Landscape, Nature And Travel Photography

This weekend I got to take a peek at the Photophlow site that is now in a limited beta and experience the Flickr community like never before. At the moment the site is growing through an invitation only process not unlike Googles Gmail back in the day. What is unique about Photophlow is the truly real-time discussion of photography in a very clean interface.

It’s not often that a site comes along building on Flickr’s API that in itself is superior to the original. Photophlow has a very intuitive and clean user interface that enables multiple people the opportunity to navigate, search and discuss photographs collectively. These discussions occur in rooms, not unlike the old IRC model for discussion rooms, that are open to the public in the instance of the “Welcome” or “Photophlow” room, are tied in parallel to existing Flickr groups or are rooms of the individual user.

The photos display from small thumbnail to a small preview with the ease of a mouse over and clicking on an image will load the medium size image for all to see in a particular discussion area. Users can discuss the image in the room and/or comment/fave the image which is also registered on Flickr. Along with the medium image display is basic image, EXIF, copyright licensing information, description, tags, photographer and the person that initiated the discussion about the image.

A very cool feature is the embedded search terms that highlight automatically as links with in discussion entries. This is a great mechanism for free form exploration of the Flickrsphere and takes the powerful search in Photophlow to another level. Notification features are also embedded in the site so that users can be notified of activity via email, IM and Twitter. If you have a Tumblr account you can port interesting photos to your tumblog. All this functionality combined with the active photographer community equates to a very addictive environment.

If you’re big on photography and are part of the Flickr community keep your eyes peeled for available invitations.

Photophlow Screenshots: Read more…

The 14th episode of EXIF and Beyond has been released.

Unlike previous episodes a lot of debate and controversy has been swirling within the online photography community and blogosphere in regard to various cases of copyright infringement (see my previous articles Will The Real Flickr Please Stand Up among others) and the use of Creative Commons (Creative Commons: A Great Concept, I’ll Never Employ among others & Black Star Rising’s Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons / Protecting Your Images: The Myth of Creative Commons). As use of Creative Commons grows and copyright infringement cases surface more frequently it’s become clear a lot of the discussion around Creative Commons has become quite polarized and often riddled with inaccuracies. In an effort to keep this debate as accurate as possible I thought it would be beneficial to go straight to the source for the most accurate information about Creative Commons.

This episode features an interview with Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, co-director of the law school’s Center for Internet and Society, author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” and founder of Creative Commons. In this conversation Professor Lessig, with a focus on photography, discusses the purpose & objective of Creative Commons, his perspective on copyright law, addresses the question “How if at all the adoption of Creative Commons is hurting photographers? and shares more information about the recently announced CC+ license.

Download the latest episodes:
EXIF and Beyond: Lawrence Lessig Interview

For the non-iTune listeners a streaming version of this podcast can be accessed here.

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