Renowned portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz will keep her photographs after all. Private equity firm Colony Capital, the same company that purchased the loan for Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, has agreed to assume the debt Leibovitz owed the Art Capital Group, becoming her sole creditor.

Leibovitz was recently at risk of losing ownership of her iconic portfolio of portraits after borrowing $24 million from the Art Capital Group and then being sued when she was unable to repay the debt. As part of her collateral, she had used rights to her entire collection of photographs, a move that led the New York Times to write that, “one of the world’s most successful photographers essentially pawned every snap of the shutter she had made or will make until the loans are paid off.”

The Financial Times reports that under the new deal,

Ms Leibovitz will retain the rights to more than 100,000 photographs and about 1m negatives stored in a warehouse in Manhattan.

Colony Capital will also be assisting Leibovitz in marketing her work. Founder Tom Barrack is quoted in the article as saying,

We will be partners in managing her assets and her business so that Annie can spend her time and focus in pursuing her passion as only she can do,

Leibovitz’s financial woes have puzzled many in the general public, since she is considered one of the most successful portrait photographers of all time. According to a New York Times article last year, she earns a seven-figure salary from Vanity Fair, and commands tens of thousands a day from her clients. However,

Friends and colleagues said that despite her many successes, Ms. Leibovitz has been shadowed by a long history of less than careful financial dealings. Public records show that in the last two years, Ms. Leibovitz has faced tax liens of $1.4 million and two lawsuits claiming that she has not paid more than $700,000 in bills for photography services.

(via The Wall Street Journal)

Image credit: Annie Leibovitz at her SF exhibition by Robert Scoble

The golden hour in photography is the first or last hour of sunlight in a day that photographers often aim to shoot in, since the sun’s position produces a soft and warm light with longer shadows. The Golden Hour Calculator is a useful website that can help you calculate the golden hour(s) for your location, telling you exactly when the sun rises and sets.

The Golden Hour Calculator (via Reddit)

Update: Darkness is an app for the iPhone that can help you calculate your golden hours on the go. (thx @noahaboussafy)

Do you know what to do if one of your prints gets damaged by water? If you living in a flood prone area (or are clumsy), it’d be good to know.

The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) has an informative technical bulletin titled “Salvaging Photographs”, that provides a rundown on the response you should take to water damage.

One of the interesting tips is to freeze your prints to prevent further damage:

Freezing to help retard further deterioration by water or mold may be necessary if the materials cannot be treated immediately. Storage at low temperatures buys time in which to safely plan and organize the many steps needed to dry the affected materials and to prepare a rehabilitation site.

Vacuum freeze-drying can help you recover the prints:

In this method, photographic materials—either wet or frozen—are placed in a vacuum chamber. As the vacuum is pulled, a low heat source is introduced and the photographs are carefully dried at temperatures below freezing.

Some additional tips from the document:

• Keep immersion time to an absolute minimum
• Treat least stable items (i.e. prints rather than negatives) first
• Keep identifying information near the prints
• Never let the prints dry in contact with any surface, since it may stick permanently

If there’s any chance you might have to deal with recovering wet prints, this PDF would be a good thing to bookmark, save, or print out.

Salvaging Photographs (via Lifehacker)

Image credit: Flood series by cikaga jamie

theprintspace, a photo gallery in London, has announced a summer group exhibition comprised entirely of Flickr photographs, allowing up-and-coming photographers a chance on the big scene.

Four photographs will be selected each month from theprintspace’s Flickr pool by a different industry professional. The guest judge for March, World Press Photography Award-winning photojournalist Laura Pannack, says,

This is a fantastic opportunity for photographers to have their work exhibited and brilliant that theprintspace is lending its space to the best of amateur photography on Flickr. The lack of restrictions on the competition opens up a world of diverse photography, from photographers of all ages, with no distinct theme or genre. We can look forward to discovering some hidden gems.

If you’ve never had work shown in a gallery before, why not give this a shot?

(via PhotographyBLOG)

This amazing video clip shows the amazing collision of two vortex rings. Imagine the kind of smoke photographs you could make if you had this setup!

Anyone know how to reproduce this? Tell us in the comments!

(via Boing Boing)

On an unrelated note, did you know that the vortex ring gun is currently being developed?

In the future, we might be able to roam around a 3D virtual representation of our world, where everything you see was automatically generated from photographs taken at the real locations.

Vision researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University have been working on turning photographs of things in the real world into 3-dimensional representations. This research could eventually turn snapshots into virtual buildings, neighborhoods, and possibly cities.

PhotoCity is a new online game created by researchers that aims to harness the power of crowdsourcing in order to obtain the photographs needed for reconstructing these locations. Here’s a short 1 minute introduction of how the game works:

In addition to playing with a 2 or 3 megapixel camera, they’ve also released an iPhone app:

We’re pretty darn excited to see how photography will play a role in the technologies we’ll be using in the future.

Thanks for the tip, @eugenephoto

P.S. If you haven’t seen the TED 2007 demo of Microsoft’s Sea Dragon and Photosynth technologies, you’re in for a treat.

Buttons is a concept camera by Sascha Pohflepp that lacks traditional camera functionality. Rather than taking photographs, it displays photographs that other people took at the moment you pressed the button. Pohflepp explains,

Buttons takes on this notion of the camera as a networked object. It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn’t have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.

Essentially, it is a camera that – using a mobile communication device – takes other’s photos. Photos that were created by someone who pressed a button somewhere at the same time as its own button was pressed. Even more so, it reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between two individuals.

So how does it work? Flickr, of course! The SonyEricsson K750i inside the device contacts a server that searches Flickr for photographs taken at the requested moment. As soon as a match is found, it is transmitted to the “camera” and displayed on the screen. The press-to-view process could take a “few minutes or hours”.

(via Trend Hunter)

The White Mountain is Charles Leung’s first time-lapse video, showing the stars and our galaxy sweep beautifully across the Hawaiian sky. It was shot in Mauna Kea, Hawai’i using a Canon 5D Mark II (with an assortment of lenses) at ISO6400 using 30 sec exposures and 15 sec intervals.

Time-lapse photography and the night sky (sans light pollution) sure go beautifully together.

(via Gawker.TV)

Along with some news of the collectible 70-200mm Canon cup we posted yesterday, we mentioned that DSLR News Shooter was giving away a 24-105mm look-alike cup that we hadn’t seen before.

Turns out the cup was manufactured by some company in Hong Kong, China rather than Canon. It’s probably not legit, but seems to be a fantastic replica of the actual lens. We’re not sure how long this is going to be available, but you can head on over to eBay and buy yours for $40 ($24.99 plus $15 shipping):

24-105mm f4L IS Coffee cup (This really is a cup!) (via 1001 Noisy Cameras)

The web has been abuzz the past couple days over the collectible L-lens look-alike coffee mugs Canon was passing out at the Olympics. Everyone is asking whether they’ll be available to the general public.

One of our readers, Chris Wilkinson, has sent in photos of the Canon EF Lens Collector Cup he actually purchased from a local camera store in Canada. He tells us,

I saw the photo via Petapixel’s link to PDNPulse, so I emailed the photo to Carsand Mosher in Truro, Nova Scotia. A store I’ve purchased every piece of photo equipment to date, and they know my obsession with Canon branded promotional items. The subject line was “Just one question” the body was “Can you get this:” and the mug photo in the body of the message.

To my delight, The reply was “Yes…and I thought of you when I saw those this past Monday. We ordered some, and we have a sample here fresh in the box. They will sell for $29.99 (cad). A few minutes later, another reply came in that they have two samples on hand. I bought both. One for use, one that will remain wrapped for my collection. They arrived in the black gift wrap complete with the red ribbon, perhaps cleverly imitating the red ring. These samples may have been special, or maybe even an add-on from my camera shop. Either way, I can’t see the regular stock wrapped in black paper and a ribbon.

According to my sales rep, they are taking pre-orders for the mugs now, many colleagues of mine have placed pre-orders for the regular stock when (if?) it arrives.

Wow. If these things actually go on sale to the general public for $29.99 CAD (currently about $29.13 USD) I’m sure there going to sell like hotcakes. Here’s a video Chris uploaded showing his mug:

Yup. It’s obviously real.

PDN Reporting the Opposite

Don’t get your hope up TOO much though. PDNPulse is reporting that the mugs may not be available anytime soon:

Despite rumors that the mugs would be offered as free swag to those attending the WPPI Convention in Las Vegas next week, a Canon spokesperson tells us they were created by Canon Canada solely as a giveaway to photographers at last month’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

They also received another photograph of the mug from Josh Weisberg of Microsoft:

24-105mm f4L IS Coffee Cup Giveaway?

DSLR News Shooter is doing a giveaway for a… 24-105 coffee cup? We’re not sure how real this is, but the photographs they have in the post sure look real:

They’re asking that you register on their site with your name and email, and then leave a comment on the post for a chance to win the mug.

How much do you want one of these things? If one of them was being auctioned on eBay, how much would you bid?