The British government effectively killed Getty Images' deal to merge with Shutterstock. In its approval of the proposed deal, the government required divestiture of Shutterstock's editorial business to an approved buyer.

That condition proved to be too much for Getty, apparently, as its board voted unanimously to kill the deal if the condition applied. Getty notified Shutterstock today that the deal was dead.

In contrast to the U.K., the U.S. Department of Justice gave the companies unconditional approval of the proposed deal earlier this year.

Can the companies compete with AI imagery on their own, or do they need the scale they would have achieved through the merger? We'll see. I like preserving competition, particularly for editorial photography, but I worry that no one is well-positioned to take on easily and cheaply generated AI imagery.

AI is impacting photography in several ways. Judging the aesthetics of photographs, however, is not one of them.

Yet.

Turns out, AI isn't very good at judging the aesthetics of images (pdf of original research paper), including photographs, in comparison to humans.

"[T]hese results expose a clear and measurable gap between current multimodal models and expert aesthetic judgment...."

That gap is not likely to survive, though. Researchers now have "...the first set-based, expert-grounded testbed on which that gap can be tracked and closed."

This site is powered by a bespoke static site generator I'm developing—Stringer. I'm building it for myself but might put it out there at some point in the future. It's designed for photography and photoblogging, which may be a bit of a dead art but I'm ok with that.

I'm working on a shortcodes feature right now, which is intended to let me include a photo already posted on the site in the body of a post by simply referencing the slug of the photo. I'm writing this post to test that feature.

We're getting ready for a trip to St. Pete Beach, so I'll reference a few of my favorite SPB photos that I've published here.

Weird to remember a rain storm from the beach, but this photo is the first that comes to mind. "Nothing but absolute joy" is and always has been my takeaway from this photograph. I reflect on it quite a bit and it never fails to make me smile.

After the rain comes the sun, right? I literally have hundreds of sunset photos from St. Pete Beach, but I still never get bored of shooting it.

And here's one more just for kicks. I "rediscovered" this one last week when searching Lightroom for a different photo. I must have forgotten about it after editing it because I don't think I posted it anywhere. So, six years later, here it is.

I added each of these photos to the body of the post using a shortcode that includes the photo's slug. Pretty simple. Love it.

Jeff Cable's out here reminding everyone how to photoblog. Tell me a story using your own words and photos, with a few details on the shots and gear peppered throughout. His recent post about a day and a half in the city of Fes is a great read.

I'm working on the post features of my homegrown blogging setup right now and am building a feature that let's me incorporate photos from the site by just referencing a code in the body of a post. This should be a great feature for photoblogging, which I'm excited about. Telling stories with your own words and photos. We need more of that.

AI images are increasingly difficult to detect. The era of the easy tell is long gone. It's not enough to just look for extra fingers and misplaced arms. I look at a lot of real photographs, and I find myself struggling to spot AI images these days.

This article provides an interesting background on digital forensics and provides some math and physics based tips for detecting the fakes. Floor tiles, mirrors, shadows, and converging points. Who knew?

Here's some interesting research on aging from University College in London - arts and cultural engagement (ACEng), including photography, may contribute to healthy aging at the biological level.

Our findings add to the existing literature on arts and health, positioning ACEng as a potential contributor to healthy ageing at the biological level and underscoring the potential value of integrating ACEng into public health strategies and initiatives.

This is a great excuse to get out there and shoot, and may be a decent justification for some new gear. ;-)

Sometimes street photography is a game of walking around and finding interesting scenes and people. Sometimes it's a game of sitting still and waiting for the interesting thing you see in your mind to enter the scene you've designed with your eye. William Shum played the waiting game to get one of the photographs in his City Corners series of photos of Hong Kong, which recently won First Place in the Photo Essay Category of the 15th Annual Mobile Photography Awards.

Shum, whose shots of Hong Kong made him a winner in the 2025 Mobile Photography awards, had breakfast in the area before his day of street photography, then set up burst mode on his iPhone 13 Pro Max to capture several frames in quick succession. He waited on the far side of the road for half an hour for a taxi to pass by.

Click through to the article to see William's photograph.

I really enjoyed reading Jeff Cable’s recent post about his visit to a tannery on his Morocco photo tour. His post includes several great photos showing the workers and details of the tannery, along with a great description of his experience touring the site as a photographer. I’m inspired by his post, as it is a great representation of where I want to be as a photographer blogger (“photoblogger”, as we used to say). I hate that blogging seems to be on the ropes in this age of social media content silos, but I love finding great examples of just how great old school blogging can be.

My usage of Flickr has gone up and down over the years. I’ve been there for a long time (since 2009), but I’ve only posted a few hundred photos. “Getting better at Flickr” is a goal of mine for 2026. It’s nearly May, so I should probably start working on that.