Six minutes of extreme slow-motion destruction
And now we’ve got 70 gigapixels
Posted by Michal in photography on 29/07/2010
Do you remember Dresden? Paris? The first gigapixel panoramic images were exciting. They showed some ingenuity, they were fun to use and play with. Now the gigapixels multiply like rats, but the experience is somewhat diluted. After Paris everything else seems to be focusing on ‘bigger’ and not necessarily ‘better’.
The latest gigapixel project seems to be the biggest produced to date, yet probably even more boring than the experimental Dubai one.
Budapest. A lovely city. Full of great architecture and history. So why photograph it from miles away when visibility is far from perfect? I’m sure the initial idea was great – get a 360-degree panoramic image with the ability to zoom in on the finer detail – but it disappoints. Most of the image shows forests, Budapest itself seems to be too hazy and there’s not that much to explore in terms of quirky sightings.
Still, they did it, I didn’t, so kudos to them.
Current favourite quote
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
Taken from Christopher Nolan’s superb Inception.
One more try
Posted by Michal in Uncategorized on 19/07/2010
I installed WordPress for iPhone when I first got the phone, but, apart from comment moderation, I haven’t used the app for blogging as such. Which is as shame, as the plans were grand. As always.
But maybe my long commute will motivate me to use it more often. Let’s see whether I perservere or go back to reading Metro.
(Oh, and I can upload pics too? Marvellous! Here’s one from the weekend by the river).
How to protect images online
Posted by Michal in photography, software on 29/06/2010
I remember doing an image search a few months ago and seeing a copy of a picture I own. The image was posted on a site I didn’t recognise, so my first reaction was anger – somebody stole my picture! On closer inspection it turned out it was my friend who posted it on his Posterous blog with an appropriate credit.
So I was lucky. But how many of you have had your images stolen? I take thousands of pictures, but I don’t publish thousands online. Neither am I a professional photographer living exclusively off the income from photography sales. But if you are, how do you protect your images online?
You can make them small and reduce the quality to prevent people from printing them. You can use watermarks and overlays to minimise the risk of republishing your images online. You can built Flash-based galleries to bypass the right-click “save as” issue. But if someone wants to steal your picture, they will. Then you need to track it down somehow. A needle in a haystack springs to mind.
There are services like TinEye which help track down your images, but yesterday another site, Image Rights, already present on the market with its paid-for tool, joined the game with a free version of its powerful image tracking service.
I caught up with one of the co-founders of Image Rights, Ted VanCleave, to find out more about the service. I’ve asked him to explain in simple terms what Image Rights is:
ImageRights International, Inc., is a company that helps professional photographers and illustrators discover the illegal use of their intellectual property on the Web.
Our advanced visual search and crawler technology continuously scans websites and blogs to protect images for professional photographers and illustrators. The crawler indexes millions of new images every month and uses powerful image recognition technology to compare customers’ photos and illustrations against images found on the Web.
It then detects where the customers’ images have been used, even if the stolen photos have been altered, cropped, rotated or color adjusted. The customer receives a full report, including a picture of the original image, its use online, and the URL and ownership information for the website where it was found.
Nobody has come up with a really convincing way of tracking stolen images. Are you different? What is your unique selling point?
ImageRights was built from the ground up to help photographers find instances of their images being used on the internet and then helping them recover fees for unauthorized use. It’s is an extremely easy to use service. We have multiple web crawlers browsing business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Europe looking 24/7/365 at images on these types of web sites.
I’ve been using Tin Eye to track down some of my images, last time a ran a search through TinEye they went through over 1.5 billion images for free. Why would I switch to Image Rights or even pay subscription?
Tineye is a reverse search engine. That’s their term. You can only load one image at a time. And they don’t help you recover lost revenue, which we will with the launch of our Recovery program in July. While TinEye has 1.5 billion images in their database according to their site, they don’t say where all of those images came from. It’s a good service but of limited use since you can only upload one image at a time. With ImageRights, you can upload 10,000 images and we’ll send your reports all year long as we find matches.
Do you differentiate between published and unpublished photos and if so, are you able to track down the latter too?
We don’t differentiate between published and unpublished. We don’t actually track images, we are pulling images randomly off of business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Western Europe.
What happens when you actually find an image that has been illegally used, do you provide any legal help too, or just point to the website which violated a photographer’s copyright and leave it up to him to chase the culprit?
We have developed a recovery program for the USA to start, launching it in July. We will help any photographer from any country collect lost revenue from an image of theirs that has been used without authorisation, without a licence in the USA. We will also be rolling out this recovery program in different countries throughout Western Europe over the next 6-12 months.
Who is behind Image Rights?
ImageRights was co-founded by myself and my business partner Joe Naylor. I’m a photographer and entrepreneur and I have found my images being stolen on a regular basis. Joe is the former President of Web Messenger and comes from a technology background. Over the last two years we researched all of the best technologies available to help stop image piracy. ImageRights is the result of our research and findings. Even if one of your images has been cropped up to 80%, rotated, colors stripped out of it or it’s used in a collage, we can still match it against your original image.
You’ve partnered with, among others, American Photographic Artists and American Society of Picture Professionals. What does it mean to you? What kind of support or endorsement are you getting from them and your other partners?
Each partner chooses what level of partnership is right for them. Many offer discounts to their members for paid subscription services at ImageRights. All of our partners are strong advocates of photographers rights and would like to help stop image theft and help enforce copyrights and educate the public about the need to license images to use them.
So that’s what Ted has to say about Image Rights. I have to admit that it’s great that someone offers a service allowing users to bulk upload their library for free, even if it means giving up 50% of their compensation if they choose to participate in the Recovery Program Ted mentioned (it drops to 35% if you pay for the service).
I’d like to hear from you if you are a photographer and are worried about image theft. Would you use a service like Image Right? Is this a solution for you? Have you used them – or any other similar service before? Do you think anyone is able to create a database big enough to provide meaningful and robust support? Really curious to hear what you think.
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How the big boys do it
Posted by Michal in advice, photographers on 25/06/2010
Have you backed up your pictures recently? Oh, you don’t bother? You’ll do it next week? You’ve got some on a USB stick? Riiiiight….
Got a few minutes? Then see how Chase Jarvis makes sure ALL his images and videos are backed-up and secure forever.
Impressive stuff. There is more advice on how to back up on his blog.
Time lapse on the iPhone
Judging by the queues outside Apple Stores everywhere yesterday, we should expect a deluge of iPhone 4 HD videos, well, right about now.
In the meantime, Phillip Bloom posted an interesting iPhone time lapse video of a Florida sunset. It was shot, rendered and edited using the iTimelapse app.
I’m tempted to play with it over the weekend, it’s only £1.79 from the App Store, looks pretty cool and you don’t need the latest iPhone to shoot a time lapse vid:
Thoughts? Have you used the app?
Flickr gets a new interface
Posted by Michal in photography on 24/06/2010
Oh, I do like nice surprises! Last night I discovered a preview link on my Flickr page, which takes users to what will ultimately become the new Flickr interface.
The facelift was long overdue. I can’t remember any substantial changes to the interface over the last few years, but the latest overhaul is really good – and, more importantly – useful.
The first thing you notice is that the images in your photostream are bigger (the default size is now 650px). And that’s a good thing. Services like boston.com’s The Big Picture or Pictory prove that large images work better.
Depending on your layout, if you choose to display collections next to your photostream, you can now see usage stats for them and edit the mosaic for each of them from your photostream page.
But the biggest changes are visible when you go to an individual photo page.
Those of you who often post images which require black background will be pleased to know that the third-party “view on black” workaround has been replaced by a permanent ‘zoom’ feature. It allows users to see a bigger version of the currently viewed image in a ‘lightbox’ on black bacground with hardly any distractions on the page. Neat.
What’s more, it comes with a keyboard shortcut too – just press ‘f’ to toggle between regular and lightbox views. You can now also use keyboard shortcuts to scroll through images while in the lightbox mode.
The same shortcuts can now be used to browse through the photostream, collections and sets. Alternatively, use the newly added ‘newer/older’ arrows above the image. I’m also glad that the photostream thumbnails have been revamped – thanks to a wider page you can now see five instead of the uselessly minimalistic two thumbnails before.
The whole page looks and feels lighter now. All the various functions – like tagging, adding notes, adding to or removing from sets, editing, choosing sizes, etc. – have now been grouped under one drop-down menu called ‘Actions’, just above the image. Right next to it a new ‘Sharing’ menu appeared, making it easier to share Flickr images elsewhere. The sharing functionality hasn’t changed though. Twitter and Facebook integration would have been a nice addition to the new page.
But what has changed is how you add images to groups. Before it was one group at a time. And if your list of groups was long, the whole process was really time-consuming and painful. Now it’s just a question of ticking all the right boxes at once and your picture is automatically added to all yourchosen groups. It’s a bit weird that Flickr hasn’t improved this bit of functionality earlier – a much better solution was already available to Lightroom users. But thankfully Flickr has caught up eventually.
The right-hand column has changed dramatically too. The old version looked like this:
The new, wider page, has space for a short description of when the photo was taken and (if available) what camera was used. There’s also a new, permanent map for geo-tagging, plus the revamped thumbnails I mentioned above. If your image has been added to a group, set or collection, you can now preview thumbnails for the group, set or collection on the image page.
When you compare the two screengrabs, you’ll also notice that the commenters’ thumbnails are much smaller, therefore fewer things in the main column compete with the main image for attention.
Overall, it’s not a drastic overhaul, but it’s also much more than just ‘cosmetic changes’. The whole experience is now much smoother and user-friendly. The pages are more logical and lighter, the most important functionality is grouped together and is easily accessible.
If only they removed the ability to add ginormous badges to comments.
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Bland, tired, clichéd. Welcome to the world of stock photography
Posted by Michal in photography, photojournalism on 21/06/2010
Everyone is complaining that it’s more and more difficult to make money on photography and that the stock photography market has become too competitive. Stock libraries spring up every five minutes and they all overflow with images.
Yes, that might be true. But when you really need a good picture, micro stock libraries disappoint.
In my job I often need to browse for images to illustrate various stories. The subjects vary wildly, but in many cases the requirements are not too taxing: a picture of a child using a laptop; or an image of nice garden; or a messy room. You know the score – no latest Reuters shots from Afghanistan or galleries of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Just some interesting, clean, fairly generic, but hopefully inventive images. The last bit – inventive – is however the source of my frustration.
Photographers submitting their images to stock galleries seem to have a problem with thinking outside the box. They either repeat the same bland – and often detached from reality – clichés which over the years have become a norm, or go for very artistic images, which, although technically perfect, are hardly usable.
This morning I was looking for an image of a car with a few rust spots. Had I known I would need one, I would’ve snapped my own rusty car as it combines the two things I was after: it’s relatively modern and working, and it has a few rusty spots. But try searching for a such a car on a certain well-known stock image website and all you get is numerous images of old rusty Dodge trucks, abandoned somewhere picturesque and artfully photographed in HDR. It ticks all stock library boxes, so it gets accepted, yet from an editorial perspective it’s mostly useless.
Next one: knitting. Here’s where all those predictable clichés come out in force. Because if you were to believe in what stock libraries have to offer, you’d have to conclude that knitting is for old frumpy pensioners in rocking armchairs. Therefore, a story on young trendy mums meeting in gastropubs to knit and chat simply cannot be illustrated by a stock image.
And don’t even get me started on corporate photography. Or rather, don’t get me started on images with keywords ‘meeting’ and ‘office’. Seriously, have you ever been to a meeting, mr stock photography? Do you really think that all meetings involve extremely good-looking people in blue shirts, pointing at a laptop screen or shaking hands or gazing at a whiteboard graph?
I recently needed an image to illustrate a story about tackling challenging meetings. The choice was between a group of happy suits gazing at a graph/laptop/whatever else or a room full of snoring office workers. All looked very corporate because yes, in real life meetings only involve airbrushed 30-somethings in Armani suits, sitting in sterile air-conditioned office towers.
Stock photography now appeals to a much wider audience, the rules have changed a bit. It is no longer just a repository of clinical images for brochures and PowerPoint presentations, or at least it shouldn’t be. Media outlets use stock images to illustrate their content because it’s cheaper. This creates more demand for more original imagery. Stock photographers must start thinking like journalists to differentiate. There is no point reproducing the same old crap – find out who your audience is and do some research on what works for them.
I know there are people who probably make a fortune on those clinical corporate images – and I agree there is and probably will always be a market for those. But budget cuts and/or smarter thinking have forced many newsrooms to rely on cheaper alternatives. Therefore standing out in a sea of blandness is the only way forward.
Maybe the new Flickr-Getty deal will provide editors with more ‘real’ images? But I should deal with that can of worms in a separate post perhaps…
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Eyjafjallajökull video shot using Canon 5D Mark II
This is beautiful. Thanks to @documentally and @kate_day for posting the link on Twitter in the first place.
Oh, and as always, go full screen.
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
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