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We're just relaunching in January 2012 with a new angle. DSLR Blog will be about images and their stories (we also write about other topics on Photography too). We welcome submissions from any type of photographer - from baby portraits to gut-wrentching humanitarian photography to pure art. Read our submission guidelines.
Category Archives: Online Photography Community
Photography WordPress Themes
UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2011: Photocrati has completely changed their offering since this was written. They completely recoded their themes with more solid code, introduced 15 new designs that come prepackaged with the theme, introduced their own built-in gallery management, and became the first theme to introduce built-in ecommerce functionality. There’s not really anything like it out there, at least if you are looking for something based on WordPress. VISIT PHOTOCRATI
Photocrati WordPress Theme
As you know I’ve been slowly (very slowly, sometimes) working on a series of reviews of website templates for photographers. This has given me a bit of insight into the advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of solutions.
Along with the team over at Photocrati, as well as a couple teams of web designers, I contributed that insight to help design a new series of WordPress themes for photographers. I think these are now one of the best low-cost solutions on the market (I’m biased, of course). I’m not going to write a full review of the themes, since it’s hard to objectively review a product you’ve helped design. But I do want to talk about what some of the advantages are, and, yes, some of the disadvantages. I’m going to structure this like my other reviews.
Let me start by saying that we’ve converted this site and I’ve converted my own phojournalism site to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. Check them out here:
WORDPRESS PHOTOGRAPHY THEMES | DEMOS
OVERALL APPEARANCE
In my view, these templates are beautiful. They have just the look I like, which is a simple, elegant look that emphasizes the images. The rest of the site just kind of fades into the background. They use primarily whites, grays, and blacks for the background, which for me is less distracting from the images than greens/reds/oranges or other bright colors.
Let’s start with a few screenshots of the themes. Here they are:
They have the look of many flash sites, even though they are not flash. The home page is designed with one large image space that contains a flash-style slide show. The gallery pages contain rows and columns of thumbnails, which I prefer to “filmstrip” style thumbnails that require you to scroll up/down or side/side to see all the thumbnails in a gallery. Continue reading
DPReview Joins the Blogosphere
That’s right, one of the biggest names in digital photography is starting not one, but two brand-spanking-new blogs.
From DPReview.com…
Dragged kicking and screaming into 2008 we’ve finally decided to break the code of silence which hovered over the inner workings of the dpreview beast and launch our very own blog, or blogs to be more precise.
They’ve start two separate blogs: one for the editorial side of things, and one for the developer side.
Looks like they will be using the blogs primary to open up the site to some transparency, which is always nice, as well as being a direct link to the community for questions, comments, and the expected flamewars that are sure to come.
It will be interesting to see how active the blogs are beyond the usual reviews and such, and of course the ability to rant tends to bring out the best AND worst in people, so only time can tell how the community will react to the personalities behind the blogs. So far though, it’s looking pretty good.
If you’re interested in camera/equipment reviews, and photography in general, I’d highly suggest checking them out.
Viewfinder: See Pictures Matched with 3D Google Earth Scenes
Viewfinder is a project from the University of Southern California that promises to allow you to see your pictures in context within a 3D Google Earth scene. It’s not ready to try out but the demos are very impressive.
Here is what they say about it:
“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth
That doesn’t really make much sense until you watch the video and then it becomes much more exciting!
Flickr Launches Commons
What can be achieved when you combine thousands of images, tags and photographers? Flickr thinks they have the answer with their Commons feature. Check out the info over at the Flickr Blog
What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?Well… you can.
Announcing The Commons.
Their first stab at this idea is the library of congress pilot project. While it is early days I think it could be quite an interesting scheme. There is by no means the wow factor of Photosynth, but imagine both working in combination …?
Photosynth Wows Audience at Ted
We have talked about Microsofts super-cool photosynth acquisition before but never seen it demonstrated quite so well as this video from TED
Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation.
I am sure you will agree, it’s the future! 
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Images & Their Stories – Bringing DSLRBlog Back to Life!
We are excited to announce our new series of ‘Image Stories’. Every photographer is an artist and each artist captures not only an image but a story to tell. Let us share your photography, and the stories behind your images with the world.
Submit your Image Story here: http://dslrblog.com/write-for-dslr-blog/
When you’re finished, be sure to follow us on our newly launched profiles at:
Twitter: www.twitter.com/dslrblog
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DSLRBlog
Google+: DSLRBlog on Google+
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dslrblog
With our new photo group at Flickr we plan to spotlight a random collection of images for themed posts here on DSLRBlog (i.e. ’50 Inspiring Images of Hope’). Feel free to share your ideas for different Themes for the group. We’d love to hear from you.
Share DSLRBlog with your friends and invite them to submit their Image Stories as well!