Wandering the floor at the PhotoPlus Int’l Conference and Expo
Coming as it did, just a few weeks after Photokina 2008, this year’s PhotoPlus felt a little anti-climactic. There was a lack of buzz about a super-hot product announced just two or three days ago. For instance, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Sony Alpha 900 feel like they’ve been here forever, when they are really just a few weeks old! But the lack of a supernova product announcement or two overshadowing everything else allowed me to spend a lot more time wandering the edges of the show, scouting for cool products and services from smaller shops, startups, and companies that aren’t yet household names, but hope to be—at least in photographer’s homes…
In no particular order, here’s a list of things that caught my eye at PhotoPlus this year:
SocialDocumentary.net is a new website dedicated to helping photographers tell their stories. It is curated collection—meaning they’ve got to approve your photos and words before they go live. Apply for inclusion before December 1st and its free for the first year, after that, it’s $2/per photo (minimum six) to share your visual narratives on the human condition.
And if you need advice on how to make a difference with your photography, visit the Blue Earth Alliance and download their free eBook (pdf format) chock full of advice on applying for grants, fundraising, campaign awareness and more.
Precision Camera is jumping into the Infrared conversion game for both SLRs and compacts. At $249 for SLRs and $149 for compacts, it might rescue a lot of older cameras from their current paperweight status.
Marketer meet your target market. Happenstance is cool! I ran into my old friend Mike McLaughlin at the same time that Laura from Imagespan ran into me. As soon as I explained to Mike what ImageSpan does, he immediately asked for their URL to check it out. You see, ImageSpan’s LicenseStream with Digital Content Tracker keeps an inventory of your online images, with licensing terms for quick sales—and not only that, it scours the web looking for your photos (and like Tineye.com it uses the photos themselves for the search criteria) and sends back reports of unauthorized postings of your images. It’s just shy of a hundred bucks a year for the full service, with a basic LicenseStream account (minus Digital Content Tracker) going for just $39/year, it’s not a whole lot of money to potentially make some money off your shots.
For still and still plus video presentations, Mac users should check out Boinx’s Fotomagico and PhotoPresenter. The web-based Animoto builds flashy slideshows that analyzes both the music and the photos to make a customized slideshow for both Mac and Windows users. And need some royalty-free music for your presentations? Head on over to Triple Scoop Music.
Jill-e, which originally designed stylish, yet functional camera bags for the female photographers has launched the Jack line with three brown leather bags aimed at the stylish and upmarket male photographers.
Xdepth was showing off some very impressive hig-bit compression technologies. For example, they've got a way to put a 32-bit High Dynamic Range file into a JPG wrapper, among other things. There’s a free plug-in available for Photoshop—go check it out!
And that floor photo up top was shot with the new Lensbaby Composer on a Nikon D90—a lens and camera combo that offers cool still and video possibilities. (Check back in a few days for a way cool Halloween video using this setup!)
--Jack Howard
Editor, PopPhoto.com
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