
What We Learned This Week: Twitter Will Show Verified Accounts Only On Its 'For You' Page

Getting yourself heard on Twitter is getting more complicated: This week we learned that users of the app will need a "verified account" to get recommended on the platform's For You page starting on April 15th. In other words, noted one observer, you'll have to be a company, government entity, or Twitter Blue subscriber if you want to pop into the feeds of people who don't follow you. Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the move was "the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over." But Musk has other Twitter problems to worry about.

Spotlight: A Drone's View of New Year's Eve Fireworks, and Other Videos

You may have greeted the new year by watching fireworks, but you probably didn't watch them the way James Inglis did. Inglis flew his FVP drone through fireworks to create a dazzling video, accomplishing the feat by strapping a GoPro camera to the top of his custom racing drone. We feature the video today in our January roundup of exception motion art work. You'll also see Civil War cannons firing in slow motion, a stop-motion masterpiece made with 12,000 leaves, and a unique view of chemical reactions.

Milton Glaser: Pop

It would be hard to dispute that the second half of 20th century America was defined by the 1960s and ‘70s. There was a counter-culture within every sector of society—it was not just about hippies and flower power. While the post-war American Dream was promoted by the Mad Men in the ‘50s, through the new medium of TV commercials, it was the anything goes zeitgeist of the 60s, into the early 70s, that informed the kind of advertising that made people want more&mdash...

Spotlight: A Moment from Colombian Photographer David Betancur's Travel Journal

David Betancur travels in order to find "character and scenarios." The Colombian photographer's portfolio is filled with people he finds on assignment and on his excursions throughout his country, which he records in what he calls "a sort of travel journal." Among the images in his journal is a shot of a girl resting on the edge of an abandoned swimming pool. "She told me, 'For enjoying the pool, there is no need to get wet in the water,'" Betancur recalls. His photograph was named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 8 competition.

American Photography Open 2019: Meet the Winner, Alain Schroeder

Last month we revealed the ten finalists. Today, we introduce the winner of the American Photography Open 2019 competition - Alain Schroeder, a Brussels, Belgium-based photojournalist who has worked all around the globe, from Thailand and Tuscany to Crete and Vietnam. From October 2018 through April 2019, he was in Sumatra, Indonesia, to document efforts to aid the area's critically endangered orangutans. His photograph of an abused three-month-old female orangutan named Brenda being treated for a severely broken arm earned Schroeder the top spot in this year's contest.

The SONY a9: What the Pros Have to Say

"Eventually you knew it had to happen. Sooner or later cameras would get so good at what they did that basically your job as a photographer would be to look for interesting things to shoot and then try not to get in the camera's way as it did it's thing capturing them. I mean, imagine if a camera had pretty much flawless exposure capability, flawless focusing and could fire and focus so fast it never missed a frame?" So writes Jeff Wignall in todays Street Test of the Sony a9 full-frame mirrorless camera. Sony Artisans of Imagery Katrin Eisman, Andy Katz, and Pat Murphy-Racey join in with their takes on the 24.2-megapixel camera that has caused an uproar in the photo industry.