We decided to close the forum after several severe spam attacks (from web robots). We’ve not decided if we’ll try to improve the forum technology, or if we’ll aim for other ways of communication – such as blog comments, twitter, e-mail, and maybe open a chat room for more casual interaction.  Do you have any suggestions or preferences?

And a Thank You to the users who notified us of the spam attacks!

Cheers, Linda

A team of photographers from the company 360systems Ltd from Hungary has recently published the largest photograph ever taken. The panoramic view of Budapest has a resolution of 71 gigapixels! The resolution of the image is 590508 x 120750 and it takes up a whopping 350 GB.

Photographing gigapixel images has become quite popular recently, with new world records set at high intervals. Large companies like Google, Microsoft and Sony have all sponsored teams who are doing gigapixel photography. Google has even worked with NASA in developing a motorized head which can easily be set up to photograph extremely large images.

The technique used for this kind of photography is basically to take a whole lot of images (often several thousand) and use a large computer to stitch the images together. The 71-gigapixel image was stitched together on a Dell Workstation over several days. The team took a total of over 20 000 images over several days to compile the image in the quality they wanted.

The amount of progress in the field of gigapixel photography, has also been noticed by scientists – which are now looking for ways to use the technology in different fields. Among other uses they are looking into the possibility of doing macro gigapixel photography.

Check out the following impressive images:
Budapest 71 Gigapixel
Corcovado 67 Gigapixels
Paris 26 Gigapixels
Prague 18 Gigapixels

Thanks to our wonderful photographers, only two years after startup we’ve reached 1 million images in our image base!  As we say in our press release: We are proud and excited that so many talented photographers have decided to let us sell their images for them! Thank you everybody!

The wide range of images combined with usability and low prices are attracting new customers in great numbers – we expect to multiply sales in 2010.

Image No. 1 million by Stephanie Frey:

Read more about the image and take a look at some of the other images from Stephanie Frey.

Read the press release here. You can also download a PDF of the press release.

Congrats and cheers from all of us at YAY!

We’ve changes our approval process in order to process editorial content faster! As you all know, editorial news images often has a short life span, and should be uploaded and approved within hours. From today of all editorial images will be approved before creative images. If you have editorial news images of important events, feel free to e-mail us to ensure a fast approval.

Cheers,

Linda

We’ve just finished an upgrade of the software that generates previews of submitted vector files. This means that the color of newly submitted vectors will be better than those already in the database. Next step is to regenerate older previews, so that these also will have a better and brighter color. The upgrade also means that our servers can handle more vector files without increasing the server load.

We are also working on a site upgrade that will be specifically aimed at the checkout process. Our data shows that we loose too many customers in the last few steps of the checkout. The new layout will be a lot easier to navigate. We will live up to our promise to be the easiest online stock agency once again!

Jan

Tilt-shift photography is fascinating, and can be used as an easy way to fake miniatures. Tilt-shift lenses let you focus on a single part of the photo (tilt), while other parts are blurred (shifted) out. This creates an optical illusion which makes the photo look like a miniature model. It works especially well when you photograph scenes from above the ground, with people, buildings or other man-made objects. The outer edges of the image is blurred, so that the eye is fooled into believing that the part in focus is a miniature.

The good news is that you don’t actually need a tilt-shift lens to get the effect. The same principle can be added in Photoshop/GIMP. In Photoshop do the following:

• Use the quick mask mode and select gradient tool
• Select “reflected gradient”
• Draw a vertical line from where you want the focus to the top of the image
• Go back to “standard mask mode”
• Use the filter gaussian blur (or lens blur if you don’t have PS 7)
• Experiment with the radius and the amount of blur
• Saturate the image to get more colours

Or, if you want a quick and easy way to create tilt-shift, go to http://tiltshiftmaker.com/. The results you get there are actually quite good, though it is easier to get a more precise focus using Photoshop/GIMP.

Example:

Original image by iofoto

Tilt-shifted image

We also have some tilt-shift images from our photographers. Both leaf and shalamov have a couple of tilt-shifted images.

The same technique can also be used for videos. Check out Keith Loutits website, he’s a man that pushes tilt-shift videos to the limit.

Happy tilt-shifting!

Jan

The «Keep It Simple Stupid» phrase is from the design world.It basically mean, don’t do things unless you don’t have to.It is a very powerful rule in presentations also.

Do yourself a favor, go through your presentations and look at every slide and every detail. Ask your self; is this necessary? Does it contribute to my story?

Be hard on yourself and remove everything that doesn’t really need to be there. Be as clear and precise as you possibly can. Maybe you have a cool chart or graph that you really wanted to show, but unless it contributes to your story, take a deep breath, sigh, and delete it.

We’re happy to announce our new page feature: Image Preview! You can know easily get a closer look at the images in your search results without clicking into the image preview page. Try a search or one of our categories, and see the feature yourself!

We’ve finally added a blogroll to YAYblog! We know that many of our photographers, visitors and customers got their own blogs, and we’d love to be updated on what you’re writing about.

So if you think your blog could be of interest for us at YAY, please send us an e-mail. We’ll take a look, and if it’s a good match we’ll add it to our blogroll! Interesting themes would be anything related to photography, illustrations, design, photoshop, web design, media in general, microstock and the stock photo industry, etc.

You can e-mail us at: post@yaymicro.com

Linda, Jan & Bjorn