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- A quick trip back to Sorrento
- Vimeo relaunches with new features
- You wait for a bus…
- The miniature world of London commuters
- Some sound advice
- LCDVF: an entry-level viewfinder for DSLR film-makers
- Time for a refresh
- Google+ gets a new lightbox
- Hampshire frozen in time (capsule)
- What the new Canon C300 can do
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Category Archives: photographers
The Art of stealing images
Yesterday, a well-known photographer, Trey Ratcliff, posted his thoughts on watermarking online images. In short, he doesn’t believe in watermarks and he explains why. And it works for him, which I respect.
Others responded by explaining why they do watermark their images. There are multiple reasons for that – commercial, social, ego-driven, etc.
I watermark mine too. Generally, watermarks don’t bother me, unless they are overwhelming, badly applied or extremely distracting. In most cases they aren’t as many photographers rely on software like Lightroom, which enables them to create and compose individual watermarks and control their position, size, transparency and other parameters.
My brain processes the image and ignores the watermark. I can understand that many people’s brains work differently and that’s fine. But that’s not the point of this post.
In his post, Trey Ratcliff explains why he doesn’t watermark his numerous images. He claims that, since they are protected by Creative Commons, people can repost them with attribution (except for commercial purposes) and that – because he registers them with the Copyright Office – any lawsuit will be easy.
I don’t necessarily agree with Trey – I certainly think he is wrong when he says that “legitimate companies do not steal images to use commercially” – but as I said, I respect his choices. In the post he does admit that there will always be those who steal images – he calls it the cost of doing business on the internet.
And, as if to prove his point – less than 12 hours after reading Trey’s post, I came across his images, reposted on Google+ by someone called Art Rudenko (assuming it’s his real profile). Oh, the irony.
Art, whose profile is in Russian (all screengrabs here have been translated into English using Chrome) seems to have a penchant for stolen images. His profile is a loose collection of images, videos etc. collected from all over the web and reposted – without any attribution – under his name. You’ve probably seen many blogs like this on Tumblr.
Trey Ratcliff has become Art’s latest victim. I noticed at least two of Trey’s images on Art’s profile, including one which he subsequently deleted from his profile (see screengrab below)
Exif data from both images confirms without a shadow of a doubt who the original creator was.
Under pressure from a few Google+ users Art eventually added attribution to one of the images and deleted the other one.
But his ‘discussion’ with Google+ users confirms he’s one of the bottom feeders (Trey’s expression) who don’t give a damn about intellectual property, and is likely to continue stealing from others, republishing under his profile and thinking nothing of it.
So here is my point. Most people whose images have been misued (for commercial or non-commercial purposes) don’t have, unlike Trey, 300k+ followers willing to speak up for them. Many of them don’t – or can’t - submit their work to the Copyright Office as they either don’t know of its existence or live outside the US (although the Office does protect “many works of foreign origin“).
Many live in territories where all forms of copyright theft are widespread and they simply feel more vulnerable. Watermark might be a form of security – yes, it’s weak – but it’s some security.
Others have been stung in the past or maybe simply want to discover new talent online.
So, Trey, if you are reading – I assume that you wrote your post simply to share your point of view, and not to lecture. But it was slightly detached from reality. And when it comes from someone with such a huge fan base, it is bound to unleash some criticism.
You may consider them ugly, but for some photographers watermarks are a necessity.
Adde Adesokan’s Triptychs of Strangers
Every now and then comes a photographer who does something new and unique. And every now and then I feature some of them on this blog.
Today I’d like to introduce you all to a Hamburg-based photographer, Adde Adesokan, whose stunning Triptychs of Strangers have recently attarcted a lot of attention on sites like Google+ and Flickr.
Adde takes street portraits of strangers. But instead of traditional portraits, he creates triptychs, where in one image he combines three close-ups of his subject’s face, hips (or general midriff area) and feet. I couldn’t resist asking Adde a few questions and I started by asking how he came up with the idea for Triptychs of Strangers:
I came up with the idea while looking at normal triptych artworks around an exhibition. I tried and posted the first stranger without a description but with time I developed a writing style too to make those strangers even more unique and to stress what I tried to reveal about their personality in the pictures.
How difficult do you find it to convince people to participate?
Not that difficult. It really depends on your idea, yourself and experience. People are really excited about the idea itself or when I show them a few examples. I end up talking to my strangers for about 20 minutes, sometimes up to two hours. Most of them are flattered if you ask them about how they get along and stuff.
Then comes your experience – don’t push to much. Don’t talk to people in groups (individuals seek group-approval), don’t ask for 10 minutes of their time if it’s raining heavily – and offer to delete the photos in case they don’t like them.
A lot of your images – including this project – are street images. Why street photography?
I would say 99% is street. I love people in the streets – whether you get in touch with your subjects or not. I enjoy these moments in life and photography is a good thing to record them.
How long have you been doing photography?
One year. I was in London a year ago visiting my cousin and the city. Unfortunately his time was rather short, so I had to kill some time. This is how things started.
Image © Adde Adesokan, used with author’s permission
The largest indoor photo – by Jeffrey Martin
I promised myself to stay away from gigapixel images for a while. I’ve written about so many of them on this blog and it almost feels like a catalogue of the biggest and the most impressive gigapixel images.
But here is something new. Jeffrey Martin, who kindly answered my questions about his gigantic panoramic image of London, has published another stunning image. But this time it was taken indoors.
The Strahov Library is a very impressive – and historically very important – building in Prague. (I know all that because I Googled it, just to be clear). There are over 200 thousand old prints and manuscripts dating back to the 9th century (yes, Google again).
The image itself, at ‘only’ 40 gigapixels, is half the size of the London photograph Jeffrey took last year, but he captured many of those fine architectural and printed gems in great detail:
Strahov Library - Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net
As always with those images, you can zoom in on many details – from individual books:
Strahov Library - Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net
to lovely frescos which – due to their nature – can never be scrutinised in real life for more than a couple of minutes without making you dizzy:
Strahov Library - Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net
You can read more on the project Jeffrey Martin’s blog.
The 40-gigapixel library image itself is here. Great job, Jeffrey!
And thanks to @anniemole for the tip.
London in 80 gigapixels – meet Jeffrey Martin
My prayers have been answered. London eventually got its first decent gigapixel image this week. You’ve probably already seen what its creator calls the biggest spherical panoramic image in the world at the moment, the 80-gigapixel picture of London.
It’s an amazing achievement. The level of detail is incredible – you can clearly see individual faces in the street, peer into cluttered offices and count the number of tourists in each of the London Eye’s pods.
Jeffrey Martin who created this image, and who runs 360cities.net, took some time out of his very busy schedule to answer a few questions for this blog. Here’s what he had to say about the image, but also about his other projects, including 3D and timelapse panoramas:
First of all, explain how you took the image(s) and how you worked on the final picture.
I took 4 panoramas (about 30 gigapixels each) from each corner of the Centrepoint skyscraper in London and stitched them teogher into a single 80 gigapixel image.
Many people cannot really imagine such a gigantic image. Could you explain what 80 gigapixels mean in the context of this project.
80 billion pixels is the equivalent of 400,000 x 200,000 pixels. A normal camera might give you a picture that is 4,000 x 3,000 pixels. I joined nearly 8000 images together. If you took this image to the photolab and printed it like you print your holiday photos at the photolab (or on a good inkjet printer at home) the image would be 35m x 17m in size – and not a billboard, which is just dots when you get close to it. this would be something you could press your nose against and still see detail.
So the next obvious question would be about your gear…
I used an 18 megapixel SLR camera (Canon 550D, but they didn’t sponsor this image) and a 400mm lens. I used the 18 megapixel SLR because it has the smallest pixels (highest pixel density) of any digital SLR on the market, allowing the largest possible panorama in terms of pixel count.
I’ve written about many other gigapixel images before – it all started with Dresden and Paris, then there was Dubai and Budapest and many others. Did they inspire you in any way? What did you think about them?
I made another world record image last year, the Prague Gigapixel – http://www.360cities.net/prague-18-gigapixels at about the same time, the Dresden image came out, larger but not a 360. The Paris image is wonderful. Holger who made the Dresden image, and Alexandre Jenny (and his colleagues from Kolor) who took part in the Paris image I have met a few times. They are all great guys, once or twice a year we get a chance to meet at a panoramic photographer conference, and we get to talk about all this geek stuff 
What was the most challenging part of the project?
The stress of not knowing if this was going to work at all! These other world record images were shot from a single point, and from that standpoint were much more straightforward to do (I won’t use the word “easy”) 
This image was shot from 4 quite different viewpoints, but the subject matter was mostly quite distant, but still the way to get them to fit together well is one of my trade secrets I guess.
So we’ve had panoramic images, spherical panoramic images, what’s coming next? 3D? Interactive panoramas?
Some people call spherical panoramas “3D” which they are not – they are 2Dphotos on a spherical surface. You can have 3D spherical panoramas also, and we have some on 360cities.net: www.360cities.net/search/anaglyph (you need red-blue 3D glasses to see these) It is geometrically impossible to make a completely spherical anaglyph panorama because when you look down the 3D effect breaks. But it mostly works. I personally don’t like to wear these red-blue glasses. Until this can be shown without any glasses, I think it is kept to a very tiny niche.
I have dabbled in timelapse spherical panoramas – back in 2005 when I had more time on my hands. I shot 6 spherical panoramas from the *exact* same spot, every few days, for a whole year – there was even a flood! You can see them here. You need the adobe shockwave plugin to see these, and your browser might crash – but it’s worth the risk
http://www.vrlog.net/2007/11/timelapse-panoramas/
It’s fascinating, but tell me a bit more about 360cities.net
I founded 360cities with my brother David, 4 years ago. It grew out of a local project called Prague360.com which I worked on with the supremely talented designer Adam Trachtman (of www.lucidcircus.cz)
After we made the Prague site, google maps came out and we thought “hey, we can clone this for anywhere in the world” so we did just that. I invited other panoramic photography enthusiasts to publish their own images, and it started with 7 cities. And it grew from there. In 2007 we received Angel funding, and it became my full time job (more than fulltime – running a startup is crazy!)
I can imagine. What’s next for you and for the site then? Which city is next and are you hoping to set another world record?
I’d love to keep making world records, it’s fun Next could be Mumbai, or NYC, or Istanbul. Who knows? You’ll be surprised!
All images in this post © Jeffrey Martin, used with permission. Thanks to @anniemole for help
Related articles
- 80 Gigapixel 360 Degree Panorama of London Largest of Its Kind (petapixel.com)
- “London venue for the world’s largest panoramic photo” and related posts (pocket-lint.com)
- Panoramic pic captures London at 80 gigapixels (news.cnet.com)
Also posted in inspiration, photography
Tagged 80 gigapixel, London, panoramic image
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How the big boys do it
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.
The story beyond the still
Just came across a fantastic HD video contest on Vimeo, called The Story Beyond the Still.
It’s sponsored by Canon and the winner can get either Canon 7D or 5D Mark II, there are also other prizes like Canon lenses or a trip to shoot a short film with one of the judges, and the author of the video which opens the series, Vincent Laforet.
So what is it all about?
It’s the first ever user-generated HD Video Contest where photographers become filmmakers, and we all see beyond the still. Last month the contest kicked off when Canon asked photographer, Vincent Laforet, to interpret a still by telling the story that lived beyond it using the Canon EOS 7D.
And here is his video:
And now the story continues. More from the site:
It was the first chapter of seven, ending with a still photograph of its own for the Vimeo community to then interpret. After 112 entries, Josh Thacker was chosen as the very first winner and now, once again the question is posed to you, what do you see beyond this still?
There are six more chapters to come, so really plenty of time to get creative and submit something equally intriguing. Among the judges is the brilliant Phillip Bloom, whose stunning HD videos are always beautifully shot and edited.
If you fancy submitting your video, there are only 4 days left to send the third chapter.
Five days, four cameras, one beautiful video
Also posted in video
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London photography from the upper deck
Every now and then I’ll be chatting to photographers who inspire me or do something unusual with their cameras. This is my first quick chat with a London-based photographer, Przemek Wajerowicz, who some time ago set out to create a project called From the Upper Deck.
Here he talks to me about in more detail about his project and the inspiration behind it:
The project started soon after I arrived in London in 2005. I’m a street photography fan and From the Upper Deck is weird version of street photography. The view from double-decker buses fascinated me from the moment I arrived in London. I’ve always taken pictures from buses, sadly I lost the very early ones when my hard drive died some time ago. (Three low-res images survived here http://plfoto.com/730749/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/765776/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/777852/zdjecie.html – these were my first pictures from the upper deck.)
After a while the whole idea grew into a project and in 2007 I decided to ride every bus route in London from the first to the last stop. The following year I started my photo blog.
What camera are you using? Do you stick to just one lens or do you change them?
Currently I’m using Canon 5D and a Canon 50mm f 1.8 lens. The 5D allows me to take good quality pictures at very short intervals, which is a great bonus when photographing the street from a moving bus. Plus it’s a full-frame camera too. 99% of all my pictures were taken with the 50mm lens. In my opinion the 50mm focal length manages the task best and is ideal for me. And besides the 50mm is like cheap wine. Why is cheap wine is good? Because it’s cheap and good.
I agree, I love my 50mm f1.8 lens. Incredible quality for such low price. Which aspect of this project do you find difficult, what’s the biggest challenge for you?
I don’t look at it this way. It’s difficult to say what the most difficult thing is. Most things about taking pictures are exciting. The most boring – and therefore the most difficult aspect – is not getting lost in all the information: when and where I’ve been, which route I’ve covered… All that admin stuff (two spreadsheets, calendar) is very ungrateful, but I need to remember where and when I’ve visited. The biggest challenge is getting on every single double-decker route in London from the beginning to the end.
Have you ever met with a negative reaction? Or do people prefer to pose for pics?
Usually people don’t see me. But when they do, they react in various ways – they’re surprised, they smile, they seem reluctant. But there has never been a negative reaction – maybe just surprise. Here are some examples:
http://www.ftud.net/p/494
http://www.ftud.net/p/87
http://www.ftud.net/p/357
Has this project changed the way you perceive London and its inhabitants?
No, although I’ve seen places I never knew existed, mainly on the outskirts of London – places like Purley, Biggin Hill or Hillingdon.
How was the project received by other photographers and the general poblic?
I think the feedback was positive. The project was picked up by the BBC website and other blogs/online publications, including a prominent German site I never knew existed
How many routes have you got left to cover and how are you planning to cover those without double-decker buses?
I don’t know exactly how many as not all of them have double-deckers. I think I’ll simply ignore those.
What’s the next step for the project?
The main aim is to publish an album then to re-edit and rebuilt the website to allow for easier picture browsing.
You can follow Przemek on Twitter and check his site www.ftud.net
All images © Przemek Wajerowicz, used with author’s permission
Chase Jarvis – photographer of the year
I’ve been away – hence the silence – but even while travelling (and taking pictures on my ‘grown-up’ camera) I couldn’t help reaching for my iPhone and taking a few pictures here and there.
Not because the camera is great, but because of the Best Camera application, which is simply fantastic.
I’ll write about the application itself more in the next few days, but today I just want to mention Chase Jarvis, the guy behind this application.
Today a prominent American photographer, blogger and podcaster Scott Bourne announced Chase Jarvis Photographer of the Year 2009. And I think that this is a well-deserved title. I would possibly modify it to Photographer-Innovator of the Year.
So why does Chase deserve the title? Here’s Scott:
His work is as different from anything I’ve ever seen as it can be. And I admit to sometimes being unsettled by it. Sometimes I don’t get it. Most of the time, I’m blown away by it. But even the unsettling stuff and the stuff I don’t get are very valid reasons to recognize the work. Chase is never satisfied with the conventional or with good enough. He doesn’t rest until he gets what he wants. And he has VERY big vision. It’s probably the key to much of his success. He shoots like a five-year-old. And I mean that as a compliment. There’s an old saying. All children are born artists. The key is to keeping them that way. In the case of Chase Jarvis, it worked. He works with freedom and abandon that is empowering.
And to understand what Scott means you must have a good browse through Chase’s portfolio. Yes, the words ‘different’ and ‘unsettling’ are fully justified. Great man, great photographer, great shots.
Oh, and did I mention The Best Camera…?
Thinking outside the Wall
Today I read a blog post by one of my favourite news photographers, Leon Neal, who describes his experience on an assignment in Berlin, working for the local AFP bureau covering the Berlin Wall celebrations.
His blog shows just why you should – if possible – get off the beaten track to capture the real spirit of the moment.
The main event (in this case the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall) produced a number of similarly looking images from the Branderburg Gate area. We’ve seen the giant domino shots and the fireworks in all papers and on all websites last week.
Leon however recorded the ‘extra-curricular’ activities – people walking across the line marking the former site of the Wall, old Trabants taking tourists along the route of the former wall, kids chasing giant bubbles or people crowded on the bridge which years ago was the original gateway to the West.
And this is the exciting bit. Photographing a major event is always thrilling, but you also run the risk of producing images which are similar to everyone else’s.
The best Glastonbury shots I’ve seen didn’t feature a single musician or a stage, but gave me a brilliant idea of what it’s like to be there. The most amazing New York martahon shots I’ve seen didn’t show the usual masses of people, but featured single runners photographed with a flash on a bridge.
I find such pictures much more interesting, particularly when, as Leon says, what you see on TV never really gives you the full picture:
While dignitaries, leaders and celebrities congratulated each other on their success in ending Communism, the public were kept at a safe distance, behind twin layers of security barriers. While I totally understand the need for this during the speeches by Sarkozy, Merkel, Medvedev and the rest of the political heavyweights, once they were tucked up in their bunkers again, the public should have been allowed in to celebrate in their own way, under the famous gates. As is the way with nearly all of this kind of event in current times, the whole evening left the feeling that it was created to be enjoyed at home on tv, with the spectators that did make the effort used as a backdrop for the cameras.
Read the rest of his post and see his brilliant pictures here.
Image © abhijeet.rane via Flickr, used under Creative Comons licence
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