Did you know that Pablo Picasso was a light painter? His most famous light painting image shows him drawing a centaur in the air, but there are quite a few lesser-known photos showing the master dabbling in the art. LIFE writes,

Renowned LIFE photographer Gjon Mili, a technical genius and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the South of France in 1949. Mili showed the artist some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and Picasso’s lively mind began to race. This series of photographs, since known as Picasso’s “light drawings,” were made with a small flashlight or “light pencil” in a dark room; the images vanished almost as soon as they were created.

Head on over to LIFE to check out a gallery of the light painting photos.

Picasso: Drawing With Light (via Flavorwire)

The relatively small 1-inch CX-format sensor found in Nikon’s new mirrorless cameras caused quite a bit of discontent among serious shooters even before the cameras were announced, but now that it’s official we finally have the opportunity to see its image quality in real-world environments. dpreview has published a gallery of 23 JPGs shot with the Nikon J1, along with 5 RAW files shot between ISO 100 and ISO 3200. Take a look, and judge for yourself.

Nikon J1 real-world samples gallery [dpreview]

Twitter, Google+, and Facebook are one step closer to becoming clones of each other (at least when it comes to photo sharing) — Twitter has rolled out photo galleries that display the 100 most recent images Tweeted by users in chronological order.

The images included in user galleries can come from Twitter, yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and other image sharing services supported in Twitter’s details pane. [#]

To view a user’s gallery, simply visit their Twitter page and click the thumbnails on the sidebar.
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Millions of people know Instagram as a fun way to share photographs, but get popular enough on the service and it can be a profitable one as well. Keepsy, a startup that helps people quickly create albums from Instagram and Facebook photos, has launched a new curated gallery featuring top Instagram artists. Fans can purchase photobooks from the site at a price set by the artist, and profits are split 50/50 between the service and the photographer. While only about 20 users are represented currently, they’re planning to slowly add more based on merit.

The gallery is also a good place to find people to follow for fresh inspiration.

Featured Photographers (via Mashable and TechCrunch)

Toronto-based artists Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements have an exhibition titled “Take a Picture” which features paintings that are invisible to the human eye but visible to cameras. To do this, they use a frequency of light that is outside the visible spectrum but visible to the CCD and CMOS sensors found in digital cameras.
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Last Friday the art collective THIS had a gallery opening during which a patron asked to use the restroom shortly before closing time. Turns out it wasn’t just to relieve themselves — the person brazenly snatched a one-of-a-kind Polaroid photograph of Dennis Hopper taken by Jason Lee off the wall and walked off with it. Now Lee is personally offering a $25,000 reward for the return of the photograph.
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Utku Can over at Mint Digital had the fun idea of turning an iPod Nano into the world’s smallest gallery for displaying Instagram photographs.
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When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they’ve upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

If you don’t have a full arsenal of lightning equipment, you can filter the photos by what kind of lighting equipment was used to browse photos that are more relevant to you.
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Yale University has announced the acquisition of American photographer Lee Friedlander‘s archive, and 2,000 prints from his collection. The joint acquisition by Yale’s Art Gallery and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library involves over 40,000 rolls of film and contact sheets by the prolific photographer.

So far, 2010 has been a year of big photographic acquisitions. Just over a month ago, billionaire Michael Dell’s investment firm purchased Magnum’s entire press print archive, which was then relocated to the University of Texas at Austin.

Image credit: Friedlander by -will wilson-

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)