Elsewhere in Photography

Wired News reports on iPod fans getting their own iPod ad. For $20 you can have someone "ipodify" a digital snap, converting you into one of those duotone silhouettes that you see in the iPod ads.

IPod My Photo is a new web-based service that transforms any digital photo into a signature iPod silhouette-style ad.
Customers upload a digital snap, choose a background color and pay. In about five days, the "iPodified" image is e-mailed back to them. A white iPod and earbud wires will even be added to the picture, if so desired.

"It's mostly pets, a lot of children and tons of married couples," said iPod My Photo co-founder Kevin Muoio. "There's lots of new babies, too. Straight out of the womb -- bang, they've got an iPod on them."

My first response was to agree with other graphics types who think that $20 is a lot of money for something I could do in Photoshop in 5 minutes (even at my rates), but the creator of the site responds to these criticisms, "If you work in design, it's really friggin' easy," Muoio admitted. "But ask someone who is over 50 to do it, and it's not easy. It's not easy unless you've got the skills."

At Salon (daypass or subscription required), Katharine Mieszkowski reports on Flickr, a new (still in Beta) photo sharing site that has a novel way of organizing images. She calls it the Friendster of photo sharing sites. The concept being that images are organized by keywords, not galleries, so your cat images might get interspersed with other photographers cat images. Makes for an interesting community. She writes...

On most sites, you create your own album or page of photos, and invite your friends to look at them. But on Flickr, you can mingle all your photos with similar images, creating an endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities.

Personally, I participate in Dotphoto and Photoblogs.org, and as a somewhat more serious photographer, prefer to control my galleries, but for the avid catbloggers and their ilk, this sounds like a great idea.