Rumors range from the plausible to the utterly absurd; the gamut is run from possible price increases going into effect after Canon’s current rebates expire on 16-Jan 2010 through the prospect of a full-line refresh of every single EF lens due to reports of the upcoming Canon EOS-1Ds Mark IV having a square sensor all the way up to Canon getting out of the lens business completely.

I’m selfishly hoping for price increases due to my recent acquisition of a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM and pile of Canon Speedlite 580EX II units. At least my Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM and Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM aren’t on the list.

An article that ran in The Washington Post earlier this year sparked a flurry of activity as an anonymous source’s location was seemingly outed by the metadata the photojournalist embedded in the photo attached to the article. The photo was eventually pulled from the Post’s Web site but not before Slashdot readers posted the probable location of the source and later used Google Maps to track down locations mentioned in the article. Although not a career-ending move the situation could have turned out much worse had the source’s real name been left in the metadata.

Gaze into my eyes...

Even more serious is the case of not properly re-saving an image file after executing minor crops or edits. Under some circumstances Photoshop and other image editing programs will use the original unedited image to generate the thumbnail icon instead of using the final edited version of the image. One such widely-publicized incident resulted in topless photos of then-TechTV correspondent Cat Schwartz getting posted on the Web.

While the final published photos were tightly-cropped closeups the photoshoot was actually done with Cat lounging topless in the studio. When fans downloaded the images it was quickly revealed that the thumbnail icons contained an original uncropped topless image. Although the thumbnails weren’t high-resolution it was still enough to result in an embarrassing moment. Even now, years after the incident, a page containing the enlarged topless photos is #2 on Google when searching for Cat’s name.