More good news for photographers in the UK. A week after UK’s terror tsar called for the abolition of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, UK’s Crime Minister David Hanson has new statements assuring photographers that anti-terrorism legislation should not be used to hinder photography. He is quoted as saying,

I recently met with Austin Mitchell MP, members of the Parliamentary All Party Photography Group and representatives of the photographic press and the Royal Photographic Society to discuss the issue of counter terrorism powers and offences in relation to photography.

I welcomed the opportunity to reassure all those concerned with this issue that we have no intention of Section 44 or Section 58A being used to stop ordinary people taking photos or to curtail legitimate journalistic activity.

Guidance has been provided to all police forces advising that these powers and offences should not be used to stop innocent member of the public, tourists or responsible journalists from taking photographs.

These powers and offences are intended to help protect the public and those on the front line of our counter terrorism operations from terrorist attack. For the 58A offence to be committed, the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

I have committed to writing to Austin Mitchell MP to reinforce this message and to follow-up on the representations made.

Indeed, news of photographers being stopped unreasonably has died down in recent weeks, so it seems as though things are becoming more photographer-friendly in the UK. If you’re in the UK, have you noticed any improvement?

(via Digital Photography Now)

Image credit: Shooting the Man by neate photos

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

Facebook recently announced that it has increased the maximum size of photographs from 604 pixels to 720 pixels, a difference of 19.2%. They posted the above photograph showing the relative difference in size.

While this is pretty exciting news for those of you who upload your photographs to Facebook (how many of you are there, really?), this is actually a much bigger deal for the company that most people probably realize. With a 20% increase in the size of photograph they allow, they increase their storage demands by at least 20%.

20% for a smaller photo sharing service might not be too significant, but for Facebook it’s a huge change. Why? Because Facebook is the most popular photo sharing service on the web. We’re talking billions of photographs per month, and petabytes of total storage. Just how much data is a petabyte? Check out this neat infographic by Mozy.

Don’t worry though. Facebook’s revenues are expected to be up to $2 billion this year.

P.S. Did we mention we love the prefix “peta”?

Adobe has just announced that the Photoshop.com Mobile application is now available to third-party developers to integrate into their own applications.

[...] take for example a “sell-your-home-fast” application that allowed you to upload pictures and descriptions of your home to some web site that will advertise your home to millions of people all over the planet. Now imagine that this “sell-your-home-fast” application allowed you to not only snap and upload pictures – but also edit those pictures so that your home looks its very, very best. Well now that scenario is possible – all the “sell-your-home-fast” developer needs to do is use standard Android APIs to incorporate the Photoshop.com Mobile editor into their application.

By doing this, Adobe is trying to assert its software as the de facto standard for mobile image editing, allowing it to have a bigger control over things like interoperability and file types. It’s a lesson well learned from Adobe Acrobat and the PDF.

We reported at the beginning of last month that photography co-op Magnum had sold nearly 200,000 prints to billionaire Michael Dell’s MSD Capital. Now, new details are emerging as to exactly what they plan to do with the money and with their future direction.

Magnum managing director Mark Lubell recently told ArtInfo.com that he developed a three year turnaround business plan to move the co-op away from traditional revenue streams – a plan that was approved with a unanimous vote by Magnum’s members and estates. The plan involved not only embracing new media, but returning to their photojournalistic roots:

Although he declined to go in to detail about how the company plans to use the proceeds from the sale of its archive, Lubell says that some money will go toward a Web initiative that will give photographers a platform to distribute content. Funds will also be devoted to helping photographers reach field destinations for stories and see them through long-term — the kind of journalism that was once Magnum’s bread and butter. For instance, photographers will be sent to Haiti over the next 12 to 18 months to document the nation’s effort to rebuild. After the initial tragedy subsides, “everyone leaves,” Lubell says, and because the aftermath isn’t headline news, coverage of continuing crises typically aren’t “funded in traditional media circles.”

In an age where everyone is suddenly a “photographer”, it’ll be nice to see Magnum going places and documenting things that amateurs and traditional media neglect.

Revolutionizing Photojournalism, Again (via A Photo Editor)

If you’ve ever edited your Flickr photographs using the default image editor provided by Flickr, then you’ve used the web-based image editing software developed by Picnik.

Whenever you click the “Edit Photo” button above one of your photographs, it opens up the image in the Picnik editor.

Well, Picnik announced today on its blog that it has been acquired by Google. There aren’t many details available regarding the acquisition itself, but the web is abuzz now with speculation as to what Flickr will do.

Thomas Hawk suggests today’s purchase may signal that Google is trying to dethrone Flickr as image-sharing king of the web:

What else makes me think this? Google Buzz. While I consider Flickr superior in a lot of ways to Picasa today, the biggest advantage that Flickr has always held over their competitors is how strong a grip they’ve had on the social aspect of photo sharing. But now that Buzz has arrived on the scene (and your Buzz photos go into Picasa albums by default by the way), it would appear that Google finally has a viable social network to compete with Flickr’s own internal social network inside of Flickr. By combining the social power of buzz, with an enhanced version of Picasa, Google could mount a formidable competing offering to Yahoo’s Flickr.

It’s interesting that Flickr let Picnik slip into Google’s hands after partnering with them for so long.

What do you think today’s news means for Google’s Picasa and for Yahoo’s Flickr?

“Save Our Earth, Let’s Go Green”, an electron microscope photograph created by Harvard scientists, was recently awarded first place in the Science And Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009 put on by Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation.

Noodlelike fibers stretch to latch onto a green sphere. Alone each fiber is powerless, but together they grip and support the orb, embodying cooperation at a microscopic scale. This electron microscope photograph catches self-assembling polymers in action, but it could also represent people’s cooperative efforts to save Earth, says materials scientist Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University. “Each hair represents a person or an organization,” she says. “It shows our collaborative effort to hold up the planet and keep it running.”

What’s amazing is that each fiber seen in the photo has a diameter of 250 nanometers, or 1/500th the thickness of a human hair.

2009 Visualization Challenge: Photography (via Silber Studios)

Image credit: Photograph by Harvard University