For the next two weeks posts will be automated. It’s not possible to future post photos to Flickr so I had to write a small shell script to email Flickr with my photo, a subject, and a description every night.
Check out “mpack” which is the heart of the script. Hopefully I’ll upload the script here when I come back and have time to explain how it works!
Tag Archives: Words
Photographer’s Rights in Ireland
Digital Rights Ireland have published a post about the rights of photographers in our fair isle. It’s a detailed post that shows some of the differences between the rights a photographer might expect here and abroad.
I find it troubling that the Minister for Justice says “that the private interactions of a person – even in a public place – may be covered by the right to privacy”. This could include shopping or meeting someone for a coffee, even if it’s in the street and in a public place! His opinion will help shape the upcoming privacy bill, is this a facet of the bill? If a person expects privacy they shouldn’t be on the street in full view of potentially hundreds of people. Settle into a nice warm cafe and out of the wind!
A few days ago, I asked, “do I need a model release?” Maybe in Ireland the question should be, do I even have the right to photograph someone in public?
Edit: it’s February 2015 now and the DRI article has moved to here. It’s very old at this stage and may be slightly out of date. In a comment on a recent photo the following was posted by John Finn:
I have been in touch with the Data Protection Commissioner about the legality or otherwise of photographing people in public places. As it stands, the situation is that under Data Protection law, you have a right not to have your personal data collected, published or otherwise processed without your consent. This includes your image, and therefore covers photographs. There is an exemption to the Data Protection Acts for the purposes of art or journalism.
I think that those of us who dabble in street photography would claim the artistic defence were we ever to be challenged by someone who objected to seeing his/her image being used on the internet without his/her knowledge. However, it is a grey area. Would a judge necessarily agree that, for example, my taking a photo of someone walking down the street with his children was “artistic”? Could it be construed as being sinister, maybe even verging on the perverse?
The DP was unable to give a clear cut ruling on the matter other than stating that each case would be judged on its merits. There have not been any cases tested in court .
So, proceed with caution, is my advice. The vast majority of people will neither know nor care if their images are being distributed on the net but there’s always a first time. It might be prudent, were you ever to be so challenged by an offended individual, to delete the photo forthwith rather than stand on ceremony. It could prove to be the rock you’d perish on.
Do I need a model release?
I’ve touched on the subject of model release forms in the past. What rights does a street photographer have when it comes to publishing photos of people on the street, and even the thorny issue of publishing a photography book for charity. Does “earning money” include giving it all away again as the US Book did?
Mike Johnston gives a brief introduction to situations when you will need a model release. Some of the comments are enlightening, especially the contrast between France and the USA. Mike talks for a US perspective, but some of it applies to the EU in general terms.
I wasn’t aware of the difference between artistic use and commercial use. Mike explains it with a simple example, but if the same sort of rules apply to Ireland, I might be tempted to offer prints of some of my photos here. Who’ll buy my lovely photos then?
A Cork Skateboarder in Times Square
I received an email yesterday from GE Health. A few months ago they contacted me and asked me to add this skateboarder picture to their new Health website. It was to be displayed in Times Square during the month of April and yesterday’s email confirmed that it had been!
The email included a link to this webcam photo. It could have been taken anywhere but since there definitely was an ad campaign on April 7th, so it’s probably real!
Feed me your art
While trying to keep up with all the photoblogs I’d like to visit every day I subscribed to each one that offered a feed in my Bloglines account thinking that I’ll read these blogs like I read the rest of my favourite sites.
After importing them into Bloglines (not a difficult task, but it takes a while), I clicked around and quickly discovered that many photoblogs will only show a thumbnail or none at all in their feed!
I was particularly disheartened that Joes NYC stripped all post content and No Words, Iced Coffee and Headphoneland only showed thumbnails.
Thankfully, some of my favourite WP powered blogs, Just Photo and Simply Lotus display full size images in their feeds, and even one of the heavy hitters, Daily Dose of Imagery does too.
Blogger users can rest easy, Bloglines couldn’t auto find the feed on Shutterbug Exposed but Firefox did and I copied that into my Bloglines account. You get what you post on that site. Happy! Happy!
I noticed that many blogs powered by photoblog specific software only display thumbnails. Maybe it’s the default setting of these programs or they try to save bandwidth for their hosting companies but it doesn’t strike me as being very friendly to the visitor. As an example, the Pixelpost powered Glassey Alley displays thumbnails yet Ryan’s WordPress powered text/photoblog Rymus.net displays full size images.
Sure it’s nice, no, it’s important that you display your work with the surrounding colours and whitespace customised but in this age of information overload, RSS aggregators are a huge help to those of us swamped by too few hours in the day.
Photography Feeds on WordPress.com
One of the cool things to come out of WordPress.com has been global tags. Everyone who writes articles and posts categorises them in the normal way, but the magic bit is that these posts don’t remain in isolation. They’re added to the tags pool on WordPress.com! Go check out that page now to see what people on the site are talking about.
Even better for us RSS fans, Matt announced this morning that he has created feeds from those tags! I subscribed to the photography and photos feeds immediately, and that’s only the start of it. There are gimp and photoshop tags and a lot more. Just add the keyword to the end of http://wordpress.com/tags/ to sample what people have written. The RSS feed link is at the bottom of the page.
Thanks Matt, now take Sunday off! You deserve a break!
Umm, I won!
Just a few moments ago, I received texts from Darragh, Tom and Ryan to tell me that this blog had won Best Photoblog at the Irish Blog Awards!
It’s a good thing I’m not up there because I don’t know what to say except “thank you” to everyone who voted for me. I honestly didn’t expect to win, not when you see the competition I was up against. Crikey!
Looks like Geared Up is blogging the Awards live, and Irish Blogs is the place to go for more!
Congrats Tom! You won the Best Technology Blogger Award!
I see from Irish Eyes that Roger Galligan won “Best contribution to the Irish Blogosphere” which doesn’t surprise me at all. His Irish Blogs and Cork Blogs sites make all our weblogs much more accessible to new visitors and a central point from which to glean what bloggers in Ireland are talking about!
I voted for ya Roger, congratulations to you and the team! 🙂
More .. pictures on Flickr, and a video of the proceedings too!
And the winner of the best photo blog category is..
Sorry, I don’t know! It might be this blog, or it might be any of a number of other excellent blogs shortlisted a few weeks ago.
The blog awards are on tomorrow night in Dublin but unfortunately I won’t be there.
There isn’t much that would keep me away but right now I’d prefer to be in Cork and at home. It’s a happy reason, so don’t worry! I’ll reveal all in time!
Faking Depth of Field
First it was lomo, then cross-processing, and now the latest craze among online photographers seems to be making their photos look like miniture models.
A common side-effect of macro photography is a shallow depth of field (DOF) which means that only a small portion of the scene is in focus. Luckily this effect is very easy to emulate and here’s a tutorial to show you how. Pay attention to Christopher’s advise about what sort of shots work well! You could also buy a Len Baby which does a similar job and more!
Daily Dose of Imagery has a very good example of the “fake model” photo. He blurred the foreground and background, but some middle distance objects are in focus and intersect the blurred area. Nicely done.
Even after an effect becomes stale and overused online, there’s always the print world. People seem to like that sort of stuff all the time!
Starting Photography, Digital Workflow, Orphans and Amazing Zooming Images
Starting out in Photography
A few weeks back, Tom asked me by email about starting out in photography as he recently bought a Canon 350D and started posting photos online!
Some people are born with a talent and an eye for photography, but for the rest of us, practise makes perfect. Bring your camera with you wherever you go and take photos at every opportunity. This method is scoffed at by many but it works, and by examining everything later you’ll find a few gems hidden among the duds. Occasionally you’ll remember the next time you’re out that a particular shot worked well and use that lesson to improve the composition of a shot.
You must buy “Understanding Exposure” by Bryan Peterson.. My understanding of my camera completely changed after I read that. I linked to it on my blog ages ago and I go back to it on occasion.
His Creative book is good too, but not as much of an eye opener!
I went to a meeting of the Mallow Camera Club last December. It was interesting, but for various reasons I haven’t gone back there yet. They meet every Monday night if you’re interested. Cork Camera Club meet in the Garda Social Club on Tuesday nights. I don’t know anything about them however.
Subscribe to the flickr Interestingness feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InterestingFlickr – it has a lot of saturated/contrasty images but it’s still interesting. Bloglines sometimes quickly fills up with the max of 200 posts!
Digital Workflow
Your digital workflow describes how photos get from your camera to the screen and printed in a frame in your living room. It all depends on your software and operating system. If you’re using Linux, you might be interested in Jason’s one.
My own workflow revolves around a simple directory structure with top level YYYY directories, and sub-directories named after the current day in “YYYY-MM-DD – description” format. The description on the folder is generally good enough to help me find most images quickly. In each folder is another one called “Complete” which is a work and output directory. I save work in progress images in .xcf format, and the final result as 92% quality jpeg files. I use a simple script to copy files off my camera.
Here’s how I name images:
- Large, original size or only cropped images have “-l” added to them. ie. img_9999-l.jpg
- Medium size, 700 pixel wide or high images have a “-m” extension: img_9999-m.jpg
- And anything smaller has “-s” attached to them.
- Unfinished files have “-wip” appended to them usually.
I like Jason’s “current” work directory idea. I’ll have to modify my workflow somewhat and rename each image with YYYY-MM-DD prefixed to it if I’m going to use a global work directory but it would make backing up files easier.
Before uploading images I always resize them so the longest side is 700 pixels long. Almost all the images on this blog have that contstraint. Resizing an images involves the removal of information and makes the remaining pixels slightly more fuzzy. A straight vertical black line on a white background in a large image may have a ghostly border around it and it will be merged with the background colour making for a grey line. One of the most common ways of fixing this is to use the unsharp mask plugin which gives the illusion of sharpening an image by increasing local contrast. There are numerous unsharp mask tutorials online so I’ll let you find the one that best describes it to you.
Please remember, always resize your images before uploading them. Browsers are completely useless at resizing images!
Orphans, Zooming and Other Links
- Urgent Call for Your Action on Orphan Works – a law is about to be passed in the United States making it much easier for photographs and visual works to be used without attribution or payment. Peter Marshall has a clear write-up about the danger of this bill while mrbrown describes it as a “possible disaster for all photographers”.
How do I feel about attribution and image usage? Photographers and artists must be recognised. I have heard that my images have been used occasionally by others as desktop backgrounds or screensavers, and that’s great, but please leave a comment on that blog post if you use a photo. It will encourage me to continue posting!
Printing my name and url on images is an option but it looks ugly and limits the appeal of a photo. Is it possible to embed those into the EXIF info? - Over on Hotwired I spied a very cool zooming image demo that could be built on to create a nice gallery script. I don’t like or browse gallery sites very often but this looks nice. It needs more work to be a polished work but I hope to see someone carry this project on to greater heights!
- Top 10 Tips for Getting Attention on Flickr – worth a read if you’re a Flickr user. A few tips I hadn’t thought of and new ideas I must put into practise.
- Fluid Effect – more before and after shots of beautiful people. It’s amazing what can be done!
- One tip I picked up from the Flickr advanced user guide is the upload by email and and “blog this” function. It works well, but inserts two line breaks into my blog posts for some reason.
- Shooting action shots in low light is a useful read if you’ve ever wondered why everything was blurry after that night out in the pub!
- Peter noticed that Digital Journalist turned 100 this month! This magazine is such a good read, but I haven’t had time recently to look at this month’s issue.
- Canon 5D vs 20D – full frame vs APS-C. What do you need? The full frame sensor wins, but not by much. In a “Practical Photography” magazine review of the NIkon D200 vs the Canon 5D, the Nikon won because it offered the best value for money. If you’re printing at higher than A3 size then buy a 5D but otherwise a 20D or D200 will suffice!
- A positive review of the Sigma 18-200 lens which is rarely off my Canon 20D!
- Version 4.6 of Bibble, a RAW photo processing tool available for Linux, Windows and Mac now comes with Noise Ninja included! The press release doesn’t make it clear if Noise Ninja is included in the “Lite” version but I’ll be giving it a whirl over the next few days and I’ll report back here on my first impressions! Later.. Bibblelite for Linux includes “basic” Noise Ninja support but they forgot to include the library file in the 4.6 release! Follow the instructions here to install it. It’s not the full Noise Ninja plugin, but Bibble will use it if available. As Noise Ninja isn’t available for Linux yet it’s a boon to have access to this cut down version!
The Canon 30D is finally here
This is a bit of a let down to be honest. The new 30D looks nothing like the leaked photo I found a while back. There are a couple of new features, most notably the bigger LCD screen, spot metering and a much bigger buffer but I don’t see any point in upgrading from my 20D. I was looking forward to seeing the ADAMS MODE button but alas, it’s probably not going to see the light of day for some time yet.
The really good news is that it’s the same price as the 20D which should force the price of existing 20D bodies down. Look for discounts at your favourite online retailer. If you see it at a bargain price, buy it! (via and every other photography news site)
On a related note, I weighed my Canon 20D and Sigma 18-200 lens. It’s a monster 1.25kg (or almost 3lbs)! No wonder I hurt my back last year. Carrying that amount of weight around one’s neck is a sure fire way of getting to know your physiotherapist better!
Welcome members of Dropzone.com! I hope you’ll look around and enjoy the photos!
People who noticed
Sometimes I do the right thing, take a nice photo, touch it up in a pleasing way, and I present it here and it draws the attention of a few kind souls who comment on it and maybe even talk about it on their own blogs, forums and sites. Sometimes they even say nice things about me! Here’s a few I noticed recently:
- Dave says “Donncha’s Inphotos should get your vote if you don’t want to vote for Ryan.” Aw shucks, thanks!
- Cornel likes my photos. Thanks, made my morning to read your post!
- Dr Mike says “WHOA!” Hehe. He’s a good guy. He helps out so much on the wordpress.com forums. Thank you!
- Wicklow News used one of my Glendalough photos, thanks for the link back!
- Budi and Eric took note of my Beached Whale
- James Farmer wrote a poem about Flickr, and included me in it!
- Rebeka created a Skateboarder advert using an image called Cork Skateboarders which I shot last year. It’s for a school project so it’s ok to use it!
- The guys at People’s Republic of Cork found the Cork section of my blog to be to their liking!
- Texting texting texting blew Thom away! 🙂
- Finally, Marc Scully also likes my photos!
And in no particular order, here are the photoblogs I visit each day. This list is getting longer daily but these blogs publish photos that will inspire you! Many of them have appeared in the Photoblogs.org hot list, and that’s a very good starting point for finding good photoblogs. Other blogs belong to people who have left a comment here.
c h r o m a s i a | [daily dose of imagery] | Exuvia.net | DailySnap.com | s i m p l y l o t u s | AnnaWeb PhotoBlog | John Washington | Round Here | Movement4 | MUTE – Photoblog | { just photo } | IPlog | DjMagras Photos | caps:photo | Pulpo | panhandlin’ | captured4life | HeadphoneLand | Gabriela Cravo e Canela | Iced Coffee | Macro Art In Nature | Photogranny | NoWords | chromalark | Gareth Marlow’s Photo Blog | every so often | jxiong | Cozmo Photography Fotoblog | neverhappen.com | A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania | fotoecco | your waitress photos | Learning to see | joe’s nyc | paxtonprints.com
If your blog isn’t there, and you’ve left a comment here, it’s because you don’t post a new photo every day, you’re in my aggregator, or I just haven’t got around to adding you to my bookmarks!
While I’m here, say hi to the following Cork Photo bloggers:
- Donal posts photos from gigs he goes to on a regular basis!
- Robert just recently started blogging.
- Ryan, like me, has been around as long as the hills! Bloody marvelous photographer too!
- Corksurf posts photos a semi-regular basis, but I’m hoping he’ll post more regularly because he’s posted some great shots so far!