Crestock acquired by Masterfile

If you logged in to your Crestock account today you were presented with new contributor agreement. It would not be anything worth mentioning if I would not notice new copyright statement in a footer of the page: "© 2010 Crestock Corporation. A Masterfile company." When does it happen, I asked and looked at About page. Voila, it states that it happened today: "Crestock was purchase on July 1, 2010 by Toronto-based Masterfile Corporation, a premium stock photography agency with over 30 years experience in commercial licensing." There is no official press release on neither of websites but there is an article on Crestock blog. Let's see what other changes new management would bring.

[caption id="attachment_665" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Crestock acquired by Masterfile"][/caption]

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Three extended print licenses in a day on 123RF

Print-Only Extended License on 123RF is allowing to use media in print if it is published in less than 10,000 copies. So far I sold only Comprehensive Extended Licenses which are 3x more expensive but if you got 3 PELs a day it seems like the same :-) I wonder it this images are going to be used in magazine or book. It's not possible to get customer info from this site so I am hoping somebody will let me know if these images are spotted in some publication.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Bryce Canyon National Park"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Bryce Canyon National Park"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Arches National Park"][/caption]

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Lightroom 3 upgrade

I did expect to have my LR3 Upgrade shipped so soon but couple days ago I got info from Amazon that it will be sent earlier than at the beginning of July. I got it today and installed it without making any special preparations. I have been doing upgrades on this machine since version 1 and so far no problems. This time installation was quite fast and it asked if I want to upgrade my current catalog. I confirmed and it did it quickly. I tired all my archival catalogs and no problems were detected. I quickly launched it to see how much difference I could see at first glance. It's almost no visible signs that I am using new version besides big logo it top left corner. It seems to be faster. Maybe because it optimized my catalogs to make them smaller. It is also truly 64-bit. Preview generation also seems to be faster. I read that raw processing engine has been given a complete overhaul so I tried it on few images and sometimes it is immediately visible and sometimes I cannot tell a difference. I cannot see any setting to turn it on permanently but I assume it will import using new 2010 process. Lens calibration recognized two of my lens and visually it seems to have bigger impact on image than just switching a process. I need to play with it more especially when I got images where distortions or chromatic aberrations are more visible. I cannot tell much about noise reduction until I try some high ISO images. Next I wish to see how it handles videos :-)

[caption id="attachment_657" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Adobe Lightroom 3"][/caption]

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I am glad I did not pre-order iPhone4

It looks like early adopters are facing all sort of problems which may be sorted out when there is no longer pressure to ship it ASAP. Apple was trying ship iPhone so quickly so they did not have enough time to let bonding agent used to bond layers of glass to dry. When it happens after few days of usage discolorations should disappear. Great, at least one problem has logical explanation. Other problem related to external antenna seems like software bug cause rather than design problem because I read than some users of earlier models who upgraded to iOS4 reported similar behavior and they do not have metal band around their devices. And finally something went wrong and manufacturer of devices cannot make white glass so this variant will not be available till end of July. Here you can read official statement on Apple site.

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Finally, 3rd party 5dmk2/7d batteries

I took a while to reverse engineer Canon batteries. LC-E6 is expensive and sometimes hard to find in stores. The Series 7 SL-E6 is a 7.4v, 1800mAh Lithium Ion battery pack which can charge on the Canon LC-E6. The SL-E6 battery also communicates with the EOS 5D Mark II and 7D digital cameras, allowing you to check the remaining capacity on the camera's power source info screen. The SL-E6 does not have the data chip necessary to provide storeable information on the Canon 5D/7D's battery registry screen.


[caption id="attachment_646" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="SL-E6"][/caption]

It is available on Amazon from $56.49.

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Getty Images invitations for everyone on Flickr

Last year Getty Images picked around 100,000 images from selected Flickr contributors. Now gates are open for everyone and there are 40 million images to choose from. Every contributor can have now license request button next to any image on Flickr. Anyone interested in licensing your photos can let Getty Images know by using the "Request to License" link which will show under the license on your photo page. An editor will review the request and send you a FlickrMail. You can then approve or deny the request. Once a photo has been accepted, it will automatically be added to the Getty Images Flickr Collection.

[caption id="attachment_640" align="alignnone" width="324" caption="Request to license"][/caption]

Read FAQ for more info.

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FFmpeg 0.6 with WebM support

New version of FFmpeg codenamed "Works with HTML5" is released. It is first version that supports Google's newly released libvpx library for the VP8 codec and the Matroska demuxer was extended to support to WebM container.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

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