June 29, 2009
New York Times columnist Sonia Zjawinski has suffered the swift and sure wrath of the internet by suggesting that photo sharing website Flickr could be used for interior decorating. In her initial column, she suggested that you could easily search for thematic photographs on flickr, download the photos that you felt best met your decorating whim, and then print and frame them as you so desired.
This rubbed a number of flickr users the wrong way as evidenced by this entry where the power of social networks was engaged to give Zjawinski a piece of their collective minds. The Times reacted in what I felt was a positive manner by recognizing the response to the article and then speaking to a number of legal experts on the issue of fair usage. It engaged the audience, treated their concerns as valid, and sought the input of experts on the subject to try to come to some sort of conclusion. The conclusion is essentially that you’re looking at an area greyer than a Scottish fog bank that’s spent the last two seasons locked in a basement abusing steroids and lifting weights but there are precedents that personal, non-commercial usage could in many cases fall under fair use provisions of copyright law.
Like many issues in law this all fun and games and idle intellectual speculation until someone gets sued and a judge (and perhaps jury) finds themselves required to listen to two lawyers lock horns, pick a winner, and then assign damages when appropriate.
I’ve discussed copyright and protection of your images online in the past so I’ll just put forward a few quick thoughts about this specific issue. At the center of the complaint is the feeling that Zjawinski was encouraging the public to steal. If a visitor downloads a photo from a flickr stream and prints it out for their own personal usage they’re depriving the photographer of a sale.
There are a few practical issues to consider.
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June 22, 2009
Yesterday I had my “best” day on flickr by far. 1300 views in a day when I ordinarily average somewhere below 300. A four fold increase over the course of 24 hours. There are views on individual photos as well as sets and my photostream in general (people who are “just browsing”). One might inquire why I had such a magnificent day in web statistics. The answer is simple, I gave the viewing public what they wanted.
Hooters. Tits. Boobs. Jugs. Knockers. Garbanzos. Funbags. That which brings all the boys to the yard.
Ain't she something fellas?
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June 17, 2009
June is a big month of photography in New York City.
Its a month dripping with interesting things to do, happenings to attend, people to observe, and fine weather to enjoy. My personal favorite events to photograph, the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island and the Queer Pride Parade in Manhattan usually fall on the same weekend resulting in complete collapse sunday night as my sunburned flesh gives in to fatigue. This year they fall on consecutive weekends so at least I’m spared back to back days of street high energy street shooting.
While many older and perhaps more serious photographers scorn it, I enjoy flickr a great deal. After an event I like to see what other people took away from it. Even people who consider themselves snappers with point and shoot cameras can often surprise themselves. Let’s not forget the legions of avid amateurs who have high performance machines tightly gripped in their right hands and a decent amount of proficiency at Photoshop or Lightroom to boot. Thousands of cameras will converge on the same scene and all go home with gigabytes of dirt cheap memory cards filled to the brim. Even without a camera nearly everyone has a phone with a built in camera which are surprisingly good for snapshots in bright sunlight.
And they’ll post every single pixel of it into their photostreams.
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June 13, 2009
Example of dramatic use of wide angle lenses for everyday activities.
Originally I picked up the Russian made Zenitar 16mm lens for my Pentax K100D as a way to get a very wide angle lens without shelling out a great deal of money. The K100D has a 1.5 crop factor which gets you an approximate 24mm lens. As I refuse to buy digital only lenses my only other options were the Sigma 20mm which is a dissapointing 30mm with the crop factor or pick up Sigma’s 15mm Fisheye. The Zenitar is available for $175 through Kiev USA while the Sigma fisheye is $750 through B&H. There was no question which one I was going to pick up.
After reading a number of reviews I decided that the distortion would be minimized by the crop factor on the lens when used with a digital camera. I also read about a number of quality control issues which lead me to a decision not to purchase a lens through a Russian dealer. This proved to be an excellent choice on my part as the well known infinity focus problem is not the only issue that can arise from these lenses. A day after I placed my order a gentleman from Kiev USA called to let me know that the lens would be a few days late in arriving. They had inspected the lens and discovered that it was missing an element which they needed to pull off another lens. Without that element the camera would never focus. That alone was worth the $50 price differential between ordering the lens from the US dealer.
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May 19, 2009
Last night Mrs. Obama was in NYC for the ballet and for the reopening of the MET’s American wing which I have missed rather sorely in my time of unemployment. She paid the usual lipservice to the arts using a phrase we’ve all heard 1000 times before, that arts “define who we are as a people.”
In past articles in the Times there have been signals that the NEA is being taken more seriously as an organization by being moved out of the first lady’s office into the west wing. Not to demean past first ladies which include the current Secretary of State and Eleanor Roosevelt but especially with the last administration being confined to that section of the white house does paint the arts as a bit of classy frivolity. If nothing else I personally feel a little better knowing that the current administration’s chief of staff has a background in dance. There is some hope that the new director of the NEA, Rocco Landesman can breathe some revelence into the agency but I don’t suggest holding your breath.
In some ways I almost hope for a Piss Christ or Self Portrait With Bullwhip scale meltdown over the NEA. If nothing else people were talking about public funding for culture and what that should entail. Its easy to say that art defines us and is one of the few things our brief time on this earth will leave to history. What’s not easy is to ask someone to pay for something that will never pay for itself. At least not while the people who make it draw breath.
Its hard enough to justify basic scientific research which doesn’t have an immediate economic or practical application. Even if you’re reading this on the entity that came out of one of the more far fetched ideas DARPA sponsored.
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May 14, 2009
I have a nice tripod. Its not a really nice tripod but its nice enough. For $100 at Adorama its the kind of nice my budget approves of. This is aimed at an audience that either can’t afford a carbon fiber tripod with ball head or can but haven’t been able to justify spending more on their tripod than they may have spent on their camera.
As a backdrop, I’d like to discuss the following photo:
Boating, Central Park
Using the qualities of this photograph I hope to explain why you must carefully choose your equipment when shopping on the lower end of the price scale for equipment. I am the owner of two tripods, one useful and one which has proven itself absolutely useless. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 26, 2009
I’ve noticed that the majority of users on flickr do not watermark their images.
They may add contact information into the exif data when they edit their images in photoshop but I’ve noticed that this usually does not carry over with an actual watermark on the image itself. As you’ve seen in my blog and on my flickr stream I typically add the grumpymonk.com URL at the bottom right corner of every photo. Some professional photographers add a much larger watermark across the bottom and in some cases across the middle of the image itself. This is especially true of anyone who works with women wearing a limited amount of clothing.
I’ve been posting my work online nearly as long as I’ve been taking photos. Its been a great way to learn, get feedback, show off, meet other photographers, and watch other people repost your pictures for a variety of reasons without your permission.
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April 21, 2009
Brooklyn Botanical Garden
Now we’ll turn out attention to how the Holga 120WPC performs in the field.
I took the Holga out into the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and Prospect Park, two areas which I’m very familiar with. I brought a couple of rolls of Fuji Acros 100 and a single roll of Fuji Astia 100F, a slide film which I have used a few times in the past. Its the start of cherry blossom season so I wanted to see how the pinhole would render color (and we’ll have to wait on the lab for the answer to that question I’m afraid).
For this review I’ll cover:
- How to compose with the Holga 120WPC
- Exposure and Considerations
- Problems
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April 20, 2009
I love panoramic photography but I’m unable to afford a “decent” camera. My previous review of the Horizon Perfekt covered a highly functional but still lomotastic 35mm panoramic camera. Despite its odd optical characteristics (due to the rotating lens) I’ve been generally very happy with the camera and am saving up for a film holder so I can scan my perfekt images using my Nikon 8000 (which has a segmented 35mm film holder).
I became aware of the Holga 120WPC camera through a Freestyle Photo flyer. I’ve never done any pinhole photography and for $50 it undercut the Zero Image line of beautiful pinhole cameras by at least $150 so the cost of entering the field seemed very reasonable. This review will cover the physical build of the holga and provide some background information on what’s needed to get up and running with pinhole photography. As this was my first run with pinholes I’ll walk you through the steps needed to turn out a successful roll of negatives for yourself.
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April 14, 2009
As a web developer I’ve been keenly following what has been termed #amazonfail using twitter parlance. After giving it some thought I feel its instructive to talk about what happened as it directly affects photographers who use digital media.
The core issue behind Amazon Fail is that a large number of items in the amazon.com catalog were removed from their product ranking system and partially obscured from their search engine. These products appeared to have all been tagged using amazon’s internal metadata as belonging to any number of queer categories. These works were marked in the system as “adult” which removed them from amazon’s ranking system (which tracks the popularity of any title) and partially obscures them from amazon’s search engine. Products associated with gay and lesbian catagories were being blacklisted by amazon’s own internal mechanisms. These books included Virgina Woolf’s Orlando (oddly enough not all editions) and a popular piece of non-fiction on gays serving in the military. The blacklisting was limited to marking queer content catagories as adult themed works such as Playboy collections or the biography of porn star Ron Jeremy were not removed from rankings as they lacked any gay or lesbian catagory tags.
(NB: I tend to use the term queer as an inclusive term as Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered/Intrasexual is a bit of a mouthful.)
Without getting into the back and forth speculation of how this situation came to be, especially as amazon.com has yet to release an official statement, let’s talk about metadata.
Without getting into a technical discussion metadata is like sticking a post-it on a piece of information so you have an idea of what it is. This post has a title. It has tags and a catagory associated with it. These pieces of metadata help describe what this specific piece of content is. Its extraordinarily difficult to parse meaning out of human language algorithmically so we have to rely on this additional information to inform any interested parties what it is I’m talking about. I have metadata associated with the blog in general as well. It helps search engines and other automated systems describe what I’m talking about here so that people can find this blog if it meets their needs.
Now let’s consider a photograph
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