auto focusing that is quieter than their non USM counterparts. The second lens is a monster 800mm f/5.6L prime (left photo) which also features image stabilization and USM.

Both of these lenses are geared towards professional sports photographers, and out of reach for mere mortals like me, but it is still fun to think about what it must be like to shoot with one of these. On the other hand, I won’t be complaining about lugging that monster 800mm lens where ever I go. There are pros and cons to everything I guess.

It is officially fall and football games can be found taking place all over the country. Action photography can be a real challenge to capture in tack-sharp clarity due to the split-second timing and cat-like reactions necessary to freeze motion. Last year I photographed my girlfriends annual Turkey Bowl intramural flag football tournament. Coming home with a full gig and a half of photos was a thrill but there were quite a few technical problems I ran into.

For one, I only had one battery. The tournament goes all day from morning to night and I need all of the juice I can get. It also didn’t help that the battery was having trouble holding a charge on that cold, brisk day. I would constantly have to take the battery out and hold it in my pocket for a while before continuing to shoot. This year that problem will be solved since I bought two batteries in addition to the original battery which I keep in my bag for an absolute last resort, emergency type of shot.

My second problem was my beginner telephoto lens. Don’t get me wrong it got me some good shots, but it is a very soft lens with a slow aperture of f/5.6. No surprise I got this lens at a great price of $120. For this year’s game I upgraded to a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8. The faster aperture will allow me to bump up the shutter speeds during the day and at night I will probably have to go with a 1600 ISO speed.

Finally, last year was the first time shooting team sports. I had no clue as to what I was doing and just went with my instincts. Recently I have been digging through resources on the Internet about shooting football which is how I ran into this great thread on DP Review.com.

How To Shoot Football 101

Get low…. Not only does this go a long way in cleaning up the background but it makes the players (the younger the better) look bigger the life.

No matter what lens you are using shoot tight. Tight action shots give the viewer a feeling of being in the game.

Canon and the NFL have teamed up to produce a video series of football shooting tips with Sports Illustrated photographer Peter Read Miller. There is also a behind the scenes clip where Peter talks about the equipment he uses as well as events leading up to the game.

The New York Institute of Photography has a lengthy write up on football tips with several visual examples to drive their points home.

If you are in need of some inspiration there is a weekly sports thread in the DP Review.com Canon SLR Lens Forum full of all kinds of football shots. This one from BryanP particularly stand out. Bryan is the same guy who posted the excellent How To Shoot Football 101 thread.

I hope with the new gear and the reading I have been doing will pay off come game day on November 17th. I still have plenty of time to get some practice shots in and read up about more techniques.

Do you have any tips for shooting football?