Ok, I admit - this is barely, tangentially related to photography. BUT - they do say ‘photo’ a lot…and it is really fun to watch (although I can’t say I understood all that much).

Tony Linck / Getty Images

Polaroid appears to be the next brand of film to go extinct, the company having just announced plans to completely shut down all of its film-making facilities. It seems they are hoping another company will license the technology to continue producing the film for the devoted (hint hint Lomography).

Kodak was the last big name extinction, an event that British artist Tacita Dean captured on, well, film, documenting the final runs of celluloid at the factory, for which she won the prestigious Hugo Boss art award in 2006.

Update:  Turns out there’s a whole site/movement dedicated to saving Polaroid

Interesting discussion yesterday on KQED San Francisco’s Forum with Michael Krasny on “Photography and Its Future”.

Photo: FPG via Getty Images

Really cool video of a presentation by Dr. Ariel Shamir at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference where he demonstrates a new image resizing software application

Seems like this will give heightened meaning to “photoshopping” an image, or at least make it that much easier to perform certain potentially shady operations. Are photos even allowed as evidence in courtrooms anymore? If so, probably not for long.

Louie Psihoyos, who is a prominent contributor to Getty Images’ image partner Science Faction, is suing Apple for ripping off his photo below for their Apple TV ad campaign.  That Louie’s original photo below probably brings to mind the Apple TV campaign without me even showing any actual campaign photos or clips means that he probably has a good case, but for a better illustration go here.  That Apple had previously been in negotiations for use of the photo but backed out is even more incriminating.

Maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising though, considering Apple has been quite busy building a long sordid history of this type of thing, compiled nicely here by engadget.

Here’s a funny follow-up to this story comparing the packaging from the Atari 2600 Packaging circa 1982 to the Apple TV site.  Oops - curiously the pics are gone from flickr, but you can see them here.

In a nutshell: white monitor space uses more energy than black monitor space, so blackle.com steps in to green the aesthetically spartan but energy-extravagant Google behemoth. A totally brilliant bit of internet MacGyvering that, if not a runaway success, will certainly go miles in raising awareness about what’s possible.

There’s no real reason it shouldn’t be a runaway success of wide and rapid adoption, but then again, there’s no real reason that people who buy an SUV should have a huge tax windfall instead of paying a tax directly (if not exponentially!) proportional to the weight of their vehicle - thankfully a loophole that appears to be on the wane.

Speaking of the Webbys, I’ll be damned if this doesn’t get nominated and hopefully win next year.

It’s always fun to have your own tastes and opinions validated by the premiere authoritative voice in that field, and so I was super excited to see that Getty Images’ own interact10ways microsite was nominated for a Webby Award this year, in the Art category no less, which, come on, is the coolest category to be in.

If you haven’t heard of the Webbys that may not sound like much (and you can breathe a sigh of relief at having safely bypassed the geek radar), but it’s true when the NY Times says it’s “the Oscars of the Internet”, still true but not original when Time Magazine says it’s “the Online Oscars” (ok, not totally fair, I don’t know who said it first), and oh so brash and daring when Vanity Fair says it’s “better than the Oscars”.  Interact10ways didn’t win, but it is nevertheless a big honor to have been nominated.

The latest TED talk release includes an understated but amazing demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of some new technologies that are sure to have an impact on the way we use and view digital images, photo-sharing, and the web in general.  It’s only 7 minutes and you should definitely see it.

Speaking of the ‘Creative Class’, Behance is an interesting site I just found. They’re stated mission is “to help creative people and teams make ideas happen”, based on their theory of “Productive Creativity. ” They do interviews with various notable creative professionals, and make some nice-looking productivity tools to boot.

This is leading to my own trend speculation - the productivity trend (I’m not in the trend game, so maybe that’s old news). There’s various blogs out there devoted to productivity/efficiency that are gaining in popularity, notably 43 folders (run of course by a ‘BGM’ and true ‘Guru Joe’ - Merlin Mann) and lifehacker, that cover (if not create) techniques for out-smarting the bewildering array of systems we now live with and in. From my limited forays into the area, the book Getting Things Done (known as GTD to devotees), is a sort of prime mover in the field. This feels to me like a facet of Web 2.0 and the DIY movement in general, with it’s air of subversion and self-empowerment.

It looks like some really useful tips breaking on those sites. I can definitely use this one: Get Human.

Not sayin’ any of these would be contenders, but here is a link to a bunch of video clips taken with a very high-exposure-rate camera that are pretty neato (and laughable at times with the over-the-top clichéd fetishizations), and apropos of the bullet-thru-jack-of-diamonds photo in the running for ‘most iconic image’.