News on 6: Tulsa Historical Society And Museum Adds 50,000 Photos To Online Archive. “The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum has now added 50,000 of its photos online. This means anyone can view pieces of Tulsa’s history, any time they want and all for free.”
PetaPixel: To Save its Content, Archive Team is Attempting to Back Up All of DPReview. “Following yesterday’s news that DPReview is shutting down, photographers around the web began wondering what would happen to its huge library of articles, reviews, and camera test images, including the website’s excellent studio shot comparison tool. Archive Team aims to scrape more than 4 million articles and posts within the next three weeks.”
Ars Technica: Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years. “Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email Monday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10.”
Make Tech Easier: 6 iPhone Apps to Make Your Photos Look Like Film. “The iPhone has made photography more accessible than ever before. With this prevalence in society, it raises the question, how do I get my photos to stand out? Film Photography seems to be the answer. Thanks to technology, there’s a whole range of applications designed to imitate this effect. The iPhone apps listed below will make your photos look like vintage film.”
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Using a standard RGB camera and AI to obtain vegetation data. “[Aerial imagery] Images are typically obtained with an expensive multispectral camera attached to a drone. But a new study from the University of Illinois and Mississippi State University (MSU) shows that pictures from a standard red-green-blue (RGB) camera combined with AI deep learning can provide equivalent crop prediction tools for a fraction of the cost.”
Chicago Tribune / Elkin Courier-News: Thanks to grant and hours of museum volunteer work, old Elgin newspaper photos now available online. “Hundreds of old black-and-white photos capturing decades of Elgin’s past are now online for the world to view thanks to the work of Elgin History Museum volunteers and a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Negatives of photos taken by The Courier-News between 1936 and 1994 were donated to the museum in the 1990s, museum curator Beth Nawara said. The images are being digitized so they can be made available electronically.” This project has just started — they’re about 3,000 pictures in to a collection of 100,000 images.
University of North Carolina: Carolina Libraries acquires archive of renowned photographer Roland L. Freeman. “The collection at Wilson Library is a massive compilation of assignment and project work by Freeman from a career that spans more than fifty years of documenting Black communities, public figures and folk art and artisans. It consists of nearly 24,000 slides, 10,000 photographic prints, 400,000 negatives and 9,000 contact sheets. Also included are publications and an archive of Freeman’s papers.”
EL PAÍS: How to get the most out of cellphone photo editing: Tips from professional photographers. “Most people (91%) take photos with their cellphones, rather than with digital cameras (7%) or tablets (3%). Keeping the lens clean and avoiding flash use as much as possible are key to taking a good picture. But, once the shot is taken, there is another phase that is almost equally important: photo editing. Here are some tips from professional photographers who are active on social media.” This article is far better than the headline might indicate.
The Press of Atlantic City: Black History Month at Atlantic City Library strengthened by digitized collection. “The Atlantic City Library marked Black History Month by touting its newly digitized repository ‘The City of Dreams: The Atlantic City Experience.’ The repository, the digitization of which was facilitated by a federal grant, features about 14,000 items from 25 collections that tell the story of the Black community in Atlantic City and the impacts it has made both locally in South Jersey and across the country.”
Hackaday: This Camera Produces A Picture, Using The Scene Before It. “It’s the most basic of functions for a camera, that when you point it at a scene, it produces a photograph of what it sees. [Jasper van Loenen] has created a camera that does just that, but not perhaps in the way we might expect. Instead of committing pixels to memory it takes a picture, uses AI to generate a text description of what is in the picture, and then uses another AI to generate an image from that picture.”
Chicago Sun-Times: Newberry Library online exhibition showcases images from the Great Migration. “A new chapter in Black American history is unfolding at the Newberry Library, courtesy of a recently acquired glass slides collection highlighting the significance of Chicago and several other Northern cities during the Great Migration in the early 1920s. The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast and West.”
Smithsonian Magazine: See Rare Images of Early 20th-Century Antarctic Expeditions. “A trove of historic images from early 20th-century Australian and British expeditions to Antarctica is officially available to the public, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) announced this week. Once held by the Australian Antarctic Division, the collection—hundreds of photos, lantern slides and glass plate negatives—has been transferred to the NAA.”
BuzzFeed News: Even Fitness Influencers Are Fed Up With The Amount Of Lies, Photo Editing, And Manipulation That Go Into Fitspo Social Media Posts. “A slightly bigger bicep, a more cinched waist — a huge amount of fitness influencers are editing their posts, and it’s screwing everyone over.”
Ars Technica: Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. “With over 26,000 followers, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.”
MakeUseOf: Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl. “Fortunately, the same kind of machine learning and image enhancement carried out by high-end phones, can be carried out on your Linux PC. Upscayl takes any JPG, PNG, or WEBP image as input, and allows you to select from a variety of upscaling options. The resulting images are suitable for use as glorious desktop backgrounds, and you can even batch-process multiple image files, bringing entire photo albums up to date, and looking good.” This is a bit more technical than most of the articles I include, but I know a lot of genealogists read ResearchBuzz and this looks like a powerful tool.
