MarcWPhoto

Hmm. Photography.

2011-06-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

So I decided I really wanted to take some pictures, studio or not. I rented a hotel suite for cheaper than I could have rented a studio space even for one day (thanks, hotwire.com!)

This is a model I'd worked with before a long time ago - her name is Angie. She was pretty young when I first worked with her, and it's really very interesting to see how her face has matured. She's going to be a very striking woman as she ages, I think. In addition to some images she wanted for her portfolio we of course had to shoot for my Girls in Towels project. Never pass up a good bathroom, that's my motto.

Is she adorable, or what?

The images don't have as much kick as they might due to the lighting and the fact that we saved this for last and it was REALLY late. But they're still fun and I feel good about 'em.

Review of DIY Ring Flash from... DIY Lighting Kits

2011-05-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, if you must, go ahead and get the whole "if you bought it, it's not a DIY project" out of your systems. I'll wait.

Still here? Good. This is a review of the DIY Ring Flash Kit from DIY Lighting Kits, the retail venture of DIY Photography.

The DIY Ring Flash is sold in a kit form, and ships in a flat envelope. As one commenter put it, it looks like you're assembling an oddly shaped pizza box until you're done. It has an inner section made of cardboard which has an inner reflective surface, and an outer section made out of black vinyl quite similar to the material that three-ring-binders are covered with.

It's quite easy to assemble, for the most part. You should pre-crease the folds of the cardboard bit pretty good before you start as this makes assembly easier. Also, if you're fussy like me, wear gloves so you don't get fingerprints all over the reflector. I used some cheap disposable cotton gloves I have to wear when I'm making prints. The instructions aren't clear on whether or not the center ring goes inside or outside the center aperture: the manufacturer says it's meant to go outside (which is much easier) but I put it inside because I thought that looked better. If you do that be very careful not to mess up the ring by bending it. If you bend it it will crease and you will get a dull spot. Since I didn't do that I don't know if it would be a big deal (I suspect not) but just avoid it and you won't have to care.

You will want the optional bracket. Just buy it when you buy the flash and save the aggravation. I bent mine in a vise over a round form, but that's optional. I would recommend that you bend it over something with a round edge as opposed to a square countertop, it will help avoid excessive stress on the bend. The bending template has a lot of slack in it, so don't worry if your camera's not listed or you don't get the bend in just the right place. Just use the mark for the camera closest to yours. I have a Rebel T1i (aka the EOS 500D) and I used the one for the other small dSLR's (50D, etc.) Works fine. Some people have noted that they have issues using the bracket with a gripped camera: I have the Canon grip for my Rebel and I didn't notice any issues. I did bend the bracket on the conservative side so I'd have a little more up and a little less out, but it still mounts on my tripod fine and the lens is right dead center in the aperture.

I have a 580EX flash which is one of the larger on-camera strobe units you can buy. It would not fit into the flash head aperture as-is. The manufacturer is also clear about this and the fix is easy: you just cut little slits in the corners of the aperture. I made about a half-inch cut on all four corners, and the flash slipped right in. Be careful with the rubber-bands: they are very strong but do not have a lot of stretch. I broke one trying to make the pattern the example shows with the crossovers. Fortunately two seem to hold the flash fine and rubber bands are not hard to come by.

Once it's all assembled it's pretty straightforward and works like any other ring flash. Here's a picture I took while I was messing around with it. Ironically the layered Damascene steel looks better with more directional lighting but note the nice even light with no shadows.

Pros:

Cheap, cheap, cheap. A powered ring flash is several hundred dollars, a plastic Ray Flash is around $200, this thing was $47 with shipping and bracket. No comparison.

It's fun to assemble your own stuff even if it's not "real" DIY.

It is a ring flash and appears to be a reasonably consistent and symmetric example of same. Insert standard ring flash "pros" list here. :)

Very fast service, although that's not related to the thing itself. I ordered it Sunday night after seeing it on the Strobist site and I had it Wednesday morning.

Cons:

It's not really fair to say the lightweight nature of the unit is a con, as you are getting a $30 ring flash out of this deal and frankly, it's sturdier than I thought it would be. However, the bracket really could be sturdier as the whole assembly vibrates for a few minutes if you so much as touch it. I think I may have a machinist friend of mine make me one out of a slightly sturdier metal. I got around this by putting the whole deal on a tripod and then using my camera's remote shutter release after the vibrations died down.

The device does cost you approximately two stops of flash output, maybe a little more, I would assume both from inefficiencies and from increasing the effective area of the flash output. If somebody wants to send me a Ray Flash to compare it with, I'd be happy to oblige. With the setup for the picture above, at ISO400 and manual 1/1 flash output I couldn't do better than f7.1 without pushing the shadows too far. The unit was about three feet away from the target. (I couldn't get closer because I was using a prime lens.)

Because of the way it's constructed, there's no way to fire the thing with the flash attached to your camera's hot shoe. Well, you could, but not with the camera lens in the center aperture for maximum ringlightosity. (They are very clear about this on the site, but some people apparently don't see that.) I use my wireless flash trigger. You could also use a sync cord if your flash supports that. (You can buy a sync cord adapter for your hot shoe if your camera doesn't have a sync port. They're very inexpensive.) The other thing this means that you don't necessarily anticipate is that there is a LONG arm of stuff that goes down from the unit. You can't hold it very close to your body if you want any angle at all. It gets in the way of your tripod head adjustments from many angles and would doubtless also hinder mounting it on a light stand in certain ways.

This can make it really hard to use a tripod with any sort of downward angle. Since it also makes the thing very tippy, angling your tripod to compensate can be a real headache. My tripod (a Manfrotto) has a deal where you can take the center column and make it a horizontal arm. With this and some creative tripod configuration (it looks like a big spider) I was able to point the unit, mounted on the camera, at about a 30 degree downward angle. Any more down that that would be very tricky, especially since the weight of the flash will try to pull the unit closer to vertical. There's no way you could shoot straight down with it without some additional bracing means.

Summary:

This is a fun way to experiment with a ring flash for not very much money. If you like putting things together it's fun and easy. (If you don't like that kind of thing don't buy it, period.) You get what you pay for, of course, but in this case you at least get a good value for the small amount of money involved.

On Camera Straps

2011-04-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

It is a very popular discussion question 'mongst photographers: "Okay, you've bought your camera. What should you buy next?" Well, my answer is dependent on which camera you bought. If it didn't come with vertical controls/grip and that is available as an option, that is what you should buy next. But either after that, or if you don't need it or can't get it the very first thing, you should buy a new strap.

Think, everybody, think. You just spent several hundred to multiple thousands of dollars on a camera. You're going to keep the cheap, ugly, painful strap the camera came with just so you would have a strap if you had to use it RIGHT THIS SECOND? Don't be a cheapskate now.

Manufacturer's straps have two things in common:

1) They're cheap.

2) They're ugly.

Now, ugly I can live with - all my straps are still plain black, although at least I'm no longer a walking advertisement for Canon - but cheap, I refuse to. Those straps are thin, so they cut your neck. They have no padding and no elasticity, so they hurt your back and can really give you a good smack if you drop the camera too hard. They have no swivels so they get tangled up easy, and they are usually too short if you're of more than average height. Not. Acceptable.

Now, at the very least you can spend twenty bucks and get a padded strap from any camera store. Get one with swivels, so it's easy to re-orient if it twists or tangles, and get one with quick-releases so you can take it off or loop it onto things if you need to. (I have been known to loop my camera strap around chair rungs and whatnot to make it impossible to snatch-and-grab. I do this with my bag, too.)

These padded straps are basically just upgrades for the standard neck strap design. If you want to really have fun, start looking at some of the more advanced strap designs and even strap systems. For instance, I have a Black Rapid RS-4. (See: http://www.blackrapid.com/product/camera-strap/rs-4/) I got it for Christmas - it was on my wishlist because I'd heard they were good. However, I hadn't got around to putting it on a body yet when I tried one on somebody else's camera at a photography workshop recently. Wow! This was a full-frame DSLR with grip, zoom and strobe rigged, but when I put that over my shoulder it was like it wasn't even there. I promptly went and dug it out and will be rigging it sometime in the next few days.

My other main strap is an OP/Tech Utility Strap. (See: http://optechusa.com/straps/utility-strap.html) It's heavily padded and has a lot of give to it, so even if the camera bounces around my neck all day, it won't chafe or dig in. I have a Calumet AirCell strap which I also like: I may keep that one on my backup body and replace the OP/Tech one with the RS-4. (See: http://www.calumetphoto.com/eng/product/calumet_aircell_curved_shoulder_strap/rm2004) I really like the curved straps as they do add a little more comfort as well as being less likely to slip and slide since they follow the curve of your neck better.

Oh, and if you just HAVE to be different, there are also any number of colored and/or decorated versions out there. OP/Tech straps come in several colors, and if you need more, just shop around. There are even hipster straps: http://www.calumetphoto.com/eng/product/tamrac_n_40_quick_release_camera_strap_red_flames/tq0041.

Intro to Exposure Controls

2011-02-07T18:52:00.000-08:00

This is a quick post on the three exposure controls on digital cameras and what they do so I can refer people to it when I wish to pontificate on the Interwebz. Feel free to read it: comments invited.

Digital cameras have three exposure controls. Three. That's it. That's all. Learn what they do and you've mastered exposure. At least the technical part.

They are:

1) Shutter speed.

2) Aperture.

3) ISO (Equivalent) Setting.

Those are the ONLY THREE THINGS that control the exposure of your photograph. However, they interact: changing one can make what the other ones do change as well. But fear not: it's entirely logical. There is another setting called "EV" which stands for Exposure Value, and I will talk about what that does, but it does NOT AFFECT the three settings here when you are in manual mode. It only matters when you are in an auto exposure mode such as Program, Tv or Av.

In full manual mode, you have full control over these settings and they will be whatever you set them to. That means if you tell the camera to take a thirty second exposure of the sun at noon on a clear day, it will let you, and you will burn out your image sensor. (If you are looking through the viewfinder you will burn out your personal image sensor, aka the Mark I Eyeball, too.) So don't do that.

Another technical clarification: the word "stop" is used a lot in photography, and not not just by models when Terry Richardson is on location. (Zing!) A "stop," in the generic sense, is a doubling of the exposure of the image. If you go up a stop or increase by one stop, you double the amount of light which contributes to the exposure. If you go down a stop or decrease by one stop, you halve it. Any of the three controls can be used to "stop up" or "stop down" in terms of total exposure. What really makes this maddening is that aperture is measured in "f-stops," which are related but not the same, and usually when a photographer says "stop up" or "stop down," they are specifically referring to changing the aperture value. After discussing each control, I will specify what would constitute a one-stop movement in both directions by means of that control.

Here we go.

1) Shutter speed.

The simplest and most intuitive. This is just "how long do you want me to open the shutter and let light into the camera?" It's measured in fractions of a second. Most digital cameras can shoot at fast as 1/500th of a second and many can go as low as 1/10000th of a second, which is pretty darn fast. To "freeze" a human walking at a normal pace, you want a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second or less. Any slower, and you will get "motion blur," which is just blur caused by the fact that the subject moved while the shutter was open. You should use the fastest shutter speed you can get away with to minimize both "motion blur," caused by the motion of the subject, and "camera shake," caused by moving the camera. (Nobody has perfectly still hands.) Shutter speed affects exposure linearly. Open the shutter twice as long, get twice as much light, get an image with twice as much exposure. Open it half as long, get half as much light, get an image with half as much exposure. Often, when shooting outdoors in bright sunlight, you will have no choice but to use a very fast shutter speed to keep your image from being overexposed, since there are limits to how low you can go with both ISO and aperture. Once you hit them, your only choice is to lower shutter speed. At a very high shutter speed, say 1/1000 or higher, you can shoot under almost any light you can bear to look at without overexposing your image.

Stop adjustment: Doubling your shutter speed (going from 1/30th of a second to 1/15th of a second) will increase exposure by one stop. Halving it (going from 1/30th of a second to 1/60th of a second) will decrease exposure by one stop.

2) ISO Equivalence.

This controls how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. It usually starts at 100 (200 for most Nikon cameras) and goes up to at least 400, although some high end cameras go into the tens of thousands. It's also completely linear: take a picture at ISO100, and then take the same picture at ISO200 with all other settings the same. The second photograph will be twice as bright. Go from ISO400 to ISO200, and the image will be half as bright. The reason you don't always shoot at the highest ISO you can is that the higher the ISO setting, the "noisier" the image will be. Noise (also sometimes referred to as "grain" because it looks similar to film grain, though it's caused by a different phenomenon) can make images all but unusable at very high ISO settings, so you should always set the ISO as low as you can and still get the exposure you want, or at least at the lowest setting in which your camera has acceptable noise output. I usually have my Canon SLR's set to ISO400 as a default: when working in bright light or in a studio I lower it to ISO100. ISO100 can be pretty dim in anything but direct sunlight or under strobes, so it's safer if you leave it set up a notch or two in case you want to make some quick snapshots in unanticipated or unknown future lighting.

Stop adjustment: Doubling your ISO setting (going from ISO200 to ISO400) results in a one-stop increase in exposure. Halving it (going from ISO800 to ISO400) results in a one-stop decrease in exposure.

3) Aperture.

This is the one that usually causes confusion 'mongst photography newbies. The aperture is a mechanical device in your camera (in an SLR, it's in the lens: every lens has its own aperture) which opens and closes to control how much light comes in. It's basically the size of the "hole" that the light can come through. Increasing the aperture allows more light in: decreasing it lets less light in. However, because the hole is a two-dimensional circle, it's not linear in effect. Doubling the size of the aperture increases the amount of light that hits the sensor by a factor of four. (Because the area of a circle varies as the square of its radius.) To really make things fun, aperture is measured not in absolute units like square inches or square centimeters, but as a dimensionless ratio called an "f-stop." When you hear somebody say "stopping down" or "stopping up," they are talking about decreasing or increasing the aperture.

"But that's backwards," you may say, and you are right. The ratio is the ratio of the focal length of the lens to the diameter of the aperture. So if you have a 50mm focal length lens, and a 50mm aperture, your f-stop is 1.0. If you have a 50mm focal length and a 25mm aperture, your f-stop is 2.0. So you can see that going from f1.0 to f2.0 doubles the "f-number," but as I noted above, that means that you cut the amount of light to a quarter as much. (Because a circle with a diameter of 50mm has four times the area of a circle with a diameter of 25mm.) So when you increase f-number (go to a larger f-stop) you are decreasing aperture, and therefore decreasing exposure. Because of the physics of all this, the f-numbers are not linear and tend to be very weird numbers, and range dramatically. Your average beginner lens is going to have a maximum aperture of f4 or f5 or so, and a minimum aperture of f32 or thereabouts. A really "fast" lens, so called because it has a large maximum aperture and therefore allows faster shutter speeds, might be down to f1.4, f1.2, or even f1.0 although lenses at f1.0 are both rare and insanely expensive.

Now, just as with shutter speed and ISO equivalence, there is a tradeoff when discussing aperture. The bigger the aperture (the smaller the f-number) the more light gets in. So since you're letting in more light, you can use a lower ISO and/or a faster shutter speed. O frabjous day, right? Well, no. There are two downsides (or one downside and one mixed blessing) to using large apertures.

The downside is that lenses tend to have a "sweet spot" in the middle of their aperture range where their optical performance is maximized. My 50mm f1.4 (lenses are usually described by giving their focal length and their maximum aperture) gives a much clearer, sharper image if I stop it down to f2.0 or f2.2 compared to full-open f1.4. This also applies to the smallest aperture settings, but the difference can be profound at the bottom because of the huge amount of light coming in that the lens has to collate.

The mixed blessing is that the larger the aperture, the smaller the "depth of field." Depth of field indicates how much of the image is in focus relative to the object in clearest focus. If depth of field is large, everything or most everything in the picture will be in focus. If depth of field is small (narrow) then anything any distance from the object of focus will start to blur. At a wide-open aperture, a portrait can have the subject's eyes in focus but their nose may have significant blur. Now, obviously if you want the sharpest picture possible you want to use the smallest aperture you can get away with, but if you are actively trying to blur out extraneous objects (things in the background, etc) this can be a very effective tool. Unless it's a very low-light situation (in which case you open up your aperture to allow the fastest possible shutter speed) selecting aperture is more an artistic decision than a technical one, and the other two settings then become subservient to the aperture desired.

Stop adjustment: Going up one f-stop results in a one-stop increase in exposure. Going down one f-stop results in a one-stop decrease in exposure. However, the f-stop settings on the vast majority of lenses are fractional. (Remember, the aperture is built into the LENS. If your camera can use different lenses, it will have varying aperture ranges.) For a typical SLR lens, here is a one-third F-stop chart.

1.0 1.1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.5 2.8 3.2 3.5 4 4.5 5.0 5.6 6.3 7.1 8 9 10 11 13 14 16 18 20 22

Every three increments on that chart (say, going from f1.0 to f1.4) is a full stop. Note that it is extremely nonlinear (it's based on powers of two.) So f1.0 to f1.4 is one stop, but so is f16 to f22! This is why aperture is so confusing to new photographers, especially those without a background in science or mathematics. To a mathematically oriented individual this chart is laughably simple and makes perfect sense. Everybody else basically needs to memorize it, or else just count clicks on their aperture control. (That latter is much easier. :) )

Bonus: EV Control.

EV control, also called exposure compensation or EV compensation, is a way of using auto-exposure calculation on your camera but still having some manual input. When you are in full automatic mode, the camera will select both a shutter speed and an aperture (and maybe an ISO, although most cameras use the manual ISO setting even in most auto modes.) You can set the EV to tell the camera to fudge a bit. If you increase the EV, or set it higher, you are telling the camera, "Figure out what you think is the best exposure, and then shoot a little bit brighter." The camera will decrease shutter speed (holding the shutter open longer) or increase aperture (letting in more light) or both, depending on its programming. If you decrease EV, it will do the opposite. This can be very useful both for artistic effect and because cameras, while they're pretty smart these days, don't actually know what you're shooting or what you care about in the image. If the main subject is well lit but the rest is dark, it may overexpose the subject trying to make the whole picture even, or vice versa. In that case you'd lower the EV so it would expose for the main subject properly. If the whole image area is very bright, you might actually want to increase EV so the camera doesn't make it dingy trying to even it out. (Cameras are notorious, for instance, for underexposing snowscapes because they think they're brighter than they actually are. When shooting outside in winter, always see if upping your EV doesn't brighten your snow.)

If you're in Program Mode or full-autoexposure mode, the camera will take your EV setting and do as it deems best. Might open the aperture, might lower shutter speed, whatever. You have no say in the matter. Where EV is useful to the fairly serious photographer is in the two modes known as Shutter Priority (abbreviated Tv, for Time Value) and Aperture Priority (abbreviated Av.) These are semi-automatic modes where you manually set one value (shutter speed or aperture, respectively) and ask the camera to figure out the other value according to its programming. Say I am shooting a basketball game, but the light's not even so I can't set to full manual. I could set to Tv, and tell the camera I want 1/200th of a second shutter speed (which will freeze even a fairly fast-moving athlete with no motion blur.) The camera will adjust the aperture according to the light it measures every time I take a shot. Further suppose that I like my pictures dark and broody: I could tell the camera to use an EV of -2, which translates to: "Calculate the exposure according to my set shutter speed of 1/200, and when you pick an aperture, then stop it down two more EV values so the picture is darker than you think it should be." Contrarily, suppose I am shooting a portrait and I want a soft, dreamy picture with a very narrow depth of field. I can set to maximum aperture in Av mode, and then up my EV so my picture is bright and cheerful compared to the neutral exposure the camera would otherwise try to achieve.

EV is usually in fractional stops, but varies, you'll have to read your manual to know how your camera does it. Mine does it, as do most SLR's, as a third of a stop per EV point. On full-manual, it does nothing, because there is nothing for the EV to "adjust." The camera is going to shoot at the shutter speed and aperture you programmed. But it can be very useful in the semi-auto modes.

Stop adjustment: It depends on your camera's settings. Most cameras allow a one-stop increase or decrease in EV, with both directions having three fractional stop adjustments. If this is the case, every click you move the EV up from zero increases exposure by a third of a stop, with movement to the end of the range (usually three clicks) resulting in a one-stop increase in exposure from the camera's calculated target exposure. Note that this is a relative change, unlike the other three stop adjustments: it changes it relative to what the camera thinks it should be. If the lighting changes, so will what the camera thinks the exposure should be, but you will still always get the same relative adjustment to that calculation.

A Little Google Fodder for auction house Guernseys

2011-01-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a post by well-known photographer Ctein at The Online Photographer's blog. (The Online Photographer is Mike Johnston: Ctein is a frequent guest poster there.)

How To Make a Small Fortune In the Art Business

Summary: Ctein tried to have Guernseys (Guernsey's? Guernseys'?) auction off several rare photographs from his collection. The auction didn't go well, which was disappointing but understandable, and they returned several of the prints which didn't sell. However, they were returned with sufficient damage to reduce their collector's value to essentially zero. Guernseys refused to discuss the matter with Ctein and referred him to the insurance company, which settled fairly reasonably but told him he'd have to seek the deductible from Guernseys despite the fact that their release mentioned Guernseys as a released party. Guernseys of course refused to pay anything and has exhibited the most reprehensible conduct during the entire affair.

Obviously, we're only hearing one side of this, but having dealt with insurance companies before, I have absolutely no trouble believing this. Personally, I find this absolutely deplorable. I really have to wonder, even being a lawyer, if Guernseys really didn't buy themselves more than five thousand dollars worth of bad publicity (not to mention bad karma) by their actions. The Internet is forever, guys.

My Advice to the Minions of Satan

2011-01-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Here is a comment I wrote to a radical leftist complaining that radical leftists are unrepresented in the blogosphere. (http://lhote.blogspot.com/2011/01/blindspot.html for original post.) It Amused me, so I thought I'd record it for posterity. Comments welcome.

Explanatory note:

One of the earlier comments to the post read: "This entire post can be reduced to "I didn't get the memo that Communism failed." There's no hyper-left blogosphere in America because there's no hyper-left in America, as you so keenly observed in noting that we alone in the west lack a serious socialist party. What you have failed to observe in tandem is that there is a very good reason for that." The response by the original poster was, "I am not a Communist."

Now, my comment:

I find your tossaway answer above to the "didn't get the memo" comment intriguing. You're not a Communist. Fine. If you don't mind a little advice from the Loyal Opposition, here's a suggestion:

Communism was the bogey of American politics, except for Marxist campus types, for decades. The world's largest Communist power had nuclear missiles pointed at all our heads, fought us in proxy wars that killed tens of thousands of Americans, and said it would bury us all in the name of the People while its actual, non-capitalized people lived in obvious squalor (compared to Americans) which was denied laughably. Eventually, it collapsed utterly and caused even more chaos. Americans don't like the word Communist. They don't like being threatened (nobody does,) they don't like being told they're evil (ditto) and they don't like a loser, and Communism is the biggest loser most Americans can think of since the Confederate States.

They don't like the idea of Communism, is what I'm trying to say here. And then here you come, saying, "Oh, no, I'm not a Communist, I'm a $WHATEVER," but saying basically the same things American Communist apologists spouted the whole time all this was going on.

Don't point me at Wikipedia. Don't tell me to read some dense tome. Tell me in a hundred words or less why you're not a Communist, what the difference between you and Communists is, and why we wouldn't end up where the Communists did if you were in charge instead of the murderous leaders they started out with or the bureaucraticly inept apathetic tyrants they ended up with. That's your job. That's your burden, that's your cross. Drop her, Jack, and all be lost.

But do it, and somebody, somewhere, over the age of twenty-five who's ever had to work for a living may actually listen to what you say. I won't, because I think that you are an agent of the Adversary. But somebody might. Probably more people than would ever listen to me, because parts of what you say are much more appealing than anything I have to offer. Fail, and the right-wing sleazeballs will continue to rule populist opinion and you will stay right where you are.

And if you challenge any of my assertions about historical Communism above, you've lost already. They lost. Demonstrably. Provably. Utterly. And what I said is the common understanding of How The S**t Went Down. You will NOT change it. Ever. Defending it only brands you with the Loser Brand. You can only make progress if you make yourself distinct from it. If you can't do that, you lose.

Hiya.

2010-11-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me yesterday that I hadn't posted anything on this blog in quite some time. Other than more family photos for a co-worker, I haven't had the gumption for photography.

Eventually I'm sure my cameras will guilt me into taking some pictures, but I don't know when.

M

And Yet More Transitioning

2010-07-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

I got an email from my studio partner yesterday...

...well, I should say, my former studio partner. She hasn't been able to keep up her apartment/studio since she broke up with her boyfriend, and she's moving next month ("next month" starts tomorrow, but I think she means she has to be moved by the end of August.) Her parents help her with her rent and she wanted to get a cheaper apartment, as well as a smaller one which she thinks will help her be less messy. So I went today and cleared out all of my stuff.

She's not in the best of health, so I had to carry it all up the stairs to the living room and form a staging area, then carry it around to my truck in the alley. There was a U-Haul on one side (July is the biggest moving month in Chicago) and then once I was loaded I discovered some dipstick had parked his car right in the only other way out of the alley. So I had to wait for him to come out and move it, and he gave me a look like, "What's your problem?" and only the fact that I was tired and hot and didn't feel like getting out saved him some pretty extensive bodily injury. I was about five minutes away from demonstrating that a V-8 Ford F-150 can move a Hyundai sedan even if it's in park and has the parking brake set. No, I wasn't. That would be illegal. I would never do that.

I got it all home, and brought a few things inside and the rest are in the garage waiting to be sorted. So far as I know all my lights work, and I found my tripods and my light stands and my background system and all the other expensive stuff. However, due to either a leak or just excessive condensation, several boxes and one plastic crate had been compromised by moisture*. I have enough crap I need to get rid of without hauling home moldy stuff which I'll probably never use again anyway, so I just left it in the basement. I told her father (her parents are helping her move) to just have the junk guys take it, since I'm sure they'll have to call someone to take the stuff of hers that got wet or that she just doesn't want.

Absent winning the lottery, that's probably pretty much the end of my studio photography career. It's kind of sad, but it's not like I don't have enough to do that I should be doing anyway.

M

*I kept a lot of my props and stuff in the basement, which it's pretty unusual for an apartment to have, but it did. They couldn't be kept in the main space because she and, until last year, her boyfriend lived in it. The beginning of the end, really, was when he put up a big ol' mirror on the wall facing the area where she and I liked to shoot. It was either cover it or deal with weird-ass reflections, and covering it meant you still couldn't shoot in the corner because there was a sheet hanging on the wall.

Transitioning Yet Again/Still

2010-06-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

So, we're theoretically moving in two weeks or so. (I'll believe it, as I tell everyone who asks, when I'm standing in front of the place with my keys in my hand.) So haven't done diddly other than work and deal with that for a while. But I thought I'd pass along two little things which may Amuse you.

First, iTunes has the pilot of "Double Exposure," the show about Markus Klinko and Indrani, as a freebie. It's certainly worth watching if you are interested in photography or fashion, mostly to show you that it's not exactly rocket surgery. (Editor from Women's Health: "We want the shot to be about beauty, and fashion, and strong women." Well, gosh, lady, good thing you were here to provide direction. He might have done a shot themed on bumblebees eating cheese or something.) Markus and Indrani are possibly the least sympathetic stars of a reality show I've ever seen, although Markus was totally in the right about being peeved when Eve brought her own photographer to the shoot. Not only is that incredibly rude, he had an on-camera strobe and he could have been stepping on Markus' light. I've had that happen and it is not happy-making.

Second, also available as a freebie is the pilot of "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." It's like America's Next Top Model or The Shot, only the subject is artists generally. There are two photographers, as well as sculptors, painters, etc, etc. Several of the artists are abstract artists and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the dressing-down they got when they submitted totally abstract works for the first challenge, which was to do a portrait of one of their fellow competitors. I am a petty person. But anyway, also interesting if you're into art and things like that.

M

The World Is a Strange Place, Part 1,349

2010-06-04T18:08:00.000-07:00

The otherwise unameliorated suckiness of today was slightly mitigated when the kid talked me into going to Barnes and Noble. Why, I don't know, because she didn't want to buy anything. I suspect it was a trick to get me to take her to Burger King. Well, I wasn't going to drive that far just for Burger King, so I told her we'd go to Half Price Books and get Burger King from the one in their parking lot.

Now here's the mitigating part...

What I really wanted was an out-of-print CD which is VERY hard to get, or even the original LP of the album (which was released in, IIRC, 1972. It's not much younger than I am, at any rate.) We have a USB record digitizer so I'd settle for that.

Well, they didn't have it, but my usual quick shufty through the photography section produced a book which for some reason sounded vaguely familiar.

"Wait," I thought, "Isn't this the book that one of my favorite models talked me into giving some publishing rights to her pictures? It was going to be published in England, I never saw it nor heard if it actually went to press."

Check the book - published in England. Publisher sounds right. Check the index. There's the model's name. Turn to her section...

... there are the photos. Credits, weblink, the whole shebang.

Well, how about that? I'm in a real book. In a real bookstore. Okay, yeah, it's a publisher's remainder. But still, that means it GOT published. There were two copies on the shelf and they both looked brand new, so it pretty much has to be a publisher's remainder and not a used book.

Sucker wasn't cheap - marked GBP18.99, USD37.95. It's an oversized art photography book, perfect binding, spot-glossy cover. The quality of the printing is really quite good. Pity it didn't do better. I bought 'em both - I'll give one to the model if I can find her again.

M

Up to Nothing Much

2010-05-19T06:48:00.001-07:00

Still trying to buy a new house (and sell the old one.) Still not doin' a lot of photography.

All I can do is keep on keepin' on. Back later.

M

Burst Mode On

2010-04-11T06:05:00.001-07:00

Quiet again, I know. Life keeps getting in the way. I went through a little spasm of photographin' there for a minute, then we decided to try to buy a new house. For various reasons I won't get into this is kind of hard on me. I doubt I'll have time or energy for photography until at least a few months after this is done (which with any luck will be sometime in July.)

But I did manage to take a few pictures.

This is an aspiring model named Brittany. (Not Britney. Brittany is a fine old name. Britney is... not.) Yet again, high-ISO fast-lens madness.

The backlighting is a streetlight: it was absolutely pitch-black outside other than streetlights. Here's a picture I took of her where I literally could not see her through the viewfinder.

Here's me gettin' all Ryan McGinley, except that it was kind of cold to ask her to run around naked. But it's Cute Young Person In Hip Yet Unstaged Circumstance With Direct Flash Lighting, so that should at least get a C for effort.

M

On Inspiration, Theft, and the Doctrine of Unclean Hands

2010-03-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

As you may know, I am not a fan of "mashup" art. Incorporating pre-existing things into imagery in an ironic, amusing, or artistic way, sure. One of my favorite artsy photos is a fun picture I took of a model staring into a dry-cleaner's window at night, with the neon sign and the tattered flyers posted all over it framing her and providing interesting visual and textual elements.

But mere collages, y'ask me, are not particularly creative. They can be artistically arranged and esthetically pleasing, but they are not new works. At best, they are highly derivative works. At worst (and at usual) they are mere rearrangements.

And so we come to the case of one Mr. Thomas Allen.

Mr. Allen, whose work is visible at Thomas Allen Online has as one of his major photographic interests clever little pastiches he makes by cutting up the covers of pulp novels and arranging and lighting the bits.

Mr. Allen feels that he has been wronged (actually using the phrase "copyright infringement" at one point) by an ad agency which more or less admits that it used his technique as inspiration for some dummy ads they made to enter a contest. See more information at: Thomas Allen Online: Theft.

Now, there are two problems with this. First, Mr. Allen hasn't, so far as I can tell, posted any examples of a blatant copy of any of his images. You cannot copyright style. (You might patent a method, but to my knowledge Mr. Allen has not done so.) Absent a direct copy, or a copy which rises to the level of derivative work, there is no copyright infringement here. His use of the term indicates he does not understand what it means. That's not a failing on his part in and of itself: lots of people, even lots of lawyers, don't understand what copyright infringement requires. But if you do not know what something is you should not accuse people of doing it. I hope the logic of that is evident to all.

The second and far greater problem is that Mr. Allen's hands are not clean: his moral outrage is fatally tainted by the fact that he himself is merely repurposing the work of other creative minds. Somebody sat and painted that picture, putting far more work into it (not relevant for legal purposes but, I think, morally relevant) than mere scissorwork and lighting. Somebody owns the copyright to it. Mr. Allen, absent any demonstration to the contrary, is using it without permission, without color of right. Nothing has been done to Mr. Allen that he has not already done to someone else, only more so. In the law we have a principle called the Doctrine of Unclean Hands: it states that he who comes to court seeking equitable treatment must himself have acted equitably. In other words, his own hands must be clean.

Mr. Allen's hands are as stained as those of his alleged offenders, and therefore a moral person must simply say, "Live by the mash-up, die by the knock-off," and walk away with a weary smile at the foolishness of the world.

It is interesting to note that Mr. Allen's blog requires comment approval: he approved my comment asking to see some of his copyright licenses, but then removed it a few hours later (presumably when he figured out I was making fun of him.) Mr. Allen, should you happen to read this, you are welcome to comment here and so long as your post is not mere invective, rest assured it will remain.

M

High ISO Madness

2010-02-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

Have a look at this photograph I shot Sunday night.

Oh, wait. That's pretty boring, isn't it? That's because that's the photograph as it would have been shot on 100 speed film. (I'm not sure what Blogger did, but the picture is actually a little brighter on my blog than it is in my image editor.)

Let's try that again.

Maybe you'll like this one better?

Actually, that is sort of cool, but it's not really much of a photograph of the subject. (The subject, by the way, is an aspiring model who wanted some interesting pictures for a portfolio page.) That's what the image would have looked like shot on 800 speed film, which is about the fastest you can buy unless you're really hooked up.

But wait!

I actually shot this at ISO12,800 on a Rebel T1i. What did that look like?

That is with no exposure adjustment in post.

Holy Toledo.

Handheld, no flash, ambient lighting - and it was so dark that even with my human eyes, which are far more sensitive than any camera, I could barely see the model. (My eyes don't have such a good focal range but I have excellent night vision.) And this is the cheap model, with a slow lens - aperture was f5.6, the maximum aperture of the lens at this focal length. The newer high-end dSLR cameras will go up to four times faster than this. And even sticking with the T1i, I have a lens that has a maximum aperture two stops larger.

The US Army has as one of its mottoes, "We own the night." Digital photographers are about to start trespassing on the Army's territory. When I think of the amazing photographs I could have taken with this technology in my former studio, or at Goth clubs and fashion shows, it just about makes me want to cry.

True, this is a little noisy, but I could have gone down a stop on sensitivity and that would have gotten rid of a lot of it. With a faster lens I could have gotten two stops down in sensitivity, gotten the same exposure, and the noise would have been scarcely noticeable especially with a little post.

A Word of Advice for those of you with Canon Equipment

2010-01-07T19:49:00.001-08:00

First of all, a very Happy New Year to anyone who reads this. (No comments for a long time - it may just be me and myself.) I regret to say that my family situation did resolve itself over the holidays, and not in a happy way. But it is good that it is finished and life, as always, goes on.

Anyway, here's the advice, if it helps. Canon's newer DLSR's allow separate setting of second curtain sync for onboard flash and external flash. However, you have to have a new enough flash to allow this to work. Otherwise the flash's setting overrides the camera's. (Or the camera may not allow you to set external flash curtain sync at all.)

Here's the kicker.

Although it's not readily apparent from the manual, if your flash can be a master flash (has a setting for "Off/Master/Slave," typically on the 500 series of Canon flashes) you cannot set second curtain sync on the flash if you are in anything except "Off" mode.

This is actually quite logical in that with multiple flash units it would be problematic to ensure that you got the result you wanted, but it's not obvious. At least, it wasn't to me. I haven't checked to see if this is true for slave-only flashes (mainly the 400 series) but it very well may be.

Edit: It is in fact true, at least on the 430EX.

M

Placeholder.

2009-12-24T05:41:00.000-08:00

And so I pause on a very grey and icy Christmas Eve morn to say two words. I've been busy with work and family matters and even when I'm not "busy" with them, it's hard to concentrate on other things that seem a bit frivolous, such as photography. I got a "lateral" promotion at my day job - same title, but additional responsibilities, a new office, and a minion. Never had a minion before. It's actually kind of worrisome. I know *I* can look busy, but now I have to either make sure another person also looks busy or I look bad. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, as soon as this family thing is resolved - which, sadly, probably won't be much longer - I really do want to try to get back into photography. It's just that scheduling things in advance is a bit of a fool's game at the moment.

Anyway anyway, I gave my father and my grandmothers digital photo frames for Christmas and preloaded them with several hundred family photos. They were a huge hit.

You can give these to even non-techie types if you a) preload them and b) make sure that they are such that if they get turned off or unplugged, all you have to do is turn them back on and they go into slideshow mode. I don't know what kind of industrial design school dropouts they've got designing the interfaces for these things - half of them don't even have a shuffle feature - but you can find acceptable ones if you shop around a little. They've gotten quite reasonably priced, too. I got 15" ones for not much more than a hundred dollars! That's big enough even for older people whose eyesight isn't the best and/or larger rooms.

M

I Don't Get It, I Never Will Get It, And Apparently I'll Never Be An Artist

2009-11-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

I am following with moderate interest www.aphotostudent.com, the blog of one James Pomerantz, a student in the MFA (Photography) program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. My interest is moderated not by any failing of Mr. Pomerantz - who writes well and obviously cares very much about photography - but rather because it is mainly about being a student in a modern fine arts program and, well, "modern," "fine," and "art" to me largely comprise a tripartite oxymoron.

Here's his latest entry:

Roger Ballen in Conversation with Darius Himes Monday November 9th, 7pm

As might be apparent it is about an event where in a modern fine art photographer will be discussing his work with someone. In this case Roger Ballen, the photographer, will be publicly discussing his work with Darius Himes, an editor at an art press. It should be noted that both are quite successful in their respective fields, with Ballen having had a book recently accepted for publication by Phaidon Press and Himes being labeled as one of the 15 most influential people in photography publishing by PDN, the industry trade journal.

So why do I care?

Because if you read the post linked above, you will come across such gems as:

"His most recent work (to be published by Phaidon Press in the Spring of 2009) has pushed this further still, often eradicating the human figure altogether to create intense and loaded subjective spaces that produce intense arenas of disease."

What does that even mean? "Intense arenas of disease?" Used to describe black and white pictures of plates of apples and somebody's feet? (Said apples not being particularly unwholesome-looking, nor said feet particularly ravaged by pathology, just a bit grimy.) How much Kool-Aid do you have to drink to come up with that kind of stuff? Also, five demerits for multiple uses of the word "intense" in a single sentence. Somebody has Grammar Check turned off.

I hasten to add that Mr. Pomerantz did not write that - it was a quote from Robert Cook, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. And if I may wax stereotypical for a moment, how does somebody who can write things like that even survive to adulthood in Australia? Perhaps he's an immigrant. But I digress.

The point being, Mr. Ballen, who is certainly a fine technical photographer and beyond question more experienced and able than I, chooses to use his skills to produce things like photographs of people who look a little genetically questionable wearing scrap wire helmets and holding cats. And for this, he is celebrated, nay, lionized, in much the same way that Michelangelo or Bach might have been in an earlier, less sophisticated time. (Or, to tip the con, much the same way that Picasso or Pollack were not so very long ago.)

Now, here's the thing. I am well aware that a metaphor can be framed in almost any fashion. But if you do not use contextual elements to anchor the metaphor, you are not framing a metaphor, you are throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks. To impose my own unsophisticated metaphor on the situation, any intelligent preschool child can tell you that if you have to explain a joke, it's not funny. Granted there are many things I might find funny (or insightful) that a preschool child would not. It's entirely possible that I am but a Preschooler of Art. But if so, that is a mighty high bar to set: I have two college degrees, a postgraduate degree, am ridiculously well read and altogether too clever by half, and I still look at most of these things and say, "Yes? And?"

I can go from dirty feet with apples to "arenas of disease," with a little prodding. But I can just as easily go from dirty feet with apples to "the dignity of poverty in epicurean repose." It's the Emperor's New Art: "Only a foolish person cannot see the idea inherent in the work!" Well, human beings are really smart and really good at rationalizing, so there's no pile of dreck that can't have some meaning tormented out of it ex post facto. However, at that point "art" becomes deliberate obfuscation: if you want to tell me something, use symbols we both associate with the basic concept you are trying to discuss. Making up new words when there is already a perfectly good word that means exactly what you are trying to say is pretentious at best and dictatorial at worst.

Now, that doesn't meant that abstraction or surrealism can't be perfectly valid artistic metaphors. One could create an "arena of disease" with a photograph showing nothing but smiley, happy people sitting round, say, a dinner table on which a young child has been laid out as the main course. (*eyes up and to the left*) But the key to such communication is the discontinuity. A picture of a feeble-minded person wearing a scrap-wire helmet and holding a cat is nothing but discontinuity. Other than, "The world is a strange place, innit?" it does not consistently communicate anything in a common symbology. (Not that that's not a valid observation, but it never stops there.)

I have Mr. Pomerantz's blog on my bloglist, but I tend to save up and read it every week or two rather than daily (he doesn't post daily, but I don't read as often as he posts.) This is because I have to be in the right headspace to deal with the topics that he discusses. Again, this is no disrespect to Mr. Pomerantz, who appears at times to have a bit of fish-out-of-water feeling about the process himself and who chronicles it with integrity and merit. In my normal mindset, as soon as such is put in front of me, I merely dismiss it with boredom. I need to be a little introspective - at least willing to grant the benefit of the doubt. So far the benefits are unclaimed, but from time to time it is good to stretch one's mind even on topics one finds intrinsically suspect.

M

It Really Is A Shame

2009-10-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a post on the Copyright Action forum called, "The Real Cost of Being Sued By Getty [Images]."

http://copyrightaction.com/forum/the-real-cost-of-being-sued-by-getty

A small company used one unlicensed image "about the size of a postage stamp" on its website. Getty sent them a bill for unlicensed usage for £1,700 (the image could probably have been licensed for a tenth of that, or a similar image licensed royalty-free for a hundredth of it.)

They relied on advice from "experienced business people," Internet lawyerin', and all the old tired arguments we hear when such issues are discussed 'mongst the crowd.

Net result?

They paid the license fee, they paid lawyers, and they paid Getty's legal bills. They won't disclose the final amount but it is surely north of £25,000, or roughly Forty Thousand US dollars.

It was a small company, the error was inadvertent (and made by a third party web developer) and... it cost them a significant portion of their operating revenue. It could very well end up bankrupting them. Not to mention the enormous stress it placed on multiple employees of the firm as well as diverting time and resources from operation of the business.

Bottom line?

If it isn't yours, don't take it.

If you do, and somebody calls you on it, 'fess up, pay up, and move on. If you admit fault (when you're clearly caught) and offer to negotiate, they'll probably work with you. Start relying on Internet Lawyerin', and, well, you end up where these poor folks did. And that doesn't really help anybody.

M

Little Ways to Change the World

2009-10-12T06:40:00.000-07:00

Today I read the obituary of one Marty Forscher, a repairman.

Of course, I read it in the New York Times.

Why was a repairman memoralized in the Gray Lady?

Here's why...

Mr. Forscher opened a professional camera repair shop in New York City right after the Second World War. He had been working on cameras to make money before the war, and during it worked in the Navy photography shop (run by the famed Edward Steichen!)

Mr. Forscher was a native genius and inventor - see the obituary for a small sampling of examples - but in the 1960's, he started collecting discarded cameras from magazines, fixing them, and sending them to aspiring photojournalists in the South for use in documenting the Civil Rights movement. When they were soaked by fire hoses, or smashed by police, he would fix them right up and send them right back. The images produced by the cameras were published all over the world.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the camera is also a fearsome weapon for truth: by arming these men and women, Mr. Forscher played a small but vital role in their dangerous work. As the evil and the furtive have been learning since Leopold's day, the evil that flourishes in darkness and ignorance will not survive the light. Well done, Mr. Forscher, well done.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/nyregion/11forscher.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Link courtesy of James Pomerantz at http://www.aphotostudent.com/.

M

Licenses, Releases, Copyrights and Contracts: Let's Review

2009-10-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

I get a lot of emails about model releases and various confusions about what they are. Herein, a brief refresher on the four Intellectual Property issues that are of the most importance to photographers, models, and other people in the industry.

Please be advised that while I am a licensed and experienced intellectual property attorney (I have been admitted to the bar of the state of Illinois, the Northern District of the Illinois Federal Circuit Court, and to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as well as appearances before the United States Copyright Office) I may or may not be licensed to practice in any jurisdiction where the reader may reside or have business, and nothing herein is meant to constitute specific legal advice. Always consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction and familiar with the relevant law before making legal decisions.

There are two sets of rights which may attach to any photograph showing a recognizable human being. The first we will collectively refer to as the right of publicity, although in some jurisdictions it is also referred to as the right of privacy, even though technically they are two different things. For purposes of our discussion, the right of publicity (or, for brevity, the RoP) is the right to control the use of your own likeness. This right belongs to the recognizable human being depicted, to whom we shall refer as the model. It is governed by state law.

The other right which may attach to the photograph is copyright. Copyright attaches to the photograph the moment is fixed in tangible form (including either a film negative or an electronic image file in a digital camera's memory.) It is granted by the Copyright Act in the United States, and by similar laws in other countries. In the US, the copyright belongs to the creator of the work. For a photograph, that's the person who pushed the shutter release, whom we shall call the photographer. It is governed by Federal law.

Copyright is the first of the four IP issues when dealing with the question of who may and may not use a photograph. Copyright trumps all other rights: if the holder of the copyright has not granted permission to make any particular use of the photograph, it is almost certainly unlawful to make such use. The oft-misunderstood doctrine of "Fair Use" will almost never apply to any matter relevant to our discussion. If a professional photographer took a picture of a professional model, almost no use the model could want to make of it is a Fair Use. Put it from your minds.

It is interesting to note that in Canada, if a model hires and pays a photographer to take pictures of them, the model owns the copyright. This is a very unusual rule. In the US, the photographer owns the copyright, even if the model is paying the photographer. The only exception would be if the photograph was a "work for hire," a very misleading term which requires far more than that the photographer is being paid. Again, in almost no situation you are likely to run across will the photograph be a work for hire. Put it from your minds.

So. The photographer has a copyright. The model has a right of publicity. They wish to allow each other to make various uses of photographs subject to these mutual rights. What to do?

If the photographer wants to use the model's likeness, he needs a release. A release is just permission to use someone's likeness in a way which otherwise they might be able to prevent as a breach of their right of publicity. Here is the text of the release that Norma Jeane Mortenson, later known as Marilyn Monroe, signed at her first session with the incomparable Bruno Bernard, greatest of the Hollywood glamour photographers:

"Release 7/24/46
I hereby permit Bernard of Hollywood to use the pictures he has taken of me for exhibition and commercial use.

Signature: /Norma Jeane Mortenson/"

With one minor exception, that release would stand up in court in any jurisdiction of which I am aware. You will note, however, that it does not say anything about payment, nor does Bernard's signature or any obligation or promise by Bernard appear. Why? Because a release is not a contract. A release is a release. A release can be consideration ("Consideration" is the legal word for "payment," but it does not mean the same thing as "money.") for a contract. A release can be included in a contract. But a release is not a contract, nor must a model receive any payment whatsoever for a release in the vast majority of cases. You give the permission, the permission is given. It should also be noted that unless the release contains limiting terms, such as a time limit, it is generally held as unlimited in time and space. Releases need to be written in many jurisdictions, but not all. When in doubt, releases should always be written.

Similarly, the photographer may give the model the right to use the copyrighted image for any particular purpose by granting the model a license. Here is the text I use to grant models a license to use photographs for their portfolios:

"I, Marc Whipple, by my signature below grant [MODEL] a license to use the copyrighted photographs I have provided for them on [DISC, EMAIL, ETC] for the purpose of self-promotion. The photographs may not be used for any commercial purpose other than promoting [MODEL]. This license shall be perpetual and throughout the world, but is not transferrable.

Signature: /Marc Whipple/"

You will notice again that this does not talk about money, nor does it require any promise from the model. Why? Because a license is not a contract. A license is a license. A license may be consideration for a contract. A license may be included in the text of a contract. But a license is not a contract, nor must a photographer receive any payment whatsoever for a license in the vast majority of cases. You give the permission, the permission is given. (Note, however, that while whether a release has to be written, and what format it requires, varies widely by jurisdiction, the requirements for a copyright license are standard throughout the US.) Like releases, licenses must contain any limiting terms at the moment they are granted: limits cannot be imposed later. You will note that my license does not allow the model to commercially exploit the images or to allow others to do so.

So again. The photographer can grant a copyright license. The model can grant a release of RoP. Excellent well, excellent well... but what if the parties are not quite this straightforward for some reason? Suppose the model is concerned they will not get the photographs they were promised by the photographer in consideration for posing? What if the photographer is worried the model will not pay for the photographs after they review them?

The parties, wishing to bind each other, must now enter into a contract.

A contract is a mutual exchange of promises, nothing more, nothing less. The promises may be executed immediately upon entering into the contract (such as when you pay cash at the store for goods) or may be delayed until future events occur or do not occur (such as when your insurance company promises to pay you if your car is stolen.) But for a contract to exist, both parties must make a promise, either to do something they are not otherwise obliged to do, or not to do something they would otherwise be entitled to do. Contracts generally do not have to be written (in some cases the copyright law does require written documents,) although of course it can be difficult to prove the terms of a contract that was never written down. An oral contract which contains a promise to later execute a written document (such as a license or release) is perfectly enforceable, if the party seeking to enforce it can prove it existed at all.

Interestingly, it's that latter formulation (the parties promise not to do something that they would otherwise be entitled to do) that governs contractual use of both releases and licenses. The model could use a promise not to sue a photographer for infringement of the model's RoP as consideration for something they want from the photographer (like prints or digital image files.) The photographer could likewise promise not to sue a model for infringement of copyright in exchange for something they want from the model (such as posing time, or a RoP release.)

So, let's take our oft-repeated situation where a model is trading posing time for images they can use to promote their modeling career. The parties should, of course, discuss what they expect (how many images, when they will be delivered, limits on usage by both parties) before the shooting even begins. When the session is over, the model usually signs a release. When the photographer delivers the images, they usually include a license. But if they have concerns that problems may ensue, they should enter into a contract. For instance, here is a short example of a contract which would govern the above sort of exchange:

"Marc Whipple (hereafter, "Photographer") and Jane Doe (hereafter, "Model,") by their signatures below, hereby enter into this Agreement for Photographic Services:

1) Photographer agrees to provide Model with six good-quality digital image files within thirty days of the signing of this Agreement. These files shall be suitable for use on Model's Internet portfolio site and comparable to the other images located there. Photographer also agrees to provide Model a reasonable copyright license allowing her to use the image files for reasonable self-promotional purposes.

2) Model agrees to provide Photographer with a reasonable likeness release which will allow him to make commercial usage of any and all photographs of Model which Photographer has produced.

Signatures: /Marc Whipple/, /Jane Doe/"

Now, this is a highly simplified contract. But it ties back in to our earlier examples. The photographer has to give the model her images as he's agreed, and a license to use them. If he does neither of these things, he's in breach of contract, and the model is not obliged to sign a release. In fact, she can sue him for her photographs, or for damages!

Similarly, the model has to sign the release, if the photographer lives up to his end of the bargain. If she doesn't, she's in breach (she's broken a legally enforceable promise,) and the photographer can sue her to get damages (money) or even specific performance. In other words, the court could order her to sign the release, and find her in contempt - possibly even jailing her! - if she refuses. If she were to try to sue him for breach of her RoP, he could use the unfulfilled contract as a defense, and her suit would likely fail.

A "real world" contract of this sort might have both the release and the license "built in," so that the terms are specified in advance, and just make them conditional upon everybody doing what they're supposed to do. In fact, that's usually how it's done in commercial photography. But this example shows the process as a series of discrete parts.

I hope those interested in the subject find this a useful and hopefully not too-intense introduction to these topics. Interested parties are invited to comment (I will respond here) or email me with questions or comments.

M

Gasp!

2009-10-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

Two posts in one day!

Just a quick update. We did go to Calumet, but they were out of pretty much everything. The woman behind the counter (who aside from being just adorable is, more importantly, also a highly-skilled photographer and a most expert salesperson) exclaimed, twice, "Oh, I'm waiting for one of those too!" when asked for something. The only thing we ended up buying was a packet of Brilliant Museum photo paper for my wife to play with. I just looked in my stash and I had a packet, but I already used some of it and I think she wants to do some comparison prints.

So I went on their website and ordered the stuff I wanted. They're switching filter manufacturers (their old manufacturer is Hoya, which produces material in Japan, and their new one is B+W, which produces material in Germany.) So their store-brand filters are largely on clearance - I got a circular polarizer for my wife for less than half price, and a 2-stop ND filter for both of us ditto. The only thing back-ordered was a .6 graduated ND filter I want mainly so my wife can do landscape work with it. They're back-ordered EVERYWHERE, for some reason. Not that I mind waiting, it's just odd. I guess that the recession hasn't hurt demand for 2-stop graduated ND filters. Go figure.

In case you wonder why I need all these ND filters, the regular 2-stop ones are essentially a way to restrict the amount of light that gets into the camera so you can slow down your exposure, or open up your aperture, even in bright light. There comes a point where, if you're outdoors in full sun, even at ISO 100 equivalent sensitivity, you just can't use a long shutter speed and/or a large aperture because the camera just can't handle all the light. This filter is essentially sunglasses for your camera, reducing light intake without affecting color. The back-ordered one is graduated - at one end, it's clear, and at the other, it's 2 stops darker, and from one end to the other it gradually gets darker or lighter depending on which way it's turned. This allows you to shoot things of extremely different brightness without blowing one side out, or making the other side too dark. The classical application for this is shooting landscapes - you hold the filter so that the light end is toward the ground and the dark end is toward the sky. Then you can still have a rich blue sky and a well-exposed ground.

We also went to the Blick store down the road from Calumet (interestingly, both Calumet stores in Illinois have a Blick store down the road) and she got a sheet of silver foil matboard. She looked pretty funny holding it in her lap all the way home, but we were in my truck and I was afraid it would get wet and/or beaten up if we put it in the back. (It has been raining here all day.) She plans to experiment with this for black and white pictures.

M

Stirrings of Life

2009-10-01T08:11:00.001-07:00

Well, obviously I haven't been very photographic - or very much of anything - here lately. Mostly I mess around with MMORPG (which shall remain nameless - I don't do endorsements unless I'm paid) and other useless ways to pass the time.

However, I decided that if I have all these pictures around, I might as well try to capitalize them, so I applied to another Internet stock agency. (Which shall also remain nameless until they accept me.) You have to submit a batch that passes human-monitored QC before you're accepted for full upload, and they failed my first batch because one of the images was too soft. I think they're nuts (I won a contest with that photo) but whatever.

I will not be active in their online community, as that never seems to go well for me. I am going to upload pictures and if somebody wants to license them, I'll get money. Well and good. Hopefully I won't kill this one by joining.

I bought a macro lens and fooled around with it some, but otherwise, I get my camera out for family stuff and that's about it. I think the PhotoShelter Collection shutting down hit me harder than I realized at first. (PhotoShelter's other services for photographers are still available and continue to receive good press. If you are a more commercially-oriented photographer, I think they are a good value and work well.) I am largely motivation-free when it comes to photography. Add to that some personal drama (not directly involving me) with the studio space I use and it's just not appealing at the moment.

However, I need to get out and I need to do stuff and this is getting a little sad. (Okay, sadder.) I think I'll go roust out my shopping partner and run to Calumet Photo just for fun.

I resubmitted a new batch this morning, too... I replaced my award-winning photograph with one which Richard Freaking Leakey licensed for a presentation for Science Week in NYC. If they don't take that, I will simply submit pictures of kitties and cute children until they let me in. Then I will upload a massive batch of subversion.

M

Good Advice Then...

2009-08-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

... good advice now.

This was taken at the Kankakee County Fairgrounds, in one of the livestock display barns. I wouldn't be surprised this sign was many decades old. Then, of course, the major risk was fire in the hay/straw/wood bedding of the animals, ignited by a flame lighting source or a cigarette.

While there's still a lot of hay, straw, and wood chips, neither flame lighting nor cigarettes were much in evidence. There were, however, much newer signs warning that food and drink were not allowed and that you should not touch your face while in the barn and that you should wash after you left. Bird flu and the Oink, you know. Ah, progress.

M

For Your Consideration.

2009-08-02T15:17:00.001-07:00

We took my daughter to the county fair today. Since we got there just as the Midway opened, we had to wait in line to buy tickets. There, apparently sent by the God of Metaphorical Photo Ops, I saw these two.

I call this, "Jackie Spratt and, Um, Jill Spratt."

I don't know (nor would I care to wager) that they are anything other than friends and/or relations. They might have even been total strangers waiting for their kids. The title is not meant to imply a spousal relationship. I just thought it was funny.

Incidentally I don't recall that Jack Spratt's wife had a name. In the nursery rhyme tradition I have called her Jill. I also considered Jane. Incidentally incidentally, you can't read it at this resolution, but the sign reads, under the "Notice" section:

Due to the design of the seating safety device on this ride, exceptionally large people may not be able to ride.

I think Jill is dead out of luck. Sorry, Jill.

Comments invited.

M

No, I Did Not Get Hit By a Bus

2009-07-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Although the dog keeps trying to kill me. He likes to lay in the hall in the dark and see if he can break my legs. So far, he's only managed to hyperextend one of my toes on the laundry hamper, but it's only a matter of time.

I have not had any creative impulse whatsoever for quite some time, I'm sad to say. I mostly just sit around and do geek stuff. I did send a model who's traveling here (or maybe she already did) an email just to see if she'd work with me and she didn't answer, so that didn't help. I can handle most criticism but the kind which implies it's not even worth it to criticize me is kind of rough.

Anyway, here is a letter I got from a nice young lady in Greece and my comments on her questions. You may find it useful. Or interesting. Or at least mildly Amusing.

Hello!!I read your article http://www.marcwphoto.com/starting.html and I thought that you could maybe help me out and answer some qustions.
First of all I'd like to work on swimwear modelling and I'm thinking of building my portfolio soon.
Questions:1)Is it possible to start modelling and still be a good student?

That depends on your bandwidth. If you have the mental energy to try to do both, then yes. I know several models who have finished college degrees, including postgraduate degrees, while supporting themselves partially or wholly through modeling.

2)My portfolio should only include bikini pictures?

If all you ever ever ever want to do is swimwear, then I guess you could have all swimwear pictures and one good headshot, but you might as well at least put a few casual/lifestyle shots in there. It will look awfully strange if it's all bikinis, all the time.

3)Only one photographer helps with the portfolio or can I cooperate with more than one?

If you want your portfolio to have any depth, you're pretty much going to have to get images from more than one photographer.

4)How many pictures can you take in 1 hour?

Me? Thousands, especially if I put my camera on motor drive and hold the button down.

But if you want *good* pictures, the answer is complicated. I've gone the first hour of a shoot and not taken a single frame. I've taken thirty pictures in a two-hour shoot. (And to an old-school film photographer that could STILL be machine-gunning it.) I've taken three hundred pictures in a one-hour shoot. It depends on what you're doing. I would say that unless you're doing seriously complicated concept work, a one-hour shoot ought to get the model at least five pictures she can use, if you're doing trade or paying the photographer. See question three: you don't want or need dozens of pictures from any given photographer anyway. I'll never understand models who want all the images from a shoot. If you get one great image from a session, you're ahead of the game. More than that is a bonus. Unless, of course, you're paying for different looks - then you should expect at least one usable image for each look.

5)Who does the make up,the styling,the wardrobe?

That depends on who's willing to pay for what. I've had the model do it all herself, I've had models pay for stylists and artists, I've paid for stylists and artists, I've had stylists and artists work for trade, I've had clients pay for stylists and artists. (That last is how it works in the "real world" of commercial photography - they're just a line item on the invoice or included in the daily.) If you want pics for your port, either you ask the photographer to arrange makeup and styling and pay for it as part of the shoot, or you arrange for it yourself. If you're doing trade you can often find artists and stylists who also want trade, although they do tend to be less experienced.

6)Do photographers retouch the pictures taken?

Usually, especially if you're paying. However the level of retouching varies wildly, as does the quality. I retouch my pictures very little, but that's because (if I do say so) I know how to take pictures that don't need much retouching. Some photographers are mediocre photographers but have Photoshop skills far exceeding my own. This is great, unless their pictures end up more as photo-illustrations that don't *look* like you. If you show up at a shoot looking radically different than your heavily-retouched pictures, the photographer/client is going to be very upset.

7)I checked model mayhem out for photographers and found some really good ones(and expensive)for bikini shoots but I didn't find someone whose pictues I like here in greece.Should I take some pictures with a not-so-good photographer at first or what else can I do?

If you want pictures to use to market yourself, not-so-good images are worthless. Better to have digital snapshots your friend takes with a point-and-shoot camera than crappy-looking pro pics. Digital snapshots say, "Hey, I'm just starting," and crappy-looking pro pics say, "Hey, I have no idea what good pictures look like and I paid this shmuck to make some bad ones for me." :)

If you listen to nothing else I say, listen to this: It is better to have one good headshot and one good body profile than fifty crappy pictures. Quality is EVERYTHING. Photographers have a saying that you are only as good as your worst picture. It also applies to models.

M

Right of Publicity Produces Win-Win-Tie Result

2009-05-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen settles with American Apparel for $5M for using his likeness in an ad without permission:

Woody Allen wins $5 million in lawsuit over his image

Despite the headline's text he did not win the money, it was a settlement on the eve of trial.

Win 1: They blatantly took a still from one of his films and used it in an ad. They claimed Fair Use, in that they added a caption in Hebrew, and that obviously, it was "never meant to sell clothes." However, their logo was quite visible on the billboard they made. A court would have made short work of this argument, I think. Commercial misappropriation is a lot harder to defend than noncommercial, and putting your logo on something, especially when you are known for offbeat ads, kind of gives the lie to the idea that it wasn't commercial usage. Right of Publicity comes out on top.

Win 2: I despise American Apparel, at least I do whenever they are brought to my attention. Their ads are the worst FOTM Terry Richardson/Ryan Mcwhatshisface dreck and their products, at least what I've seen in said ads, are ugly and faux-retro in a lazy mass-market way. What discomfits them refreshes me. Also, they tried to intimidate Allen by putting his ex-wife and his current wife, the victim and subject of a rather scandalous affair, on the proposed witness list. That was pure sleaze, as neither of them could possibly have anything to do with the case.

Tie: I have never liked Woody Allen's movies or much cared for the tiny bit I know about him through unpurposed media input. OTOH, he doesn't seem inclined to put up with people doing him wrong, which I have to admire. So I guess it's okay that he won, although ideally somebody would have hit him with a pie on his way out of the courthouse or something.

M

Sorry I'm So Lame

2009-04-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

Lame blogger is lame.

Gumption supplies are at record lows. Pretty much everything feels kinda pointless. Mostly I sit and play computer games and make snarky comments on web sites.

When (if) the weather ever improves I am going to try to get the garage ready to paint. However, it's been pouring down rain for a week and doesn't look to improve soon. That's okay: I am not looking forward to painting anyway, but at least it's a plan.

Photographywise, zip. I have ideas, I write 'em down, and then I think of all the reasons that if I try to do any photography it won't work. I miss my shooting space and my very own studio. No money for that, though. I am getting the credit cards paid down, which is why there's no money - with any luck just a few more months will do it. We had a quarterly company status meeting yesterday and while of course business is down, we are financially secure and moving product, so that's an upper. We also had our first sale of our new product line - which took four years to develop and two years to get regulatory approval for - so that's a very good sign. The potential revenue from this product line beggars the imagination, IF we can get it into the market and the whole world economy doesn't collapse and/or this new flu doesn't turn out to be Captain Trips.

I work for a closely-held company: lately my big daydream involves our main potential competitor (which has 50 times the employees we do) buying out my bosses with so much money that they give every employee $200K as a going-away present. That, and winning the lottery. :)

M

All Quiet on The Midwestern Front

2009-04-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

I got a new keyboard and mouse. That's about the extent of it.

It's very disconcerting to replace the keyboard and the mouse when you use the computer as much as I do. Especially since they hardly make "traditional" mice anymore and they're all ergonomic modern sculptures - designed for people with smaller hands than mine. I have very long fingers and I can never get comfortable on a curved mouse. Oh, well.

They were a set, and they're wireless, so that's nice - one less cable snaking around on my desk and causing my water glass to tip perilously off-center. Plus, my new keyboard has a display. That's probably the real reason I picked it. I'm hopeless.

M

Says It All, Really

2009-03-30T07:38:00.001-07:00

I give you the root of the problem:

From Attu at AttuWorld.

M

Why Not?

2009-03-28T21:12:00.000-07:00

Apple came out with an upgrade to the Mac Mini recently. Of particular interest to me was the vastly improved video card, which in my mind was the weakest link in the one I had. It would have been nice to have more than 2GB of RAM, but that video card was a dog.

Well, I had a brilliant idea.

My daughter has a hand-me-down eMac, the last one they made with a CRT. It's noisy, it uses a lot of power, and it takes up half her small desk. To do homework it has to be shoved around to make room. I thought, "Hey, I'll get me a new Mini, and she can have mine, along with an LCD screen, and it'll be quiet, efficient, and take up a lot less room."

As those of you who know me personally are aware, thought and deed are one with me, so I did some pretty elaborate shenanigans to get the maximum Frequent Flyer miles possible and the thing arrived yesterday.

Both "base" models have the same processor, but the more expensive one has more RAM, and Apple advertises it as having more Video RAM, too. However, the way it actually works is that if the machine has more RAM, it allocates more of it to the video card. A little deceptive, you ask me. I bought the absolute cheapest one: the hard drives were the same speed, the other one was just bigger, and I don't care about that. I have 2.5TB of storage in my office. I didn't get RAM from Apple, either, their prices are rapacious. I installed it myself, which is no errand for the inexperienced. If you want to see how it works, look here:

http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini2009.html

Amusingly, that site is run by a co-location company (they maintain computer equipment for people that can assist or replace their on-site equipment in case of demand or disaster) which specializes in co-locating Mac Minis. Look at the picture at the bottom, which is of literally DOZENS of Mac Minis on a big server rack. :)

Hooking the antenna back up was a bit dicey, but otherwise, no sweat. I did the Migration Assistant thing that Macs come with: it had to crank all night, but this morning I was ready to rock. Only two glitches, but both of them required some geek-fu: one of them required the use of "sudo." If you don't know what sudo is and you have this glitch, basically your Mac is going to be set to London time forever. :)

It works great: the video card rocks. Between the new video card and the 4GB of RAM (my old one was maxed out at 2GB) I can comfortably multi-task, Lightroom is much more responsive, and the water in World of Warcraft is SPARKLY.

Tonight I backed up my daughter's computer and set up her new one, which seems to be working although I have to make sure her bookmarks are moved and the Parental Controls are working. Since it's in the living room, I got a nice big monitor and we can watch Internet movies and stuff on it, too.

I'll take the old comp to work, safe-erase it, and donate it to anybody who wants it. Or maybe I'll see if my daughter's school wants it.

As always, I was Amused and a little disturbed by all the open WiFi networks I could see when I set up the computer in the living room. (We didn't want to run a cable so her computer had a WiFi card installed: the Mini has one built-in.) I could see three networks, including one which was still at factory defaults (which means I OWN your network if I want to) and one named "Aretha," which was fun. I didn't link into any of them: our network is SSID-silent and requires a 128-bit encryption key. The FBI could break it in short order but wardrivers won't even see it, especially since this is a target-rich environment for them anyway.

M

XKCD: Either You Get It, Or You Don't.

2009-03-16T06:59:00.001-07:00

XKCD can be a little uneven, although it always delivers the geek. However, today's episode is made of pure iridium-plated WIN.

http://xkcd.com/556/

Friday's comic (http://xkcd.com/555/) is also mostly composed of structural-grade awesome. If that worked I would so totally do that five times a DAY. Soon we would have a serious mirror-haunting demon shortage.

(Small spoiler ahead.)

I don't know why, but the alt text - if you read XKCD, always read the alt text, it's often the best part of the strip - is almost irresistibly hilarious to me. Here it is, if your browser doesn't support alt text:

"The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed -- for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I added the italics because that's the really funny part. He'd have put them in if you could put italics in alt text. I know this, if I know nothing else in this world. And that's the beauty of XKCD: where else are you going to get H.G. Wells, triffids, tripods, Al Gore and Cervantes, along with a reference to the totally batshit insane, in one freaking place? I ask you.

Up until now, this has probably been my favorite XKCD comic:

http://xkcd.com/442/

... because I love the "Boom De Yada" song. Many of the panels are sort of in-jokes about XKCD characters, but it's still funny.

M

New Gear is Fun. Yes, Indeedy.

2009-03-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've actually been pretty good, compared to the way I used to be, about buying new photography gear. Other than the new printer I bought myself for Christmas (which I needed, as the old one was getting very old and the ink was getting hard to find and expensive) I haven't bought anything for quite some time.

Well, the tax refunds came, and I felt it was my patriotic duty to stimulate the economy a little.

I bought one of these:

EF 135mm f/2.8 with Softfocus

I read about this lens in a book Canon gave me for being one of the first purchasers of the original Digital Rebel (the EOS 300D.) I've been lusting after it for years. It's a 135mm prime lens with a max aperture of f2.8, which is faster than most zoom lenses, but not all that fast for a prime. However, it is unique, so far as I know, amongst currently available lenses in that it has a selectable soft-focus mechanism. It uses controlled spherical aberration to soften the image to two selectable degrees (you can also turn it off.)

In English, that means it can make the subject of the image softer without affecting depth of field or plane of focus. That's what that switch labeled "SOFT" is for - 0 for no softening, 1 for first degree softening, 2 for max softening. Example:

This is a totally unretouched self-portrait. Note how it looks like a Gaussian Blur has been applied or something... but the details are still reasonably clear, which would require either high expertise with the Blur filter, or a lot of fiddling with the parameters to get the optimum blur for this particular image, and maybe partially masking out the beard, which would have been very hard to not over-soften while getting the rest of the face right. Alternatively, I could have used a fast prime and opened it way up, but then I'd have had a very narrow depth of field, which also requires a lot of fiddling to get right, or a very high level of expertise, and even if you get it right, produces radical falloff on a dimensional subject if you want a fairly high level of softening.

This lens just did it all for me, with no work on my part whatsoever. (That's a Level 2 softening, exposure f2.8 at 1/200.) It produces soft, dreamy images which don't look overprocessed or out-of-focus. It'll be very, very handy for things like portraits of "ordinary people," who often benefit from a little softening, and should produce great results even in light which is a little harsh. I'm excited about it.

Interestingly, you hardly ever meet a photographer who's ever even heard of this thing. It was one of the very first Canon EF lenses, introduced way back in the day - first year of manufacture was 1987! It has no IS, and no USM. It's almost as loud as the infamous "Angry Hornet" 35mm f2. Its autofocus, for a lens this fast, is kinda slow in lower light, and it's a bit temperamental. However, as is so often the case with fiddly equipment, it seems to call one to rise to its challenge. You just want to play with it.

The autofocus does work in all softness modes, but the plane of focus shifts when softness is altered, which means you can't focus in 0 and then switch to 1 or 2. At large apertures or high softness settings, you have to pretty much trust the autofocus, especially in lower light, which means you have to be familiar with your camera and know when to be confident that the AF is locked on to what you think it is. On a side note, my cameras are always set to "Center AF only," and I lock-and-pan with separate Focus and Exposure locks, unless I am shooting something that moves around a lot, when I might activate more AF points. This helps me be consistent in my focusing technique.

So, like I said, it's a little touchy. But when it hits, it hits. Example:

ISO1600, f2.8@1/100. Softness level 1. The only light was a 40W tungsten bulb above and to camera right, probably at least six feet away. A little noisy, but dreamy and romantic as all-get-out, with very little post (crop, slight color adjustment.)

Also, I got a Kindle2. I'm still not sure why, but somebody gave me one. It's actually kind of cool. Free wireless internet is a Good Thing.

M

On Model Psychology

2009-03-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

Well-known model Elyse Sewell (her blog is linked on the right) mentioned that she'd had a bit of a skin breakout recently and that she was subconsciously convinced that everyone was repulsed by her monstrous visage. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

Here are a few responses I made, one of which has a funny little story about my photo shoot yesterday.

Response One, to Elyse's original post:

As I'm sure you know, it matters not how lovely the lady, as soon as she gets in her head that she has a problem, it immediately equates to her being actively repulsive. You are one of the most beautiful women in the freaking world, not to mention crazy smart and funny as Hell, and some rough zits convince you you're unfit to mingle with normal, decent folk. I see this with models a lot and it never fails to confusticate me.

The really funny part is, a man can be balding, scraggly-faced, and have a pot-belly peeking out under his "Def Leppard '89" t-shirt and honestly believe he is a good haircut and a nice jacket away from being Brad Pitt. God is an iron.

Response Two, to another poster's comment:

The model I shot yesterday had, for reasons known only to God, eaten an entire bag of carrots the day before. Although she had never had an issue before, she had a food reaction and broke out in blotchy red hives. (Her trachea also started to spasm, but she took some Benadryl and it went away pretty fast.) I suspect the carrots may have slightly contaminated with a mold or something, as I've never heard of anybody almost dying from eating carrots before. On the upside, we discovered that she can now see in total darkness.

In any event, it all appeared to be gone by the time I saw her but she was still semi-convinced that her face would scare small children and dogs and insisted on putting up makeup to run to the freaking store for a last-minute wardrobe addition. (The stylist didn't have anything plain enough, so we went to Target.)

This woman is beautiful, charming, and intelligent (she speaks several languages - some of which are non-Romance languages) as well as being an accomplished model, but for a solid half-hour I swear I saw her looking around to see if people were masking their horror at her appearance. The mind boggles.

M

The Right of Publicity, Again.

2009-02-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

I happened to attend an IP law seminar yesterday, where the Copyright update speaker mentioned that this case:

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT

No. 07-3269

JOHN FACENDA, JR., Executor
of The Estate of John Facenda
v.
N.F.L. FILMS, INC.; THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL
LEAGUE;
N.F.L. PROPERTIES, LLC,

was in his opinion one of the ten most important copyright cases of the year. I agree, and although the case was related to a new use for voice recordings, it is squarely on point with the ongoing silliness related to the Right of Publicity that so many photographers and other visual artists do not understand (or do not care to understand.)

Facenda, the legendary "Voice of God" NFL announcer, had recorded many promos for the NFL, which undisputedly owned the copyrights in the promos, both mechanical and performance. (In other words, they owned the words as written, and they owned the recordings as made, under the Copyright Act.) The NFL, however, used the recordings in a video game - which Facenda had never agreed to in any release or license. Facenda's estate sued for royalties, partially on the basis of Pennsylvania's Right of Publicity Act. (42 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 8316, see also 765 ILCS 1075.) The NFL claimed pre-emption - that because the PA law would infringe on their use of the copyrighted performances, it was pre-empted by the Copyright Act. (The Copyright Act, which is a Constitutionally-mandated Federal law, always trumps state law unless there is an exception.)

The Federal District Court agreed, but the Third Circuit, in a precedential appeal, reversed. They explicitly held that because the Right of Publicity protects a different right, and a different asset, there was no pre-emption. They based this on two factors:

1) If a state right has additional requirements which the Copyright Act does not require to grant protection, there is no pre-emption. PA's law requires commercial value of the likeness to be proven before the right attaches. There was no dispute about the value of Facenda's voice, which was significant. Therefore the pre-emption test failed on that grounds.

2) More importantly for photographers and other visual artists, the Appeals Court found that likeness is not copyrightable, and therefore the right of publicity is not within the scope of copyright. In other words, while I can create innumerable photographs of a face, all of which are potentially copyrighted, I can not copyright a face, no matter how exhaustively I document it. That means that if a state grants me some kind of protection in the appearance of my face, that protection does not conflict with the Copyright Act because the two rights are completely disjoint.

The appeal did not touch on First Amendment grounds, and the court did duly note that under Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, (510 U.S. 569, 571–72, 579–80 (1994)) where there is a First Amendment issue, the Copyright act's Fair Use doctrine usually controls, and there is a presumption against the right of publicity. However, there is lots of wiggle room there: IL's law, for instance, specifically exempts works of the fine arts but defines such works very narrowly. Excessive commercial exploitation of likeness, even in an artistic context, is very possibly not pre-empted and IL's law would quite likely withstand Federal judicial review.

This opinion only binds the Third Circuit courts, but it was exhaustively researched and very well-written and I would not hesitate to cite it as persuasive authority before the other Districts. The Right of Publicity is getting stronger every day: bottom line, get a good release, get it vetted by a lawyer who knows what they are doing, and get it signed.

M

Under Reconstruction

2009-01-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

I'm making a few changes to the blog.

I'm deleting the fine art stuff for various reasons. I do plan to have a little of it in another location, which I will send to anyone who emails me or asks in a comment.

M

A Tiny Victory

2009-01-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

The revamped Communications Decency Act, put in place after the CDA was ruled unconstitutional in 1998, has just been ruled unconstitutional.

See: Online Pornography Law Appeal Denied

If it is legal to do, it should be legal to photograph and legal to show. Period. It is my job as a parent to keep my child away from things I object to, not the government's.

M

They Might Be Giants

2009-01-20T07:44:00.000-08:00

I've owned a Polaroid camera, and in a faintly nostalgic way I thought it was too bad that they stopped making Polaroid film. (Note: they have NOT stopped making self-developing film. Fuji still makes a few kinds, mostly for passport photo machines and things like that.)

Well, inspired by Edwin Land's famous quotation:

"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."

these people have decided that they won't go down without a fight. Dr. Land, by the way, was the inventor of Polaroid film - the first Polaroid cameras were known as "Polaroid Land Cameras" or just "Land Cameras."

The Impossible Project

They've leased the building and bought all the equipment from the Dutch factory where integral Polaroid films were made, which means they're very serious - that took real capital. Their intention is not simply to revive integral Polaroid films - they can't do that, as many of the components are no longer available. They intend to invent entirely new kinds of integral self-developing film products, sold under a new brand identity - they didn't buy or license any trademarks from Polaroid, which is still a going concern - which use the same back technologies as existing cameras. They've given themselves a year. I kinda hope they make it.

M

I Am Avenged

2009-01-15T11:47:00.001-08:00

I have just reclaimed my manlitude by repairing the oven, which kept coming on by itself. Yes, by itself.

The control had come loose inside the control panel while the oven was turned on: if you turned the knob, you didn't actually turn the potentiometer that controls the oven temperature. It has a multi-part shaft, so while you thought you were putting the knob back on properly, you weren't actually engaging the control. The intermediate shaft wasn't seated on the final shaft and so turning it didn't do anything.

I had to figure out how to take it apart so I could get at it. Every other gas stove I've ever fiddled with had a cooktop that lifted like the hood of a car: this one wouldn't.

I couldn't find a manual online, so I went to Sears and looked at a similar range. The salesman didn't know how to open it either, so we looked in the manual:

"COOKTOP IS NOT REMOVABLE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LIFT OR OPEN."

Well, that was a fine how-do-you-do.

Anyway, I came home and eventually figured out how to get at it, what was wrong, and fixed it. With NO manual. So there.

M

Well, That's the Last of Them.

2009-01-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

It's very, very cold here in Chicagoland. Yesterday about 10AM, I noticed I was colder than I needed to be, since I was in my HOUSE. The thermostat's ambient temperature indicator read a distressing 58F. Since the thermostat was set to 70F, this was a cause of some concern.

(This is kind of a long story, and probably not that interesting, but I feel like writing it down...)

The first approach - fiddling with it - produced no appreciable result. A little research indicated that perhaps the breaker was blown. Nope, no blown breakers in breaker box. I reset the breaker anyway just to see what that would do. Nada.

My next hope was that the thermostat itself was broken. I hied me to Menards to see what I could see. Since we don't have central air, an inexpensive round thermostat seemed to be in order. I obtained one and installed it - only to find that it was broken. So I returned to Menards... only to find that both of the other ones in that model were also broken (or at least open.) So, somewhat irate, I got the next model up and installed that. Bupkiss. I read about how thermostats work and hotwired the signal wire (incidentally, the old thermostat had a mercury switch, which technically makes it hazardous waste. More about that later. Also, the wires were cloth-covered cable. Both original, and the house is seven years older than I am.) What that should have done is told the furnace, "I want heat and I want it until the floor starts to melt." No go.

We excavated the utility closet where the furnace lives and examined it as best we could. Pilot lit. Power on. No other visible signs of non-workingness, although a few of the wires likewise had their insulation dry-rotted completely off. Hoping that it was a bad connection, I did a little research and called a reputable furnace technician. By this time it was about 1 PM and the house was not very warm, although my wife had a good fire going and the temperature had stabilized around sixty degrees.

The technician arrived and examined the furnace. His diagnosis was a bad main gas valve, which is a $600 repair. He pointed out that even if he fixed that, though, the furnace was pretty much shot. It was also original, which means it was ~45 years old. Holes in the heat exchanger, flameouts, missing blast shield, you name it. I agreed that it was foolish to put $600 into something that was far, far past its design life, and we priced out a new furnace.

Some tense waiting later, the financing was approved (6 mos no interest no payments, although I plan to pay it off early. I just didn't have the cash on hand.) He left, promising that the installers would show up between 7 and 9 that night, for no extra charge, which is pretty amazing.

The installers arrived right at 8, and after some car jockeying in the driveway they got to work. It took them about two hours to remove the old furnace, including a lot of banging and Sawzalling. We had to take the back door off its hinges to get it out and the new one in, so the back door was in the kitchen for a while, which likewise distressed my daughter. (She does not like it when things are out of place.) Then after the new one was in place they had to measure for a new intake plenum - the new one is a foot and a half shorter than the old one! There was no room indoors to fabricate, so the poor man had to go outside and set up a table: by this time it was after 11 and about 10F outside. At least I had lots of light for him while he worked. Meanwhile the 'prentice hooked up the gas and electric connections. I installed the third new thermostat of the day - the furnace came with a nice digital programmable one. I knew that was going to happen (the tech told me) and in the meantime had returned the other two. We ran new signal wire as well.

After some rewiring necessitated by 'prentice mistakes (which I quietly pointed out to the installer while the 'prentice was in the other room - I held the light for him while he wired it, and I knew what the problem probably was) the furnace got running about 2:15AM. By that time the installer had been on shift for 18 hours, but while he wasn't bubbling he was still working hard. It was very impressive and I mean to write a nice letter to his employer commending him. The furnace ran pretty much the rest of the night and got the house back up to temperature. At its lowest point, the house was probably 56F at the center, the living room (where the big fireplace is) was probably 60F, and the far bedrooms were probably 50F or below.

While it seemed long and arduous at the time, in retrospect it's really kind of amazing that they could remove the old furnace, install and set up the new one in six hours. The installer said that between the close quarters and the cold slowing him down while he built the new plenum, it actually took longer than usual! They took the old furnace away and cleaned everything up, too. They also took the old thermostat, since they have a system for dealing with them. I was tempted to keep it and get up to mischief with the mercury somehow, but I decided not to fool with it.

That furnace was the last major thing that came with the house when we bought it: we've replaced the washer and dryer (we bought some used ones when we got the house - it didn't come with any,) the dishwasher (ditto,) the refrigerator (twice - the one that came with the house died a few months later,) the air conditioner (ditto that one,) the range hood, the range, and the water heater. It still needs lots of work but at least now we're on a new cycle.

M

While You're Waiting

2009-01-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

While you await my pontification, here are a couple of interesting articles on recent developments in the professional photography world.

David Harrington over at Photo Business News and Forum has this on Lawrence Lessig's new book, "Remix," which is a screed endorsing the wholesale theft of intellectual property:

http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2009/01/copyright-lawrence-lessig-v-stephen.html

There is a link to a very funny interview with Mr. Lessig on The Colbert Report which is worth watching.

And A Photo Editor has this to say about the ~~copymaker~~ photographer Richard Prince being sued by Patrick Cariou, whose photographs were appropriated by Mr. Prince for his latest ~~kindergarten art project~~ photomanipulation work.

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/01/12/richard-prince-sued-by-photographer-patrick-cariou/

Sadly, here's what I think about the situation:

I have come to one inescapable conclusion.

Copyright in the future will belong to those with the money to enforce it. It will be enforced against those with the money to make reparation.

I would not be at all surprised if, at the end of many days, we end up with a system like Canada has where there is a tax on blank recording media, which is redistributed to copyright holders under some regime I won't pretend to understand. This will be like that, but bigger - all ISP's, all broadcast/cable/satellite bandwidth providers, etc, will pay, and it will get divided up so Disney et al can limp along in perpetuity. Anybody who wants to will be able to steal my photographs and do whatever they want with them, end of story. In other words, it'll be just like now, but I won't have the forlorn hope that some intern at a company with actual money will steal something from me and I'll be able to get some kind of recovery.

M

Still Here, Just Busy.

2009-01-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

The weather's been bad, the day job's been busy, and I was in a car accident, so I haven't had much fun ranting or photography to do.

I'm fine, my truck needs body work but is mechanically sound, and things are calming down a little. More as events warrant.

M

Not To Gloat, but Bye-Bye JPG Magazine

2009-01-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of this "user-provided content" model for commercial enterprises. If you want to use my work to make money, especially when you are demanding large chunks of licensing rights, pay me. And while I thought JPG Magazine was a nicely laid-out mag, it didn't take long for me to decide I wasn't going to submit pictures to it for token payments while they got all kinds of publication rights and all the money.

Well, it turned out there's not that much money in that particular game:

JPG Magazine Says Goodbye.

Now, several perfectly nice people have lost their jobs, and for that I'm genuinely sorry. But like people who invest in Ponzi schemes, it's hard to have sympathy for people whose business model involves what, to me, seems like a fundamental disconnect with reality. JPG was basically the print version of Flickr. Why, exactly, does Flickr need a print version? I don't know. And apparently it doesn't.

Sorry, guys. Use the lesson learned and try again.

M

The Beautiful People

2008-12-23T18:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes accidents are happy. I took this picture at a fashion show in a nightclub. The flash didn't go off so the camera held the shutter open. (Av mode.)

Disturbingly attractive.

M

Honored to Be Mentioned, But A Seal? Seriously?

2008-12-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

Remember that contest I told you I won a prize in back a ways? Well, they announced the winners Friday, so I can say it was for Hawai'i Magazine's Tenth Annual Photo Contest.

Click here for a link right to the contest entry on their site.

I won Second Place in the "Maui" category, which isn't bad out of 800 submissions. (Well, there were more than 800 total submissions. I have no idea how many were for Maui.)

The grand prize winner was a picture of a seal.

A seal.

Now, it's a really good picture. I'm not complaining that it's not "better" than mine. But a seal? For reals? For Hawai'i?

Oh, well. I guess people don't usually think "bamboo forest" when they think Hawai'i, either. Or "sledding." So I shouldn't complain, now should I?

Anyway, links to my stuff below.

Here's the picture that won second place:

Bamboo Grove Entrance, Pipiwai Trai, Kipahulu District, Haleakala National Forest, Maui, Hawai'i.

They also featured the sledding picture in the contest slideshow:

Children Sledding on Grass along the Kula Highway, Maui, Hawai'i.

M

Surfin' on Snow Days

2008-12-19T06:11:00.000-08:00

It's an icy nightmare outside and my boss closed the office before I even left for work, so I'm home today. While I'll probably do some work later, at the moment I'm reading blogs and so forth. Here's a fascinating story about equipment failure.

A Photographer, The White House, and a Smashed SD Card: A Data Salvaging Saga.

Now, I had a buddy who could have fixed that, although it would have been touch and go. I point it out not only because it's a funny story, but because it illustrates a profound lesson: Never assume something is hopeless.

I've fixed cardreaders with my Swiss Army knife. (Computers, too.) Kevin German has a nifty story about some guy with a tinker's cart in Cambodia fixing his Canon 5D when the local Canon shop told him it couldn't be done here: My Cambodian Adventure. I've saved "dead" hard drives and cards, or at least zombified them long enough to recover crucial data. There's almost always a way.

On the lighter-but-not-really side, those of you in the journalism business may enjoy this bit of gallows humor:

M

My First Really Big Print.

2008-12-14T16:03:00.000-08:00

So I decided to try making a Really Big Print today. (It's working already - the printer was sitting there silently laying a guilt trip on me.) I asked my wife if she thought my father-in-law would like a poster print of his race car for his garage, and she said yes. So I intrepidly set out to make one.

I was going to do this picture:

But my wife liked this one better:

since you can see him racing other cars, and you can see his face. Okay, good enough.

Since I had already spent considerable time retouching that image, I didn't have to do a lot with it. I cropped it to the right aspect ratio (16x20 is 4:5, whereas my camera shoots at 2:3.) 4:5 is the same aspect ratio as 8x10, so I printed an 8x10 test print and examined it to make sure I was satisfied with the contrast, exposure, etc.

Then I upsampled it with Photoshop's Bicubic Smoother algorithm so that it was a 360PPI file. (This increased it from roughly 18MB to roughly 120MB in size.) Finally, I applied a sharpening filter that was appropriate for its new PPI and a print file.

Then I printed it using the appropriate print settings: in my workflow, I use Photoshop's color profiling rather than the printer driver's. I had a custom profile from the people who make the paper, so I just had to select that along with "Photoshop manages colors" in the Photoshop print dialog, along with of course doing a "Page Setup" and setting the proper orientation and paper size. (17x22, the size of four sheets of standard letter paper put together.) Then in the OS print dialog, I made sure to select the right paper type, the right color management (i.e. none - color management OFF) and the right print settings.

After going to the Summary tab to review the settings, I just hit "Print." It took about two minutes to render the print file. and then the printer lit up and the file started to spool. I popped the top of the printer to look and make sure the image looked to be fairly centered on the paper and nothing weird was going on - after about an inch of print it looked good and I shut the top and waited for the print to come out.

After another two minutes printed area started to emerge (this printer is BIG and it takes a while for the printed area to be visible outside the enclosure.) Then it was just a matter of watching it come out.

Wow.

I can't show you - obviously it makes no sense to try to show the quality of huge printouts on a screen. But this looks fabulous. When you consider the lens I had (17-85mm IS, shot at 1/100s, f6.3 at 85mm) and what I was taking pictures of (race cars twenty feet away going forty miles an hour) it's ridiculously clear. You can read print on the car that is less than an inch high. You can see the tread cuts on the tires. You can clearly see, through his visor, that my father-in-law wears glasses. I was at max ISO (1600) and it's not even that noisy. (Some of that of course is post.)

So I'm pretty pleased with it. I went and bought a poster frame at Michael's (they were on sale pretty cheap) which I'll put it in tomorrow. I could probably put it in safely now, but I like to let prints outgas for a day or so before I put them behind glass or plastic. If I were going for maximum life/value, I'd mat it and put it in an actual frame, but this is just an acrylic frame. Since the print only cost me about eight bucks to make and it's going in a garage, it'll be fine. If I had paid forty or fifty bucks for it from a commercial printer, I probably couldn't be so blase about it. :)

M

I'm Dumber than I Thought.

2008-12-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

So since the bonus gods were kind to me, I bought myself a little present. (Most of it went into savings or bills. Really.) And I promptly got myself into one of my snits about it.

I don't make as many prints as I might. Mostly this is laziness but part of it was because my printer - my faithful Epson Stylus Photo 2200, which certainly owed me nothing - was getting a little temperamental and didn't like current MacOS very much. Endless driver problems. So I had been wanting a new one.

Lo and behold, Epson's website has refurbished Stylus Pro 3800's on sale for $995. (Normally $1295.) That's a lot of money, but on the other hand it costs less than half as much per print to operate. So if I got to making prints, it would save me money. Plus my wife is getting into photography and she can use it too. So I started thinking about it.

But wait! There's more!

December special, free shipping and $100 off instant rebate. Now the thing is $895, no tax, no shipping. And I can write it off. And I can print archival 17" wide prints. Oh, Hell. What's money for? Besides, more than half of that is ink. I think the actual printer cost me about $250. Unlike Canon and HP, Epson never ships printers with reduced-capacity starter cartriges. This thing came with over half a liter of ink all told. And I thought I might be able to get a little something for my old printer - they were still selling on eBay. (I ended up getting $100 cash for it, which means the net cash I had to come up with was only $795.)

So I bought one. Epson's shipping facility is in Indiana so even with the free ground shipping it only took three days to get here. After some lugwork getting it home (the box weighs about fifty pounds and is about 3' x 2') and setting it up, I was all set to test it. I put in some 4x6 paper for test prints... and it happened.

Paper didn't load properly. I fiddled and diddled and to make a long frustrating story short, couldn't get it to work right. Paper kept shifting.

So today I had to take a beef hindquarter to Oak Brook (long story) and after I dropped it off I went into Calumet Photo to look at their 3800 to see if mine was doing something wrong.

The nice man on the floor powered up their demo 3800 for me and fed a sheet of paper while I watched. It did the same thing.

After I stopped cursing and explained to him the problem, he asked me what size paper I'd been using.

"4x6 test sheets," I said.

"Everybody has problems with 4x6 sheets in this printer," he said. "They're very light and they tend to move a bit when the guides operate. The printer has to be able to handle big heavy 17" sheets and the tiny papers just get thrown around by the power of the mechanism."

So I ran through an 8.5x11 and did a targeted geometric figure to find the center.
Dead on. Perfect centering in both dimensions.

Okay, so I'm paranoid. I *did* run a few test sheets at 8.5x11 but they didn't look right last night (can you say confirmation bias?) Now they're fine.

This is the printer (courtesy of Calumet Photo:)

It's kinda big. But it should be fun. I also got some 17" x 22" (!) paper from Calumet's website when they were having a special sale the other day. The price I paid, it would actually be cheaper to print four pictures at once on them and cut them up than to use regular photo paper.

Another nice thing about it is that it has three stages of black and some fairly advanced black-and-white printing modes, which is something I'm looking forward to. It also holds both matte black ink and photo black ink at the same time (it has nine ink tanks.) That means that if I want to switch media I don't have to switch tanks, plus it saves a lot of time and ink because all it does is clear the line and then it's ready to print on the appropriate media. The other printer, which required a tank swap, used quite a bit of black ink to charge the line relative to the size of the tank, which meant that every three or four swaps cost me a $20 ink tank.

M

Make a Little Difference

2008-12-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

The amazing photographer Kevin German, who currently lives in the Far East, is doing a project in a Vietnamese mental hospital and is soliciting donations to try to help out the people who run it a little bit.

You can read about how little they run the hospital with, and make a donation, by reading this blog post:

400 Cookies.

Warning: Link contains amazing photography and very, very sad documentary work. If you just want to donate, you can click this link for his PayPal donation button:

Donate to Help Vietnamese Mental Patients.

Please help if you can, even a tiny bit of money makes a huge difference. (US$0.50 feeds a patient for a day.)

I sent him a little bit of my holiday bonus - probably not as much as I could, but more than some people who could spare more, so I guess I'm okay with that. "The poor you will always have with you."

M

Oh, If Only.

2008-12-02T15:57:00.000-08:00

While this isn't my actual goal, I set my HA account to "First Class Roundtrip" just to look at it for a minute. I'm weird.

Beautiful, isn't it? *sigh*

Also, note my extremely low membership number. Impressive, yes?

M

Today's "Didn't See THAT Coming" Quote

2008-12-01T08:16:00.001-08:00

In the always-entertaining Unqualified Reservations, we read a well-reasoned, sophisticated definition of "neocameralism," with a rather unexpected explanation of the ultimate source of a neocameralist government's sovereign authority:

Neocameralism informs the surrounding neural tissue that the best mechanism for producing responsibility in government is for governments to be administered as sovereign joint-stock corporations, controlled absolutely by their shareholders, who hold the master encryption keys for the government's invincible robot armies.

Whoa.

M

Attn: Canon Users

2008-11-30T16:58:00.001-08:00

Canon replaced its mid-position on-camera strobe, the 430EX, with the 430EX Mk II a few months ago. Adorama still has some of the original 430EX's left at a very attractive price. You can buy them direct there or through Buy.com. Link below:

This is the Buy.com link. You can also go straight to Adorama's link. I've bought from Adorama before, they're a reputable discount dealer.

430EX at Buy.com

Right now they're selling at $199.95. The 430EX MkII sells for around $280 to $300, and isn't any more powerful than the original 430EX. (The MkII is a little more weatherproof and has a metal foot: however, there's a reason that flashes usually have plastic feet.) It's a very good deal on Canon's lowest-priced bounce-capable flash.

M

Ah, Multiculturalism.

2008-11-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

This is so hysterical I almost fell out of my chair laughing. If I were to say these things about Saudis, I'd be pilloried - literally, if some people around here had their way.

But if they say it themselves, who can refute them?

"Sending Teens Abroad," from the Arab News.

Oh, that's a scream. Read it for yourself. I dare you.

M

A Last WindyCon Comment

2008-11-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention it before, but as always when I see a collection of artworks, I saw another thing... thousands and thousands of dollars worth of actionable torts.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. 765 ILCS 1075, the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

In the Art Show, there were literally dozens of artworks which showed specific recognizable individuals - mostly, of course, actors shown in their well-known acting roles. A picture of William Shatner dressed as Captain Kirk is, at one and the same time, a picture of a copyrighted fictional character and a picture of a real human being. Both of these grant to their owners certain rights under various legal theories. Not only is commercially selling actor-in-character fanart iffy for copyright purposes, but it's clearly a violation of Illinois law, and this show was in Illinois. Every single one of those fanart pieces, on the wall, was a statutory-minimum $1,000.00, plus fees and costs, tortious violation of the IROPA. Walter Koening, who happened to be attending, could have made a quick three grand plus fees and costs, by my count, by going down to the art show and noting a few names.

Now whether Mr. Koening wants to do that is up to him. Since he makes a nice bit of money attending Cons, he might very well feel that it wouldn't be worth the bad publicity, and that is his right. But the point is that he could, and not only is it unethical to make money off other people's property - including their likeness - without their consent, at least in Illinois, it's illegal. I don't understand why people will insist on doing it. Draw your own pictures, take your own photographs. Please.

M

I Have Declared Eternal Hostility...

2008-11-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not much of a folksinging fan, but if Woody were still alive I'd go out and buy all his albums just for this.

"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."
-- Woody Guthrie.

M

Science Fictiony!

2008-11-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

Since I'm on my sci-fi kick, here are some nifty pictures I took a while back in an improptu science-fiction setting. They're from my old studio, which had amazing skylights.

This one is called "Black Morning."

The band of light behind her is from the skylights. No studio lighting for this one other than the overhead fluorescents. I did buy color-balanced bulbs for them. That was nice because I could leave them on without worrying about introducing a color cast.

I call this one "Pure Energy."

That was blowout from studio strobes. You can see the skylights reflected in her goggles. And here's the whole package. I call this one "Malevolent."

That's all skylight again - I just backed her up a little from the position in the first picture until the sun was shining on her face.

M

Upsides of WindyCon

2008-11-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

As I said, I did enjoy meeting many of the people I did - including an Internet friend and her family as well as author Michael Z. Williamson, his wife, and their children as well. Here are some links to cool people. Go see.

Here's my friend's blog:

http://brownkitty.livejournal.com/

Here's Mr. Williamson's website:

http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/index.php

It contains a bibliography and links to buy his books. I've only read the one (it's called Better to Ask Forgiveness...) but can report that it was well worth reading.

Here's his wife's photography website. She's a combat photographer who joined the Army when she was in her mid-thirties. This is no small feat. There's a story about it on his website which is worth reading if you'd like to know how one joins the Army these days.

http://www.combatcamerastudios.com/index.php

Here's his blog, which is pretty funny in a way that won't appeal to you much if you're what the nitwit media mistakenly refers to as a "liberal" these days. Fair warning.

http://mzmadmike.livejournal.com/

I was going to link to his daughter's website - she's an actress and child model - but instead I'll just say that you can find a link to her on his website if you're in need of an actress or child model. She's adorable and sharp as an obsidian chip.

M

Shame on Me.

2008-11-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

So last year I had some photos at WindyCon (the largest, if I understand it correctly, of the Chicago-area science-fiction conventions) I was trying to sell. It didn't go so well.

Well, this year, someone I knew was going to try to go, and I thought, "Perhaps I should try to go as an attendee, and see if that works any better."

Well, it didn't. Although I did meet some interesting people and geek out about photography for a while, it was if anything on average worse than the last time as far as enjoyment. I guess I'm just not very social, even in a crowd of anti-social sorts.

These two had very cool costumes, though:

Ironically, they weren't even registered for the Con and couldn't do any events, including the Masquerade Ball. They just wanted to walk around in their costumes somewhere where people wouldn't look at them funny.

Ironically, the hotel had also rented a ballroom on the same concourse with the con to a very, very upscale wedding. The looks of horror on the faces of the guests at the army of nerds surrounding them were very Amusing. Here's the photographer for the wedding party trying to get shots of the groom next to a lovely fountain wall in the hotel lobby without including any of the peons in the shot. He looks perplexed.

M

In Honor Of the Fact

2008-11-13T14:37:00.001-08:00

... that I finally read Atlas Shrugged last weekend, I present my first LOL.

Lame, I know, but what can you do?

M

Hmmph.

2008-11-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

So, as I said earlier, I'm the only person on Earth who has no luck with Apple's built in calibration utility. I got the new monitor to where I didn't hate it but it wasn't where I wanted it to be. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy a color calibrator. These are little doohickeys with color sensors that go up against your monitor, read target color blocks, and reprofile your system until red is red and blue is blue and so forth.

So I went to Calumet and asked the girl behind the counter about "basic color calibration tools." She clicked around on her computer and told me that they didn't really have anything in stock, then described some of my choices.

On my way out, I noticed a Spyder2Express - the very model I'd been thinking about getting - in the display case. I pointed this out to her, and she got it out. I examined it and decided to buy it. Why she didn't think of this, I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps her inventory was off (although she didn't even bother to walk down and look.) My theory is that she recognized me from the Chicago store (that part's not theory: I know she did) and thought that the S2E was simply beneath a photographer of my high ability.

(pause for laughter)

It sounds good, anyway. The thing is a snap to use, I'll tell you that. My homebrew calibration wasn't too far off, but this is still a lot better. Now if I could just get my printer to work, I'd be a happy camper.

M

Yet Another Post

2008-11-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

Just feeling talkative.

Anyway, here is the latest inspiration: a fellow who uses the camera he owns as a reason models should come shoot with him. I've heard of people claiming that their cameras made them professionals (or that other people's cameras meant they weren't.) But this is a new one on me.

Now, maybe if he had that life-size Polaroid camera, I could see that. That thing is freaking cool. But this?

http://www.modelmayhem.com/118

Let me get this straight. He's having an old Leica rebuilt to have modern automatic stuff in it, and therefore models should pay him oodles of money to be shot with it.

This. Makes. No. Sense.

He's basically taking the two things that make modern and vintage Leicas unique and building something that has neither component. Old cameras are cool because they are more demanding of the photographer (call any Leica demanding and the ghost of Matthew Brady will appear and break an 18x24 sheet of glass over your head, but still) and require them to be utterly in command of their technical art. Modern Leicas are cool because they have all the Leica elan while having modern exposure control technology. Put it in an old Leica and you have... an old new camera.

I won't claim to know enough about Leicas to know that this isn't the Holy Grail of Leicadom, but still, in the end, it's a 35mm rangefinder camera, shooting what is likely excellent glass but 35mm format glass all the same. Would it kick ass for photojournalism/docmentary work? Almost certainly: We might very well have to import ass from underdeveloped third-world countries just to have sufficient ass for it to kick.

But for stuff that a model wants and can use and would pay for?

Dude, give me a Hassy every time. Or, even better, unless the model plans to take out her own billboards, spare the umpty thousand dollars on Franken-Leica OR Uber-Large-Formatotron and buy some good lighting and hire a makeup artist and a hair stylist and a wardrobe stylist. Then the model might get something for her money. But a 35mm rangefinder is a 35mm rangefinder and it don't make no difference what you've wrapped around it, you have a relatively small lens and a 36x24mm frame of film and you get what you get.

M

Breaking Technology News

2008-11-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

I got a new monitor.

I had been thinking that I should get an LCD monitor for a long time since I use my computer a lot (duh) and the CRT I had used a lot of electricity and got really hot and I couldn't even clean it without taking it down because it fit so snugly in the monitor hutch on my desk.

I don't mean to complain, and I got a very good deal, but I hate getting new monitors. The colors look off, it doesn't seem as sharp somehow, etc, etc. Of COURSE it looks different. It's a totally different technology. And I need to tweak the calibration some more. (I must be the only person in the world for whom Apple's Calibrate Display control panel does not work very well.)

What's worse is I promised myself if I got a new monitor I would work on my portfolio submission, for which less than a month of submission time remains. I hate me.

M

There's Only One Thing Better Than Two Hours of Sleep.

2008-11-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

And that's being awakened from two hours of sleep by an explosion.

Damn, if I'd known how much fun that was, I might have joined the Army.

Too late now. I'm a shell of a man and before they could make me Army Strong I suspect I'd just be Army Dead.

Incidentally, it was an electrical transformer. Fixed now. Ironic that I stayed up reading Atlas Shrugged, which has as its main theme a continuous degradation of society and infrastructure.

M

Today's Trite And Hackneyed But Nonetheless True Adage.

2008-11-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the collapse of the market. (Which market? All of them.)

Life is an author who only knows two words: "What if?"

Evolution is an editor who also only knows two words: "Not now."

M

The Kind Of Thing That Goes On.

2008-11-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

As an IP attorney, I've seen cases of outright IP theft that were just as blatant as some punk shoving an old lady and running off with her purse. You'd think people would know better, you wonder, "How do they possibly expect to get away with that?" But they do and a lot of the time they do. For instance, here's a story of blatant theft from a photographer by another photographer who tricked him into giving up his RAW images. The only reason the thief got caught at all was that the original photographer tried to submit some of the images to a contest that the thief had already sent them in to!

http://kevingerman.blogspot.com/2008/11/stolen.html

Hopefully, the thief isn't sophisticated enough to have altered the EXIF data on the original images. If this is so, between the date/time stamps and the serial number (Digital SLR's record the camera's serial number into the EXIF data at exposure time) the original photographer should be able to prove that the images are his. He did strip the data from the images he posted, but that's much easier than editing a RAW file.

I hate to say it, but this is yet one more example of why you should never, EVER give up your RAW files to anybody for any reason. They're the negatives of the digital world, and once they're out, they're out.

M

Just So You Know.

2008-11-04T12:27:00.001-08:00

I did go and vote today, despite the fact that my vote is mathematically meaningless.

In and out in twenty minutes - I live in a precinct that, for whatever reason *coughjobscough* historically has low turnout early in the morning. Since I don't go in to my office on Tuesdays, I just go early and I'm usually in and out pretty fast. There were other precincts voting in the same polling place that had a line which was an hour or more long at 7 AM.

Illinois is an all-or-nothing Electoral College state, and Obama and Jackson couldn't lose here if God Almighty opened up the skies and yelled down, "I will personally throw anybody who votes for a Democrat into the Lake of Fire ten seconds later, you got Me?" Similarly, machine politicians will win all the races I'm allowed to vote in. More than half of the races, the incumbent was running unopposed. I won't vote in a race with only one candidate, and I expected to get an undervote warning when they scanned my ballot, but there wasn't one. Apparently it's okay not to vote when it makes no difference.

I'm not saying I want all Democrats or lose or that I necessarily feel the elections are "rigged." I live in a place that is overwhelmingly Democrat. A vote for a non-Democratic candidate "doesn't count," because Democrats always win. Increasing turnout would just increase Democratic vote counts. That's life. I'm not mad about it, but I do find it irritating when zillions of holier-than-thou types say that voting is your duty, and if you don't vote you can't complain, and similar nonsense. My vote, in every possible sense, makes absolutely no difference. Why I should be castigated for recognizing reality, I'm sure I don't know.

M

Why Not To Get Carried Away

2008-11-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes too much of a good thing is wonderful. However, often too much of a good thing is... not so good. This applies very frequently in photography. Case in point: shallow depth of field/large aperture.

The first time you get hold of a fast (i.e. can open up to a very large aperture/very small f-stop) lens and a camera that can do good depth-of-field control, it's like "Wheee!"

However...

You can get carried away. Case in point: I took my camera with a 50mm f1.4 lens on it to the lake yesterday. My plan was to take pictures of seed pods and so forth with a shallow DOF and make all artsy pictures.

I switched to Av mode and opened the lens up all the way, despite the fact that the voices were telling me, "Don't get so nuts with the aperture, doofus."

Well, they were right.

Now that's some pretty shallow DOF - that dark blur in the upper right is a relatively large island in a lake which is only about fifty feet behind this feathery seed pod. Got that part right. However, the DOF is so shallow that a significant portion of the front of the pod is also out of focus. That's not so good. My plane of focus slices right through the middle of the pod, which is exactly what I wanted, but it's overdone. I might have been better off focusing on the front of it, if I had really wanted this shallow a DOF. However, what I really should have done is stopped down another two-thirds or so, say to f2.0, so that while the plane of focus would still have been right in the center, the foreground part of the pod would have not been so blurry. IMO, the picture would look a lot better that way.

In case you were wondering, while it was cloudy, there was tons of light (I love the gorgeous backlighting from the reflection of light off the lake - no polarizer on this shot) and this image was exposed at 1/3200s. It was a little windy, but none of that is motion blur, either from subject motion or camera shake. It would take a hurricane to move a plant enough to get motion blur at 1/3200s! The band of light in the upper-center is the lake, and the band of light in the upper area is the sky. The image is canted slightly in relation to the horizon, which is a relatively thin dark band comprised of the far shore of the lake and some trees.

Here's kind of a cool example of an unexpected DOF effect:

This is a tree trunk wrapped in wire mesh (there are beavers in this park as well as a lot of rabbits and they do this to trees they don't want chewed on.) Notice that since the object is cylindrical there's sort of a diagonal line of focused area. Part of the time the bark is in focus, part of the time the mesh is in focus, and part of the time nothing is in focus depending on where you are in the image. What controls the focal sharpness is absolute distance from the camera: since the object is has a pronounced relative dimension (I was really close to the tree) the areas in focus vary horizontally and vertically.

Summary: don't get nuts, unless you need to get nuts. Back it off a notch and see how it looks.

M

Why I Hope I'm Wrong.

2008-11-01T16:55:00.000-07:00

Wrong about the subconscious racist sentiments of a lot of people, that is. This is why:

I see the following scenario as completely feasible although I assign it a low probability of occurance:

1) Pre-election Obama poll numbers swollen by voters refusing to admit subconscious racist sentiments;

2) Enough voters vote against the way they claim to be planning to vote to throw battleground states to McCain;

3) Obama wins popular vote but McCain wins Electoral College;

4) Claims of "stolen election" cause widespread conspiracy allegations;

5) Mass hysteria causes civil disorder, widespread lack of faith in Federal Government;

6) Subconscious racist feelings of voters in #2 "proven" by civil disorder, etc;

7) Markets collapse under weight of uncertainty, US economy stops working, millions jobless and widespread shortages caused by disorder and disruption of transport systems;

8) Authorities come under pressure from Bush/nascent McCain administration to repress disorder;

9) Civil War II erupts.

Now THAT'S a cynical projection. Like I said, I hope I'm wrong.

Incidentally, Scott Adams also predicts some sort of zombie problem.

M

Still Here, Just Quiet.

2008-10-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

Haven't done a lot of photography lately, just haven't had the spirit. Ironically, PhotoShelter's been gone almost two weeks now and I got an email from somebody wanting to license two of my pictures that not only did she first see on PhotoShelter, but that I took at Shoot the Day. Ah, life. They're for a textbook which is a biography of a poet, can't say who, which is kinda hard to assign a value to. I took my best shot, we'll see if her editor approves the license fee. In other news...

I did sort out the first pass on the images I want to submit to the B&W photo contest, which was a big step. Now I have to bring it down to eight to twelve images, and then fine-tune them.

In other other news, we replaced our living-room couch with a treadmill, which also seems very ironic in the proper context. We pulled the couch out and I took it to Goodwill, then we brought the treadmill (which I brought home in my truck last week) in and set it up. Good. Lord. That sucker was heavy. In the box, it was probably close to 250# and unwieldy as Hell. It's all set up now, though. Fortunately I have a furniture dolly. Well, actually it's a mechanic's rollaway (those things mechanics lie on to roll under cars) but it was purposefully built to be heavy enough to hold machinery and furniture. It's pretty nifty, really.

Who knew treadmills were so fancy now? This one has both an iPod dock (with speakers, it also charges the iPod) and a flash memory slot for something called "iFit workout cards," which you can buy in various configurations with custom progressive workouts on them. These include audio narration by a human trainer! I think I'll mostly just walk. On the other hand, it has a little fan, which is genius. Exercise is much more livable with a little air moving over you.

This is the one we got:

Nordic Track C2155

It was on closeout, it's been replaced by some slightly fancier doodad. It was 40% off, which was nice too. It's not as good for running as for walking, but my wife has iffy knees and I run only when chased, so walking will be fine.

M

My Fun-Filled Morning

2008-10-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

I went in to get my teeth cleaned and to have a little spot where food was catching patched up.

Of course, it's never that easy.

Three hours later, I'd had a root canal and two crowns. The emergency root canal was necessary because the tooth was badly infected, even though I was experiencing no symptoms whatsoever. (Other than a general malaise, but I just figured that was because I'm me.) Anyway, at least I can add a tally to another life list of mine, "Times doctors have said to me, 'I don't understand how you're even conscious, let alone not screaming in agony.'" I think this makes three.

I have to go back in five weeks and get the permanent crowns put on. Oh, and get my teeth cleaned. We kinda never got around to that.

On the plus side, my dentist got a totally cool digital dental photography setup with a twin macro lite. It's nifty. And he's a really, really excellent dentist.

M

M. Moldbug Does It Again.

2008-10-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

Best. Quote. About banking. Ever.

From
The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis:

A banking system is like a nuclear reactor: a complicated piece of engineering. If it's engineered right, it works 100% of the time. If it's engineered wrong, it works 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% it coats the entire tri-state area in radioactive strontium.

M

So the Editor of a Magazine Just Called.

2008-10-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, he doesn't want to hire me to shoot a massive spread for a $20K day rate. Nor have I just won a digital Hasselblad. However...

I did just win second prize in my category in an international photo competition.

Not allowed to say what magazine until it's published, but it's a Real Magazine. (I have a subscription to it, and you can buy it in any bookstore. Paid circulation is over 200K.) The editor made a point to say how this particular photograph was one of his personal favorites. I mean, sure, he could have said that about all of them, but I'm willing to bet it was very, very different from most of the entries in my category, so even if it wasn't the jury's overall pick, I can see where it might really appeal to someone. :)

The prize isn't huge, but it's more than a "photo credit." Every little bit helps: since I write off my camera gear, I need some income to show for it!

This isn't the first contest I've had success in, but it's the largest by a country mile. Now maybe I'll have enough gumption to put together a portfolio for that B&W contest I wanted to enter.

M

They Said It...

2008-10-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Dr. Ian Malcom: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

(In response to being told, "It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room.")

Jane Craig: "No. It's awful."

Finch: ... I felt like I could see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realised we're all part of it, and all trapped by it.
Dominic: So do you know what's gonna happen?
Finch: No, it was a feeling. But I can guess.

I have spent the last several years telling anyone who would listen without walking away that our economic model was unsustainable. If a trend can't go on forever, it won't. Well, no trend can go on forever, except maybe dE = TdS - pdV, but the trends we were on were a lot less sustainable than that.

Now I am reminded of another story within a story I once read, that of an eminent toxicologist who one day accidentally ingested a small amount of a slow-acting but incredibly toxic substance. He looked up the substance in his own classic toxicology book, and saw that he'd had a lethal dose. He looked it up in his chief rival's equally eminent book, and found that by his calculations the dose would almost certainly not kill him. So there he sat, hoping he'd been wrong.

I know this isn't very photo-oriented, but I needed to get it out a little bit. My optimistic hope is that we'll use this as the mother of all resets, and go on our way sadder but wiser. My not so optimistic fear is that a lot of "post-apocalyptic fiction" is about to start looking more like documentary work.

Oh, well. All one can do is all one can do. We went to the store today and stocked up, and I bought a load of firewood a few days ago. I keep a big can of gas in the garage - enough to get around on for a while if there is a disruption like they're having in the Southeast right now. Temporary dislocations cannot overly dismay us, and with any luck at all any dislocations will be temporary. I commend the same course of action to anyone who reads this. No harm being prepared - having what you don't need is usually preferable to the reverse.

In fact, it's somewhat reassuring, really it is. I feel much better now. Plus, we discovered a delightful little Polish butcher shop not far from our house. The meat is comparably priced to that at big-box grocery stores, but the quality and selection, not to mention the service, are far superior. We got a big brown grocery bag of all kinds of really delicious looking stuff, including stuffed chicken breasts and a Polish meatloaf, for sixty dollars. No way would you get out of Jewel or Dominick's with that much stuff for that price!

And by a funny chance both Ziploc and Reynolds just introduced do-it-yourself vacuum seal freezer bags. Ziploc's pump is a hand syringe and Reynolds' is a battery-powered pump. We got the Ziploc sort on the grounds that battery-powered doodads are inherently less reliable, plus the Ziploc pump comes completely apart for cleaning. But I'm sure either would work fine.

M

Always Remember

2008-09-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Everything is connected to everything else: the world is a seamless web. As Sam put it:

A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and some-body come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, 'Why, he stumped his TOE.'

--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

M

Another Riveting Update

2008-09-16T14:28:00.001-07:00

For those of you keeping score at home:

I now have eight external hard drives in my home office.

I'm going to give my parents my PC, since I don't use it any more, and it had a big hard drive in it that I wanted to keep. So I took it out and put it in an external enclosure.

I think I'm insane.

M

Brief Thoughts and Updates

2008-09-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

1) Jill Greenberg is a very clever idiot.

2) The economy is in terrible, desperate trouble.

3) My photo mojo is not workin'.

1) From my comment on Rachel Hulin's blog:

(See http://www.rachelhulin.com/blog/ for the backstory.)

While I dread a McCain presidency even more than I dread an Obama presidency (and I dread a potential Palin presidency far more than either) that was a low-down, dirty trick to do to a subject she was being PAID to shoot by a client, who she then publicly called irresponsible and implied weren't very smart. Not to mention that now the client has to deal with the consequences of sending McCain to Greenberg and having her pull this crap.

Yes, let's all insult our clients, belittle and trick our subjects, and leave the steaming heap behind for other people to have to deal with. THAT'S a good way to encourage people to pay professional photographers rather than just send a point-and-shoot camera along with the interview journalist.

Brilliant, Jill, brilliant.

Also that crap she pulled with the Photoshopping and the monkey poo? Juvenile. Totally juvenile. No wonder she empathizes with little children who've lost their candy so much. She basically views the whole world as one big exercise in stealing her candy and her life is a tantrum in response.

2) We're already at 5x the amount of losses from the sub-prime, excuse me housing, excuse me general risk-management EPIC FAIL, crisis that was first projected less than a year ago and there's no bottom in sight. From five major investment banks we're down to two. The Big Three automakers are going broke at a rate that surpasses human comprehension. The USG has done NOTHING to mend its financial idiocy and whoever wins in November we will spend more, not less, next year than we did the year before and we will take in less, not more, in taxes than we did the year before, guaranteed. There's an old saying that if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. What we've always done is spend more than we have, and what we've always got is more debt.

There's another saying, however, that receives much less press, and that is that if a trend is unsustainable, it will not be sustained. Accruing more debt is an unsustainable trend. The USG is going to collectively wake up some morning in the same place that Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and Countrywide did, and at that point it has two options, no more and no less. Bankruptcy, or monetization of debt. That second one is a fancy way to say, "Print the money to pay the bills." This leads to a phenomenon called hyperinflation. If you want to know what that looks like, hop on a plane to Zimbabwe, or read a book about the Weimar Republic or the economics of the Confederacy. This is not a new story and it always, always, always ends the same way.

If you want to learn a little about how this all works, and don't like math, try PJ O'Rourke's book on economics and business, Eat The Rich. Trust me, any book which discusses cow howitzers and Courtney Love on permanent tour in Japan is worth reading. Your local library will have it, as PJ is quite popular, and it's probably also available in audio form. Read it, seriously.

3) Between the PhotoShelter Collection going teats-up and the fact that I just can't seem to get any joy out of it, I don't remember the last time I took pictures for fun. I take 'em at family things and so forth and they're good, it's not like I don't have the chops, or at least as many chops as I ever had, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere.

M

Well, Poop.

2008-09-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

PhotoShelter Announces closing of the PhotoShelter Collection.

And after I went to all the trouble to rearrange my blog to use the PhotoShelter Widget, and everything. Damn.

Oh, well. I sold a picture to Richard Leakey. That was pretty cool. I feel sorrier for the staff - having participated, more than once, in the closing of a business, I know how much it well and truly sucks. The Archive portion of PhotoShelter will continue in business and is doing well, but they just couldn't make the stock side work.

Things fall apart: the center cannot hold. First the Patry blog, now this. Bah. Bah, I say.

M

BTW, Here's Why Bristol Palin is Relevant

2008-09-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

Because her pregnancy proves that Sarah Palin is either a bad parent, or stupid, and either way, that's a very relevant thing to consider when asked to vote for the potential vice-president of a candidate who's in his seventies and has a history of cardiac incidents and cancer as well as other serious health risks.

Here's the logic underlying my conclusion:

Sarah Palin has stated unconditionally that abstinence-only programs are the only acceptable sex-education for American children in public school, despite the clear statistical evidence that they don't work and safer-sex education programs do. The only two reasons one could advocate such a proven failure are that one is stupid, or that one believes that sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.

Sarah Palin went to college, has been the governor of a state, and has many other accomplishments (did you know she's a pilot?) I don't think she's stupid. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she honestly believes sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.

Well, Palin, as I said, isn't stupid. She's had several kids. She knows what causes them. But apparently she utterly failed in her duty to her daughter Bristol, who got so little sex-education that she finds herself pregnant at 17. Either Bristol's too dumb to be allowed to run around where there are boys - in which case Palin failed her by deciding to pursue her political career instead of caring for her and, by the way, Palin's own four-month-old child who has Down's Syndrome - or Palin couldn't be bothered to teach her daughter not to let boys put their thingies in hers. Either way, especially for a true-blue social and religious conservative, EPIC FAIL.

And still, confronted with seventeen-and-knocked-up PROOF that such policies DO NOT WORK, Palin is presumably still all about family responsibility and abstinence-only educational policies. Unless she admits either her failure or her idiocy, she's not only either a failure or an idiot, she's also a hypocrite. And ALL of those are very relevant to somebody who is asking to be put a faltering heartbeat away from the Presidency. Bristol's not running for Vice-President, and she should be strictly left alone by the media and the public. What's important is not the choices Bristol Palin made, but what Bristol Palin's choices tell us about Sarah Palin.

And as many others have pointed out, Palin sees no contradiction between pointing out how proud she is of Bristol's "choice" and the fact that if Palin were Queen, Bristol and the millions like her every year would not HAVE that choice. It's one thing for Bristol, whose parents are kind, supporting, and financially secure, to go into such a situation, and quite another for a poor girl from the projects with no support network and no resources to face it. But Palin wants to treat them just alike.

The whole thing irritates me so that if it were not for the fact that states are all-or-nothing and there is no way on Eris's sweet Earth that Obama will not win Illinois, I might reconsider my policy of not voting for anything but rejection of tax referenda.

M

PS: Several researchers have pointed out that it is almost statistically certain that Palin and her husband were having unprotected premarital sex based on the date of her marriage and the birth of her first son, but while I find that very Amusing it only shows that Palin herself was not properly educated and made foolish choices when young, which should NOT be held against her in any way.

Against the Assault of Laughter...

2008-09-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

nothing can stand.

So we went to my parents' house for the holiday weekend. On the way home we stopped at McDonald's...

... and ahead of me was this raggedy-looking fellow who, upon receiving his order, immediately said, "I wanted this to go." It was like three Happy Meals (which come in bags no matter what) and a Big Mac deal, which was on the tray loose. Okay, fine. The counter person had the sandwich and fries in a bag in the blink of an eye. But then...

"Since my order's jacked up, I want to be compensated. I want a free cheeseburger or something."

The girl taking orders said, "Are you kidding me?" I don't blame her - she didn't say it in an obnoxious way, but the guy's demeanor was so manic that she very probably thought it was a joke.

He replied, "No, unfortunately I am not. I want two free pies. Give 'em to me now or your manager will do it." He repeated this four or five times in slightly different ways, getting more and more upset by the second.

The guy next to me and I were literally laughing out loud at this guy and making no attempt to hide it. I have not been so well-entertained by incidental street theater in I don't know how long.

Eventually the manager came out and, upon hearing the situation, said calmly, "Sir, the mistake was an accident and took ten seconds to fix. I apologize for the small delay but I am not giving you anything for free. If your order is complete, please move so we can serve other customers."

Rag-boy flounced off in a huff, obliterating any shreds of dignity he may have retained. I mean, really, he said, "Fine, I'm never coming back here again!" How cliché is that? I swear to Bog, his affect during the entire affair was that of a spoiled six-year-old girl.

My order came up just after and the manager counted off the items: he said, "Three-piece Chicken Selects" when I had ordered a five-piece. I immediately said, "That's wrong! I ordered a five-piece! I want the whole thing for free! And I want the keys to your car! Right now!"

He looked in the bag and said, "I was wrong. It is a five-piece. And I don't own a car. Sorry."

I snapped my fingers and stage-yelled, "Darn!" I then laughed and thanked him. He thought it was funny and hopefully it broke up the tension a bit.

M

Perpetual Motion Machines

2008-08-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Or, as most people refer to them, "Toddlers." A co-worker of mine asked me to shoot pictures of her daughter, who'll be a year old next month, for the birthday announcements. I took her birth announcement pictures, and apparently she was pretty happy with those and asked me to do it again. "Why not?" I thought.

Well, this year we took the pictures at Grandma's house. (Grandma has a really nice back yard.) I wanted to start early, both because the light is better before the sun is too high, and because I don't like being hot. :) After bravely navigating the path to Grandma's (my co-worker's directions had a MAJOR error that I only avoided because I knew roughly where Grandma's house was already) I waited the half-hour that I knew I would wait* and they arrived...

Surprise #1. Another couple, with a baby about the age of my co-worker's. Huh? When did I agree to shoot two families?

Surprise #2. They brought their dog. Their very large, extraordinarily slobbery dog. This dog nailed my lens with goo from ten feet away. Impressive.

Anyway, into it we went. One of the great "secrets" to child photography is to get down to their level. Pictures of the kid looking up at you - and I'm over six feet tall - are not very interesting. However, the getting up and down is wearying when you also weigh over two hundred pounds. And up and down for two kids. Whee!

Her kid is just adorable, and was very cooperative for a one-year-old. I can't complain, really. The dog was not. There were just too many people running around and he couldn't stay put. Oh, well. You do the best you can with what you have where you are.

Used quite a bit of fill-flash until the batteries in my strobe died (some knucklehead forgot to swap in fresh batteries.) It helps a lot, especially in direct sun. The yard had lots of shade and lots of sun and the kid was constantly running between, which made the exposure work fun. I did go two-gun and wear a camera with a zoom lens and one with a fast prime.

My favorite pictures, by far, were from the prime. I shot in AV (Aperture Priority) mode with the lens opened way up. I got quite a few pictures that were a little fuzzy (although I have auto-focus on a priority button and switched to Servo mode, so not as many as you might think.) But the ones that were good were great. Soft, buttery backgrounds with lovely circular highlights. And with a lens opened to f2.2 or so, even in deep shadow and at ISO100, I got shutter speeds low enough to freeze the kids and the dog. In direct sunlight I was almost maxing out the shutter! (Fastest shot I saw was 1/4000.)

Here's grandma's backyard with the prime opened way up. (f1.8 for lighting test, lens's max aperture is f1.4.)

Darn, I just love a fast lens. I only shot a few lighting tests without anybody in them and my co-worker hasn't given me permission to post any pics with people, so that's all I got for now. I'm out.

M

*My co-worker is hardworking, intelligent, and talented, but amongst her many gifts, "punctuality" does not lie. Her husband, so far as I can tell, is even worse.

This is Just Fascinating

2008-08-23T08:15:00.001-07:00

This Frequent Flyer miles thing is a whole new subculture to wonder at, now I come to learn about it. It started with "Buy X tickets, get a free flight," but quickly - literally within a few months - became, "Fly X miles, get a free flight." Ironically, Southwest, the only really profitable airline right now, got off that boat and now offers - you guessed it - "Buy X tickets, get a free flight." (Or an upgrade.)

More stuff...

Here's an article on why FFP can be viewed as a meme, or mind virus. Note at least one error - the article says that AA wishes FFM "would just go away," but that's not true. Airlines make huge profits from their FFM programs. They just don't like it when people actually, you know, use miles.

http://www.memecentral.com/mu/mu0028.htm

Here's the Wiki on FFP, including some history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequent_flyer_miles

Here's a humongous forum devoted to FFP and related topics:

http://www.flyertalk.com

M

Gaming the System

2008-08-19T13:00:00.001-07:00

We went to Hawai'i last year for a week - we won a trip at my company's holiday party. (Always fold your entry in a wacky way, that's the key.) We'd really, really like to go back, but tickets aren't cheap and aren't getting cheaper. Hotels aren't cheap either, but if you can get there, that's way more than half the battle.

So of course my devious little brain has been trying to figure out how to get somebody ELSE to pay for it.

My wife loves contests and has been entering all the ones she could find - we both entered the Hawai'i Magazine photography contest last month, so that's worth a shot. But there is a slower but more certain way to get other people to buy you airplane tickets: Frequent Flyer Miles programs.

Originally, you got frequent flyer miles by, well, by flying frequently. But no more! Of course, you can still do it that way (and that's the best way) but you can also earn them by doing various things or even win them in contests and promotions. I signed up for a Hawai'ian Airlines Frequent Flyer account and commenced to gamin'. So far:

1) Play games on Microsoft's promotional site for its new search service and trade prize tickets for miles: up to 2500 miles/redemption. It takes about four days to earn enough tickets for the maximum award. If Microsoft leaves this site up - which they won't - you could theoretically earn a one-way ticket from the mainland to Hawai'i every twenty-four days! If you want to play, it's at http://club.live.com. There are multiple programs eligible for miles awards.

UPDATE: Apparently this has been going on for quite some time and while Microsoft encourages you to redeem your points frequently, people are reporting having collected over 20,000 FFM this way. That's a domestic ticket to anywhere! The math:

Largest award you can redeem tickets for: 2500M/4300T
Max T/Day: 1000T
Cost T/M: 1.72T/M
Days to earn 20KM: 34.4
Days to earn SuperSaver Fare on HA: 30.1 (Obviously my estimate above was a little optimistic.)

But still, if you were nuts about it - and ask anybody, I go nuts about stuff - you could earn six roundtrips a year doing this.

2) Subscribe to "Hawai'i Magazine." 250 miles for a discounted rate on a magazine my wife buys anyway. :)

3) Open an account with Sharebuilder. 2500 miles after first securities purchase. If you do this right you can set up, make one purchase, and then cash out after you get your miles.

4) You can get a wide variety of credit cards that award miles for each dollar spent. However, these aren't necessarily the biggest bang for your buck - if your credit is good, you're better off getting a rebate card that pays cash back directly and using the cash for your tickets! The nice thing, though, is you can often heterodyne purchases on miles cards with purchases from "partners" who also give miles for dollars spent, and get several miles per dollar spent. That can add up fast.

5) You can wait for the Pudding Angel to reach down from heaven and give you millions of miles. I'd be all over this one but the Pudding Angel is notoriously hard to get hold of.

Interestingly, you can buy miles direct from most programs. For instance, Hawai'ian sells them for $15/500 miles plus a $4/purchase fee. That works out to just under a thousand dollars a ticket, and tickets go for about $400ea. Not really very economical. However, if you're 500 miles short and want to book a trip, as a convenience fee it's quite livable.

Here's a picture taken just outside the Kahului airport on Maui. This is the freaking AIRPORT. It's not fair, I tell you.

M

Lightroom Update

2008-08-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

I am still a little nervous about Lightroom 2: Adobe seems to have caught Microsoft Disease. ("Ship it: people will buy it even if it's buggy and we'll gradually get it to where it's livable sooner or later.") However, they have finally posted a script that fixes the keyword bug, which was totally unacceptable. And as I said earlier, some of the features are nifty. But wait..

A photographer/programmer has created a LR plugin that allows direct export to the PSC or the PSA from Lightroom. O frabjous day! This takes a very annoying step right out of my workflow. It seems to work fine both with LR 1.4.1 and LR 2.0. Here it is

http://pka.xs4all.nl/index.php/lang-en/lightroomexportpluginphotoshelter

M

You are A-Number-ONE!

2008-08-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

And on a non-photography-related note, I sadly report the death of Isaac Hayes:

Soul icon Isaac Hayes dies in Memphis at 65

Mr. Hayes was of course best known as an important soul-music writer and perfomer, and more recently as the voice of "Chef" on "South Park," but to me he will always be the Duke of New York, ruler of John Carpenter's twisted Hell on Earth, the Manhattan Island Maximum Security Penitentiary.

Escape from New York is a dystopian classic and in my opinion a future we avoided only by sheer chance and which we may yet visit. Hayes' portrayal of the brutal but brilliant Duke was masterful. He will be missed, but alas, the rules are simple. Once you go in, you don't come out.

M

Darn, this DAM is a lot of work.

2008-08-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

So my file drawer of model releases was getting kind of full.

You see, up until now I've had the following record-keeping technique for my releases. I've put in an envelope:

1) The original model release.
2) A disc (CD or DVD) with the orignal RAW files.
3) A copy of the model's ID, if I had one.

And put it in a file drawer. Well, it was pretty full, and I really didn't have room for more, and I had a bunch of releases that needed filing.

So I went to the store and bought a binder and a box of sheet protectors, and spent the last three hours opening the envelopes, stacking the discs, and putting the releases into the archival sheet protectors. Now instead of a file drawer, I have a stack of discs in my big disc rack, and a binder (that's not even full.)

What motivated me to do this was that I've spent the last few weeks organizing my digital assets (image files) so I could go through them and mine for stock images. When I submit the images, I also need to be able to submit the release to the agency. All this rooting through envelopes, taking out releases, and then putting them back after scanning was getting very old. Now I can just flip through the book (it's in chronological order,) take the release out, and put it back in the book without having to push and pull envelopes out of a drawer.

This binder will henceforth be known as the BRB, or Big Red Binder, because it's big and red. "R" could also stand for "release," but I think "Red" is funnier.

M

Diverse, or Just Weird?

2008-08-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

I know I've posted several times about my Search for Style. ("STYYYYYYYYLE!") One style I know is not really me is photojournalism. It's way too much work. :) However, I'm certainly adding a lot of photojournalistic, or at least editorial, images to my stock portfolio here recently.

First about two dozen pictures I took at a sprint-car race (See: Sprint Car Racing.) Then this week, about a dozen images of the aftermath of the Iowa River Floods. (See: Iowa River Floods of 2008.) Now, I'm an opportunistic so-and-so. I see something I can take pictures of, especially but not limited to pictures I might could sell, and I'm on it. If I were a commercial photographer and this were my portfolio, it wouldn't look good. Typically you have a portfolio for your main area of photography: if you have multiple areas, you have multiple portfolios. But, since buyers are probably not going to look at my PSC user portfolio that often, rather finding the images through keyword searches, I guess it's not that big a deal.

M

Clients. Lie To You, They Will.

2008-08-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

Today, not only did a photographer ask me for advice when a potential client wanted a photo to use in their corporate logo in exchange for a credit (What are they going to do, put his URL in their logo?) John Harrington posted this little story on his Pro Photo Business blog...

Photo Business News & Forum: Conde Nast, Encyclopedia Britannica - Selling "Their" Images

(Summary: Magazine demands full re-use and relicense rights, for no extra fees, from assignment photographers. Despite assurance to the contrary, magazine goes on to relicense the images without sharing any revenues with the photographers. Several other large publishers are revealed to be doing the same.)

I know it will come as a HUGE shock to you, but people will lie, cheat, and steal. They will also, and hopefully much more commonly, just say one thing and change their minds later. Or perhaps the person who did the deal with you gets fired, and a new person takes over, and says, "Hey! We're sitting on a gold mine with all these rights. Let's do some business!"

On that last point, I have had people I was negotiating very large deals with actually say things like, "Oh, you know we'd never [do something I was trying to prohibit in the contract.]" And you know what? I believed 'em. I'd been doing business with some of them for years and they were honorable people. But you know what else? They could get hit by a bus tomorrow and somebody less honorable, or just with different ideas about what was acceptable behavior and what wasn't, could take over management of those rights. I get paid to anticipate my client's future problems, not just shake hands with my friends. I'd be remiss in my duty as an advocate to sign over rights without appropriate compensation, "understanding" or no "understanding."

While I rarely came right out and said, "What if you get hit by a bus tomorrow," I was very straightforward with them. I would reply, "I know that, and I appreciate the relationship we have. But I have to think about what happens to these rights five and ten and twenty years from now. Can you promise me you won't retire or get promoted or that for any other reason somebody with a different mindset might eventually have control over these rights and decide to go in a different direction?" That almost always allowed the conversation to progress without casting any aspersions on the current relationship, and when it didn't, well, sometimes deals aren't worth the risk. I know it's hard to turn away money, but sometimes that's what you do. More often than not when you make it clear you'll walk away, unless they were totally fishing they'll come around anyway!

This is what lawyers are for, people. This is the value we add. We stop people screwing you over. Or, more charitably, we make sure our clients fully understand the implications of the agreements they make and help them ensure that the agreements reflect a full and fair understanding of the transaction the parties have agreed to. Pay us now or pay us later... or don't pay us at all and watch people with their own lawyers and/or a lack of scruples profit from your hard work.

M

This is Eerie.

2008-08-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

You do not know how many times I have had this dream:

(Thanks to Rachel Hulin over at Shoot! The Blog for the tip.)

No, seriously. You don't. The pictures (click on the sample to see more) were taken, without any kind of trick photographry or post-processing, by French photographer Denis Darzacq.

When I have this dream, the situation usually that I have to go somewhere or do something that you can't get to by walking, and my dream-self concentrates, like he's remembering something he hasn't had to do for a long time, and starts taking steps into the air. Eventually this progresses to "flying" in much the same posture that Superman flies, although it's very, very hard to do: he can't do it for long, and if anything distracts him, he starts to fall. I usually wake up before he gets where he's going.

Incidentally, dreams like this are the only dreams I have had since I was a child in which I do not know that I am dreaming. When I wake up, remembrances of these dreams are indistinguishable from ordinary memories. More than once the day after one of them I've tried to walk on the air for a split-second before realizing that what I was trying to do was impossible. Maybe someday I'll pull an Arthur Dent and forget to remember that it won't work.

M

Lightroom 2: Hmm.

2008-08-03T07:23:00.001-07:00

For starters, I still don't think most people should upgrade to Lightroom 2. Just too many bugs popping up and/or waiting to be discovered. Give 'em another month or two to go to a .1 version, or at least to fix that GODAWFUL keyword bug. But if you're technically minded (I can tell you how to fix the keyword bug if you are technical) and adventurous, it does have some mindblowingly nifty new features...

For starters, there's the Graduated Filter tool, which is very awesome for landscape shots with hot skies - it's just like applying a gradient-masked adjustment in Photoshop, only WAY easier and faster. And the new camera-specific color profiles are a treat. Several tests have shown that the camera-specific profile for my camera starts out WAY closer to my preferred colors than the old ACR color profiles. You still will often have to do some twiddling - Nature, after all, often doesn't properly saturate the blues or whatever - but as far as getting good color balance, it's a huge improvement. I like the new catalog organization (everything's sorted by volume by default.) And it does seem to handle my very large image catalog (68K images) quite a bit more smoothly. I think it's going to be a great program.

M

Here We Are in August

2008-08-02T19:45:00.001-07:00

It's been a real "mad dogs and Englishmen" kind of climate around here lately. Too. Hot. Otherwise, I'm keeping busy for the most part but not doing a lot of photography-related stuff.

I'm trying to pick some pictures from Hawai'i to enter a contest, I'm being a general PITA on the PhotoShelter forums, and I'm gradually withdrawing in disgust from almost every other human-related activity. Sometimes I get a little peevish.

M

Warning Regarding Lightroom 2

2008-07-29T14:42:00.001-07:00

DO NOT, under any circumstances, upgrade to Lightroom 2. This thing is not ready for prime time.

Just as one example, there is a major bug which prevents your keywords from being property exported in the new version. There is no fix as of now. The only way to get around it is to manually change a setting for each and every keyword you've ever used.

More as events warrant.

UPDATE: Adobe is aware of the problem and is working on a fix. But given the number of people who have already reported the issue, I hope I'm not being uncharitable in saying this doesn't strike me as reassuring evidence of extensive and exhaustive beta testing, despite how long the Public Beta has been going on.

UPDATE 2: There is an "unofficial" fix which requires a fairly high level of geek-fu. (If you don't know what a "SQL query" is, don't even think about it.) I did it and it worked. Adobe should have a "real" fix soon.

M

Possibly The Greatest Venn Diagram In The History Of The World

2008-07-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

Bobby Henderson, famed Pastafarian, created this amazing diagram to explain the motivation for his latest photography project:

(Image ©Bobby Henderson: Used for illustration only.)

Yes, it's Fine Art Taco Photography.

The exhibit has accrued much acclaim. For example:

"You are the Orson Welles of the taco photography world and this is your Citizen Kane."

All kidding aside, the photographs are actually quite nice, if you're into that sort of thing. Have a look.

Fine Art Taco Photography

Or click here to go to the main FATP gallery.

M

Ain't No Fighting It

2008-07-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a small town in Iowa called "Wapello." (Named after Chief Wapello of the Sac and Fox tribes.) It is on the Iowa River, which you may have seen in news reports last month (June 2008) as it destroyed large areas of several cities, including Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, and Oakville, a small town ten miles from Wapello which was totally wiped out. More than a month later, the town of Oakville is still under de-facto martial law. How do I know this?

I went home this weekend to visit my grandparents (one of them had been in a fall.) While I was there, I drove along the road from Wapello to Oakville to see the aftermath of the floods. It was horrific. The Iowa is normally a small, sleepy tributary of the Mississippi. (There's a reason you've never heard of it.) Most years, if my father takes us for a ride in his motorboat, he has to be very careful not to run aground in the shallower parts of the river channel. But this year it broke all flood records and laid waste to hundreds of square miles. Some are calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Have a look:

The water got under the road, washed it out, and tossed the concrete road sections like a child's railroad track. They are broken with almost geometric precision along the expansion joints which are typically placed in thin-bed concrete roads in the country.

Fortunately, Wapello is on higher ground, and because the levee broke in Oakville, the pressure was relieved before Wapello (which is much larger than Oakville) could be flooded. While it's cold comfort to the good citizens of Oakville, I'm sure, that failure probably saved hundreds of homes by destroying dozens elsewhere. I did drive to Oakville, but there was a woman sitting at the only road into town with a large sign that said, "ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN." I didn't feel like checking in, so I turned around and went back. My mother told me later that you had to have a permit to enter the town because there were problems with scavengers stealing things.

I have family who live outside Oakville, but they are not in the riverbottom and had no trouble. My parents, who live outside Wapello, couldn't drive into town for weeks as the road crosses the Iowa River bottom, and at its lowest point the water was over five feet deep. While the absolute number of people affected is small, the scale of this is hard to imagine. I guess the occasional severe thunderstorm isn't so bad when you think about living in flood plains or Hurricane Alley.

My grandfather told me about a fellow that my grandparents have coffee with most mornings (they still do that in Iowa.) The day before the levee broke, he came to breakfast and derisively snorted, "I went and looked at the water. The Corps of Engineers is way off - it won't get to within four feet of where they say it will."

The next day his house was gone. Not flooded, gone. The levee broke, the water picked up his house and floated it away. I'm guessing he didn't bother to get anything out since he was so sure the water wouldn't reach him. Let that be a lesson to you: there ain't no fighting a flood, there ain't no second-guessing it. If it looks like the water is coming, you have one choice: get out of the way or suffer the consequences. You can always come back and laugh at yourself if it doesn't happen.

Oakville - where I attended first and second grade, in an old schoolhouse Wapello used for a few years when their districts were consolidated - may never recover. Every building in the town limits was heavily damaged or destroyed. The entire infrastructure (roads, power, sewer, water, gas) will have to be completely rebuilt - and now that it's known the whole town is on a flood plain, there'll be no insurance available and very little government money for anything but buyouts. Only perhaps a dozen people in the town had flood insurance - not only is it very expensive (and Oakville is not a rich place) but except for those living right on the river, nobody ever thought that the whole place could literally be submerged for days. A little water in the basement, sure, but six feet of water on Main Street? Unimaginable - until now.

On a photography note, this is one of the reasons why backups, and by that I mean either portable or off-site backups, are required. Every time I leave the house for more than a day, I take a portable hard drive which has all my backlog on it. I also have a hard drive which lives at my office more than fifty miles away with a recent backup on it as well. That's not just my "art" pictures, it's all the family pictures (including our wedding photos which have been digitized,) our financial records, my wife's genealogy research, you name it. It would be awful to lose our house, but at least we wouldn't have to worry about reconstructing our records from nothing.

M

Light Is Not Your Friend, Neither Your Enemy: It Is What It Is

2008-07-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

As every book on photography points out, "photography" means "writing with light." Light has qualities, many qualities, and for the beginning photographer some of those qualities are less obvious than others. There's intensity, of course. That one's easy. It's too dark. It's too bright. Adjust exposure, or adjust light source. There's direction. That one's mostly easy - which way are the shadows pointed? Which side of the thing is lit up and which side isn't? Again, pretty easy to fix. But then there are the subtler ones - which produce anything but subtle results sometimes.

For instance, there's hardness. Hardness refers to a quality of light which is controlled by its relative size in the "arc" of the picture. The smaller the arc, the harder the light. Direct sunlight at noon on a clear day is very hard, because the sun is very small in the sky. Light from a softbox (and that's why they're called that) close to the subject is very soft, because it's huge relative to the arc of the picture.

Hardness controls the texture of the image in some ways. It isn't always apparent that this is significant in the ways that it is. For instance, consider this image:

The model's skin is very textured (and not necessarily in a good way.) That's because the sole source of light is a direct sunbeam - because she's in deep shadow, there's not even any ambient light from reflection off nearby objects or the ground, as there often is even in most "direct" sunlight pictures. It took a while to get her skin even this good: every little blemish and fold was sharply outlined by shadows. Even if you fix the blemish, you still have to fix the shadows, and it's tricky to find a good source for replacing the area.

Then consider this image:

Same model, same approximate location (less than a hundred yards away,) same time of day (less than ten minutes later.) Totally different. Why? Soft light. She's in open shade, in a courtyard with light-reflecting walls in all directions. The light "source" is huge: light is coming from everywhere. I hardly had to do any work on her skin, and that was just to remove actual visible blemishes.

It's not just a matter of how much light you have: what kind of light, its hardness, directionality, and color, are almost as important. I say "almost" only because if you don't have enough light, you don't get a picture. After that hill is climbed, the other qualities of the light are just as important as the quantity.

M

Chicago Shoot! The Day

2008-07-21T17:17:00.001-07:00

Well, nobody fell off the roof or got run over or anything, so it was a qualified success. We'll see how happy people are with their pictures. There sure was a lot of running around, I'll say that much.

We were at one studio all morning, then some of us went to another studio, and a makeup artist met us there, and then I took one of the models home, because she lived two blocks from the first studio, and hadn't got a car anyway.

While I hope some of the pictures turn out I think the high point of my day was either showing up at my studio and introducing everyone to my fabulous studio partner, who doesn't believe in clothes, or taking one of the models in full makeup to the drugstore on an emergency supply run. She stopped a lot of traffic. :) Here she is:

M

One of My Occasional Advice Postings for Beginning Photographers

2008-07-17T15:27:00.001-07:00

I post these from time to time so you don't do the things I done. Specifically, don't do this...

When I started taking pictures I was pretty haphazard about organizing them. Before long, I started at least being consistent, and saving model shoots in folders named like this:

Model_Name_Date

Well, I decided to start mining my back sessions for stock, and step one was putting them ALL in LightRoom so I could easily access and sort them. That took hours and hours. (Generating the previews on 60K images is a long slow grind.)

Then, once it was too late, it occurred to me that it's not a very useful thing to sort on Model_Name_Date, especially when your dates are in American format (MMDDYY.) The only thing you can sort on is the model's first name, and even then the shoots won't be in temporal order!

Yes, I am so smart that when I'm dumb, it's a lulu. I gotta fix this...

So now I am going through my LR catalog and changing each folder to:

YYYY-MM-DD_Name_Model

Folders which are specific projects and not just model shoots are getting this naming convention:

CC-YYYY-MM-DD_Project_Name

Where "CC" is one of five "types" of projects (Family, Other Personal, Spec, Paid Clients, Miscellaneous) each of which has a two-digit code. That allows me to add 95 more codes if I want.

I'm not saying it's perfect but it will be *consistent* and allow chronological and type sorting. If you don't like it, use your own system. But use one!

Addition:

The preceding is the naming convention for my folders (or directories, if you prefer.) So a shoot might be something like 2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos.

The naming convention for retouched images *in* a given shoot is:

FILENUM_Title_MODS.ext

For instance, a picture called "In Shadows" which corresponds to the RAW file _MG_3456.CR2 would be:

3456_in_shadows.psd

I usually save my mods (crops, b&w conversions) all in one PSD file, but in separate JPEG's, which go in subdirectories called "Retouched" and "JPEGs" respectively. So if the above image had one crop and one b&w conversion, it would look like this on disk:

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/

_MG_3456.CR2

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/Retouched/

3456_in_shadows.psd

2005-07-08-Lady_Atropos/Retouched/JPEGs/

3456_in_shadows.jpg (This is the original image.)

3456_in_shadows_1.jpg (This is the crop.)

3456_in_shadows_1_bw.jpg (This is the cropped b&w conversion.)

3456_in_shadows_bw.jpg (This is the b&w conversion.)

Then when I do my galleries for models or whatever, I just point the generator at /Retouched/JPEGs/ for that session, and it automatically generates a gallery with one of each variant of every retouched picture. I can then have models send me filenames copied from the galleries, and if I ever want to review the original image from any variant, the file number takes me right back to the RAW file.

M

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Off To Work I Go

2008-07-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I'm not at my "day job" today. I telecommute sometimes. But photographically, now that I've got most of my images in my Lightroom database, I'm "mining" the older stuff for stock. Like I said in my previous post, I'm seeing a lot of images that I haven't thought about for a while.

Here's kind of a cool picture I took by the light of a neon sign at a dry-cleaner's about 8 O'Clock at night.

The nice thing about these pictures is that while I wasn't thinking "stock" when I took them, I did get full releases from all the models. If anybody does want to use them, I don't have to chase down models I haven't spoken to in years to get publicity rights.

Anyway, I'm through the first year (I got a late start that year, so it's more like four months.) Only four more years to go!

M

Time to Get Serious

2008-07-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

I decided that it was time to really get my pictures cataloged properly in Lightroom, so I've been letting it import my photo archives a year at a time. (That way I can put the right copyright notice metadata on them.) I'm having fun watching it and every so often looking to see what it's working on at the moment. I'm seeing a lot of pictures I hadn't thought about for a while!

For instance, I had completely forgotten about the trip I took to the Chicago Auto Show - or, more importantly, I had forgotten that I had a lot of released pictures that might make good stock. F'r instance:

So I foresee several days of mining ahead. Let this be a lesson to you, kids... don't get behind on your organization. You wouldn't believe how long this thing is taking to go through, import, and generate previews. And I have a reasonably fast computer, too! Then, I'll have to go through the individual sessions and keyword them. I think I'll do that on an as-available and/or as needed basis.

M

Chicago Shoot! The Day Final Schedule Up!

2008-07-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

We've got a studio lined up, a schedule for the day, and you will miss my one-of-a-kind comedy madness if you don't come! No, really. I'm hysterical.

You can visit the Chicago Shooters forum here:

http://community.shoottheday.com/group/chicagoshooters

For more information.

M

Chicago Shooters! (Camera Shooters, That Is...)

2008-07-06T15:25:00.001-07:00

The "Chicago Shooters" group on PhotoShelter's Shoot! the Day site is coming together nicely. Plans are being made for a meetup, studio session, and work in the city.

PhotoShelter, along with Nikon, Apple, and Adorama, is sponsoring a stock photography event called Shoot! The Day, where some of the big gaps in modern stock photography needs will hopefully be addressed by photographers all over the world. More information on that here:

http://www.shoottheday.com

I'm in charge of the Chicago Shoot! the Day events. Those of you in and around Chicago, join us! You don't have to be a member of the PhotoShelter Collection to sign up, although I highly recommend it. More info on the Chicago Shooters! here:

http://community.shoottheday.com/group/chicagoshooters

Feel free to ask questions here or PM me for more details. The thread on the Chicago Shooters! group called "Taking the Windy City by Storm!" has the latest details on the day's events. See you there!

M

Bookkeeping Matter

2008-06-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Almost nobody who reads this probably even knew I had a MySpace account, but if you were one of them, I deleted it. Follow my exciting adventures here. :)

I just have too many sites and things. Gotta streamline.

M