© Jody Rogac. A recent entry on Jody Rogac's Tumblr.

Photographers have used micro-blogging site Tumblr as a tool to share their work with audiences online, many of them building followings that number in the thousands and even tens of thousands. (For more on how photographers are using Tumblr see our October feature, “Why Photographers Love Tumblr.”)

But photographers also use the site to follow other shooters, keeping up with what their peers are doing and passing along work they like or admire.

JUCO, the photography team of Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud, keep up with other photographers like Noah Kalina, with whom they share a rep, Chris McPherson, Elizabeth Weinberg, Ryan Schude, Dan Busta and the duo Day 19. (Kalina also published a list of photographers who have Tumblr pages, which is useful for people who are new to the site or want to find new people to follow.)

Ryan Pfluger follows Daniel Shea, Tony Katai, Christopher Schreck, Alexi Hobbs, and a Tumblr called “Mull it Over,” run by Jonathan Cherry, which features Q&A’s with new photographers once a week.

Alec Soth, who used Tumblr for a Magnum project earlier this year, says he recently “confessed” to an intern that he likes Terry Richardson’s Diary on Tumblr.

“In my Google reader, there’s a thousand unread things, and I find myself clicking on [Richardson’s Tumblr] repeatedly for guilty pleasure or whatever it is,” Soth says. “But there is a sense that I’ve followed him, I’m along on the ride, and I guess I’m hungry to experience that with other types of photographers as well.”

In addition to following professional photography peers like Emiliano Granado and Jessica Eaton, and an aspiring professional named Megan McIsaac, Jody Rogac follows current and potential clients like the New York Times T Magazine, Rolling Stone and Dazed & Confused to keep up with what they’re doing.

Sacha Lecca, a Rolling Stone photo editor who also posts his own images to Tumblr, says he generally follows photographers who he’s worked with, met or is familiar with. But through Tumblr’s “reblogging” function, where users share the work of others on their own Tumblr page, he can often “find out about someone I didn’t know.”

Related: Why Photographers Love Tumblr

During the next week, the Aperture foundation will create a collaborative, crowd-sourced exhibition that seeks to answer the question: What should we be looking at?

From today through September 17, Aperture is seeking in-person and online submissions for the exhibition. They are also holding a series of roundtable discussions, hosted by Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin and Deborah Willis, that look to shed some light on a series of questions: “Where should we turn for our information? How can we function as a society with so few common reference points? How can we intelligently sort through all the images and information available to us? In terms of photography and visual information, what should we be looking at?” Each host and their roundtable discussion groups will fill a section of the gallery with Web sites, images, videos, multimedia pieces, drawings and articles, and will also explain why this material is important.

An exhibition of the gathered material, “What Matters Now: Proposals for a New Front Page,” will be on show from September 17–24, and online here.

For more information, and to participate, visit http://aperture.org/whatmattersnow/

Thanks for your patience. PDNOnline and Rangefinderonline are up and running. And now, we’re told, techy folks are investigating what happened. Curious!

Twitter has launched its native photo-sharing feature, allowing Twitter users to post photographs to Twitter without using a third-party service such as TwitPic or yfrog.

Images of 3mb or less can now be posted to Twitter by clicking a camera icon in the bottom left of the status update window. The image will only appear as a thumbnail in Twitter feeds, but users can click on a particular tweet to see the photo enlarged on the right-hand side of the page.

The launch of the function is good news considering the once-popular TwitPic signed a deal in May to license users’ photographs without compensation through World Entertainment News Network, provoking the ire of many its users.

Still, photographers should be aware that Twitter’s terms of service still give them the right to use your content or let others use your content.

Here is the relevant verbiage:

“You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods  (now known or later developed).

“Tip: This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.

“You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.”

Last year, photographer Daniel Morel sued AFP and Getty for unauthorized use of his images of the Haiti earthquake, which he uploaded to Twitpic. The defendants tried to argue that, according to the Twitter terms of service, whatever is posted on Twitter is free for the taking by anyone with access to Twitter. A federal judge rejected their argument as a misreading of Twitter’s terms of service. While those terms give Twitter and its “partners and affiliates” the right to use, copy, reproduce, publish and distribute content uploaded to Twitter, the judge noted that AFP, Getty and other defendants were merely users of the service.

Related story:
Daniel Morel Wins Pre-Trial Victory Against AFP, Getty

Video-sharing site Vimeo announced this morning it has added a professional version of its service aimed at photographers and other small businesses.

Called Vimeo PRO, the service costs $199 for the year and will allow photographers to create galleries of their videos using templates and themes.

The video galleries will be hosted by Vimeo but photographers can post them directly to their own websites and use their own branding and logos. Vimeo PRO will be entirely separate from the general Vimeo.com community.

The $199 annual flate fee gives you 50GB of storage and 250,000 video plays. You can also buy more storage in 50GB increments for $199 and additional plays in increments of 100,000 for $199.

Vimeo PRO will be available on Vimeo’s site today, starting at 1pm EST.

PDN Pulse and PDN Photo of the Day have both been named among the winners of  LIFE.com’s first annual Photo Blog Awards.

The winning blogs, selected from more than 300 sites, include  sites that report on the  work of professional photographers, including the New York Times Lens Blog, Time Magazine’s Lightbox, and PDN Pulse, which judges cited for its “on point stories” by “seasoned editors” (“seasoned” makes us feel slightly weather-beaten, but we’ll take the compliment). Also honored were large-format photography blogs like The Atlantic’s In Focus and PDN Photo of the Day, which was praised for its “global reach and sky-standards”; online magazines showcasing photo essays, including Burn, acurator.com, and American Suburb X; and blogs that bring a critical eye to recent photography exhibitions and photo essays, BagNewsNotes and Conscientious.

The full list of winners can be found at Life.com.

Congratulations to all the winners. We’re delighted to be in the company of so many blogs we admire and enjoy regularly.

Getty Images has announced its acquisition of PicScout, an Israel-based company that developed image identification and tracking technology that is widely used by stock photo distributors to prevent unauthorized use of images.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and the company declined to comment on a report that the deal was worth about $20 million.

Getty said in a statement announcing the deal that it will “leverage PicScout’s technology in developing new image identification tools for customers.”

The company says it will continue to make PicScout’s services available to its competitors. And Getty CEO Jonathan Klein says, “Getty Images does not plan to change pricing as a result of the transaction.”

Corbis, a PicScout customer and one of Getty’s largest competitors, said through a spokesperson, “We don’t really have a comment on this [acquisition of PicScout] as it was just announced.”

Here’s something we somehow missed during the tumult that was CES 2011. A 31MP concept camera that looks like a combination iPhone and EVIL digital camera.

Called a WVIL (Weevil?) camera, the concept product is allegedly built around a mobile operating system similar to what you’d find in most apps-laden smart phones.

And what does the acronym WVIL stand for? Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens camera, according to the below video. The designers have purportedly built a 31MP, full-frame CMOS sensor into the removable lens. When you take off the lens, it acts as a wireless viewfinder, sending live video footage back to the camera body.

Yes, this is all kinds of vaporware bull-cocky but we think it’s wrong that some people have labeled this YouTube clip and the camera concept as fakes. Though the video looks staged, it appears to come from a real prototype design company, the Seattle-based Artefact Group.

The WVIL concept (here’s the website) is also quite clever and camera manufacturers who have seen the point-and-shoot market get eaten alive by smart phones that let you easily share photos via wireless networks, might want take note.

(Our favorite part of the below clip is the unexpected cameos by PC Magazine‘s PJ Jacobowitz and Picture Business‘ Mike McEnaney.)

Here is a trailer for the promotional video produced by Magnum Photos to promote Bob Dylan’s 2009 record, “Together Through Life.” When Dylan’s management contacted Magnum Photos about licensing an image from Bruce Davidson’s iconic “Brooklyn Gang” series for the cover of the CD, Magnum’s director of publishing, broadcast and film, Michael Shulman, pitched Dylan and his record label, Columbia Records, on the idea of producing a multimedia piece to promote the album. Producer Adrian Kelterborn, a member of Magnum’s in-house multimedia production team, Magnum In Motion, worked with Shulman and the label on the piece. It was shown on Amazon.com to draw attention to the album release.

This and other image licensing projects were featured in “(Re)Sales Opportunities,” in the January 2011 Money Issue of PDN. Subscribers can log in to PDNonline to read the story here.

Photographer and “Strobist” blogger David Hobby noticed TechCrunch grabbed one of his photos from his “all rights reserved” Flickr stream for use in a blog post today. He’s not happy about it and called the AOL technology news Web site out on taking his work without permission.

“Tell you what. Just ask me for permission to use this picture in these comments and I will grant it,” Hobby wrote in the comments below the TechCrunch article, which was about Twitter’s new look. “[H]aving [my photographs] taken from a place where there is even an ‘all rights reserved’ notice RIGHT NEXT TO THE PHOTO is not cool—even if you run a linked credit.”

Given the subject of the TechCrunch article, Hobby is appropriately also using his Twitter feed to point out the copyright violation to his followers.

Update: TechCrunch and the author of the article have apologized for the infringement and asked permission to use the photo.