Photography News - The latest digital photography hardware and software news, reviews, articles, tips, techniques and more!

SmugMug (www.SmugMug.com), a premier online photo sharing and photo storage application, just announced new privacy and photo viewing features entitled SmugIslands, which means users can be an island with their photos. By overwhelming customer request, SmugIslands gives members the option to select whether their photo galleries are hidden or found by search engines like Google and Yahoo!, or the internal search capabilities within SmugMug. 

Image Abstraction offers High Resolution Backgrounds, Patterns and Textures to Photoshop Artist and Designers. These images have been manipulated using Photoshop and a variety of plugins to create some interesting effects. You can learn more about the software used on their About Page. 

I launched another website this week, FreePhotoClips.com, that provides free photo objects (aka Photo Clips) for personal and non-profit design projects.  I’ve masked each image on it’s own Photoshop layer which makes it a snap to incorporate it into any background regardless of the color.  These are perfect for Web Pages, Blogs, Powerpoint Presentations, Newsletters and most any other multimedia project.  As of this post I have 20 photoclips in the gallery.  I’ll be adding more every week.  I hope you find the site to be a useful resource. 

BigStockPhoto.com, one of the fastest growing, royalty free, online stock image sites, today announced that the one-millionth live image has been uploaded to its site. Since launching BigStockPhoto in late 2004, the site has experienced phenomenal growth and success, establishing the BigStockPhoto online community as a noteworthy force in the rapidly evolving microstock industry.

Scrapblog™ has announced availability of its free web-based multimedia scrapbook authoring software service. In development for over two years, Scrapblog lets everyday people mix their photos, videos, audio, text and other creative elements to create multimedia scrapbooks called scrapblogs.

Scrapbloggers can aggregate content from their computer or their favorite social media sites including YouTube, Photobucket, Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, and Webshots. Scrapblogs can be shared with just a few friends or the entire world; currently Scrapblog supports direct publishing to Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and other popular social networking platforms.

Create Magazine has launched the global Create Network - an online community seeking to connect and inspire creative professionals. (http://www.createmagazine.com/)

“Since officially launching on March 20, the Create Network has already attracted over 6,000 members, including commercial photographers, art directors, copywriters, designers, film producers, animators and graphic designers looking to be informed, connected and inspired,” said Jerry Brown, publisher of Create Magazine and president of Create Communications.