Some wedding photographers offer a package that includes an iPad pre-loaded with images from that special day.

It’s a simple, yet brilliant way to get both bride and (especially) groom more excited about the album — while assuring their photos won’t lie forgotten in a dusty album years later.

The digital trend is catching on, said Pennsylvania-based photographer Daniel Lanton, who bundles the iPad with engagement photos. Lanton said in an interview with Tampa Bay Online that the iPad it adds a bit more immediacy to the images, as well as a sort of permanence in a new digital age:

“I just foresee a time when the wedding album becomes non-existent or continues falling away … Now I’m selling more iPads with bound albums. I sold six in the first week.”

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Companies that help you print and make things with your photographs are a dime a dozen, but Photozini‘s super easy magazine creation process caught our eye.

Their goal seems to be to take all the work out of turning your photographs into a nice magazine, and allow even those who are utterly computer-challenged to do so. Here’s a diagram found on the website showing how the service works:

After purchasing the Photozini kit for $40, they send you a Photozini USB card on which you can put up to 150 photographs. You then mail it in using their prepaid return envelope, and receive a photo magazine in about 3 weeks.

So much of the work is done for you that you don’t have a say on how the resulting magazine will look, but this could be a great way to quickly turn your vacation or event photographs into a nice magazine without spending hours on designing the pages yourself.

Here’s an amazingly awesome idea for business cards if you’re a photographer or photo enthusiast. Brooklyn-based photographer and designer Steph Goralnick created the above business card by hand, embedding some film between two layers of heavy stock. The resulting business card looks like 35mm slide film, except the film used was a negative.

(via Photojojo)

According to  Hoya founder Shigeru Yamanaka’s grandson, Yutaka Yamanaka, Hoya’s acquisition of Pentax may not have been the best business move. The younger Yamanaka said the $1 billion acquisition in 2007 was made mostly to expand Hoya’s involvement in medical optics, but turned out to be “overpriced.” Yamanaka, a Hoya shareholder, went so far as to say it was one of Hoya’s business “failures” which led to financial turbulence over the last three years until Pentax turned profitable.

In spite of Yamanaka’s disapproval of the Pentax purchase, it’s rumored that other companies might be interested in buying up Hoya’s unwanted acquisition. Canon Rumors reports that Canon attempted to buy Pentax, perhaps in order to control more of the DSLR marketshare, in direct competition with Sony. Sony may also be interested in Pentax’s user base. But so far, no word on whether Hoya’s ready to hand off Pentax anytime soon.

(via Bloomberg)

LensVector, a Silicon Valley startup working on novel lens technology, has received its latest round of funding from In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture firm that invests for the sole purpose of boosting US intelligence capability by providing the CIA with state-of-the-art information technology.

So what’s LensVector developing that CIA would want? Lenses that focus electronically with no moving parts.

Here’s a diagram by LensVector showing how their tiny autofocus lenses work compared to traditional technology:

Rather than using mechanical parts to focus a lens, LensVector uses electricity to align liquid crystals to a desired shape, which focuses light to a particular point.

Given the CIA’s interest in this technology, it must be working pretty well. Hopefully we’ll see this introduced to consumer cameras that need it (i.e. cell phones) soon.

A fun fact: another startup that received In-Q-Tel funding was Keyhole, Inc., the geospatial data visualization company that was acquired by Google in 2004. Their flagship product, Earth Viewer, was turned into Google Earth.

(via CNET)

Real time photo sharing service TweetPhoto has raised a $2.6 million Series A investment from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.

The San Diego-based startup is one of the closest competitors of TwitPic, the most popular photo sharing service for Twitter. As long as Twitter doesn’t compete in this space with 3rd party sites by starting its own service or acquiring one of the services, the future looks bright for TweetPhoto. Last year, TwitPic raked in $1.5 million in revenue and turned down an offer “much higher than $10“.

Although TweetPhoto still lags behind TwitPic in terms of traffic, TweetPhoto is attempting to ensure its growth and survival by spreading its eggs across multiple baskets. Unlike TwitPic, TweetPhoto has expanded to support other social networks including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.

GigaOM also reports that the company is thinking about changing its name, and will likely do so at some point in the future.

Real time photo sharing is just getting started and, if the investors are correct, we should be seeing much more growth and innovation in this space in the near future.

Google has acquired UK-based mobile photo search startup Plink for an undisclosed amount.

The company’s sole product Plink Art is an Android application that allows you to look up information about a piece of art by simply photographing it with your phone.

The application was one of the winners of Android Developer Challenge 2, scoring a $100,000 prize for winning in the “Education/Reference” category.

Remind you anything?

Artwork recognition is one of the features offered by Google Goggles, which is what Plink’s founders will be working on at Google.

Since the Plink only has 50,000 users, this is mostly a talent acquisition to improve Google’s visual search technologies.

The announcement posted to Plink’s blog gives a glimpse into where Google would like to go with visual search:

The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Imagine a world where you can “Google” information about anything by aiming your cell phone at it and snapping a picture.

Divvyshot, a Y Combinator funded service that launched publicly last month, has been acquired by Facebook. Divvyshot’s 3 employees will begin applying their know-how to Facebook Photos and the service will be shut down within 6 weeks, leaving its 40,000 users to find somewhere else to share photographs.

The service was based around the idea that photographs can be better shared between friends and family by allowing people to easily contribute to a pool of photographs based around people, places, and events. For example, a group of friends on vacation could contribute photographs to the same collection, which is called an “event”.

There’s already similar ideas of collaboration built into Facebook (i.e. viewing all photographs tagged with a certain person), but it looks like Facebook wants to take the idea even further.

Here’s an idea for those of you who are looking for photography clients of any kind: Offer portraits and other kinds of photographs at your local farmers market for a nickel.

In the above video by Michael Hanson for the NYTimes, architect John Morefield describes how he offers architecture advice at his local farmers market for a nickel. While a whole day of doing this might net less than a dollar, Hanson found 100% of his work for a year using this creative way to connect with potential clients.

Photographers might be able to do the same thing. Why not set up a booth in your local farmers market and offer portraits or photography help/advice for 5 cents? You could take down email addresses, pass out business cards, and later email photographs to your nickel “clients”. If 5 cents would create too much work in terms of emailing photographs, you could increase the price or tweak the strategy to your liking.

(via A Photo Editor)

According to an email sent out to affiliates, Digital Photography School has sold over 3,000 copies of their first ebook, The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography, in the first week of sales.

Darren Rowse, founder of Digital Photography School, blogger behind ProBlogger, and co-founder of the b5media blog network, has proved once again that he knows the ins and outs of the online publishing business.

One of the things Darren did in promoting this book was to reach out to photography-related blogs (ourselves included) and offer them affiliate partnerships. Affiliates link to the book using a special link, and are paid a 40% commission for every sale made through the link. With the special $14.95 opening week price, this translates to $5.98 for each sale made.

PetaPixel’s affiliate link has generated 4 sales so far, earning a commission of $23.92. However, we didn’t write a review of the book, which was recommended for maximizing sales, but simply included the link in a giveaway we ran. This affiliate program is the big reason you’ve likely seen numerous reviews of this ebook on photo-related blogs around the web in past few days.

What I wanted to point out was how profitable ebooks can be. There are virtually no printing or distribution costs, and even if each of the 3,000 first week sales were made through affiliates, Digital Photography School earned at least $26,910 from first week sales. Wow.

You might think that this success is due to the 350K+ RSS subscribers and millions of monthly readers that Digital Photography School boasts. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Haje Jan Kamps, blogger behind popular photography blog Photocritic.org, tells us that his latest book on concert photography, Put another dime in the jukebox, has already sold 50 copies in less than a week of sales.

Consider the fact that Photocritic has a much smaller audience than DPS, and the fact that Kamps’ books cost at least twice as much as Rowse’s ($31.43), and it quickly becomes clear that this too is another online publishing success.

These recent successes in online publishing tell me that ebooks and print-on-demand books are much more promising than I had previously thought.

If you’re a photographer well versed a particular area of photography, and have an audience through blogging or twitter, you might want to look into publishing your own book or ebook. It might just provide you with enough pocket change to fund some new gear!

Update: Since publishing this post, we’ve more than doubled the number of affiliate sales. I found that somewhat interesting, since I didn’t expect this post to generate any. Also, Darren posted some specifics today over at ProBlogger. $72,000 in the first week through 4,800 sales.