DVPhoto

Earlier this week Mike from TOP wrote a brief rant about copyright; or more accurately, a rant about essentially unknown photographers actively making it known they don’t want anyone using their work without prior approval, without giving people any way to contact them in the first place.

What seemed to me to be a reasonable request has turned into what Mike called a Copyright Brouhaha, and now a third post, Keep Your Freakin’ Hands Off My Picture, is causing even more arguments in the comments section.

While the articles are worth the read, the comments are where the meat is. There are two sides; the one, seemingly made up of some professional photographers and lawyers, claims that what Mike is doing (especially in his Random Excellence posts) is, if not legally wrong, at the very least morally questionable. The other side is made up of the rest of us, and seems to belief that posting images of other photographers to showcase their work (including linking back to their sites if possible) should easily fall within the provisions of fair use and is most certainly a good thing.

Now I can understand where the Pro photographers and lawyers are coming from. The pro photographer is out there to make money, as much of it as they can. A lawyer’s job is to twist the law to his clients benefit, if a law has some leeway in its interpretation, then all the better. Obviously when asked whether something is fair use, the default answer is “probably not”, since avoiding possible litigation is considered more important than the original intent of the law.

To my mind, the idea of fair use is there to allow others to comment on, learn from, and praise existing works. All of these are impractical unless you have the entire image to look at, and while you definitely do not need a full size image, a thumbnail will definitely not do.

While I do not dispute that the lawyers are correct when they say Mike could find himself in court for his current use of copyrighted images, I do think this shows that copyright law, and especially the concept of fair use, is currently broken.

Today there is an announcement on Strobist, that David has taken a 1 year leave of absence from The Baltimore Sun. The title, ” Blog, Newspaper, Family. Pick any Two.”, sounded rather ominous; newspaper and family being the choice I expected. It seems that running the blog, and doing seminars about lighting, is profitable enough for it to be an option.

This is great news, as Strobist is one of the best photography blogs out there, and an increase in dedication to it will only help to make it even better. Also in the pipeline is a DVD on lighting, which I’ll be sure to buy.

Congratulations David!

Well it seems that in less than one year after it started, What the Duck has been accepted by Universal Press Syndicate for syndication. Creator, Aaron Johnson, says “I’m now in decision making mode, keeping the best interest of the strip in mind.” So you might just find WTD appearing in a local newspaper or magazine near you.

Corbis, one of the largest traditional stock agencies around, has officially opened their new microstock site, SnapVillage.

The site is still very much in beta, so don’t expect it to all work perfectly, but at first glance it seems that Corbis are making a bid to change the way microstock works. There are a few things that make me want to join them immediately, and one thing that means I can’t.

At first glance I see the following.

Pros:

• You can set your prices yourself from $1 all the way to $50, which is more midrange stock than micro stock. There is a subscription model much like Shutterstocks, where the photographer only gets 30 cents, but you can opt out of that.
• Like with IStock, the top photographers will have the opportunity to be moved up to the more traditional stock business at Corbis. I assume you would have to be an exclusive photographer with them, though that remains to be seen.
• They will keyword and title your images for you if you want.

Cons:

• They only send payments via Paypal, so people like me who cannot receive payments from Paypal are a bit screwed. Please Corbis, add Moneybookers & Cheque payment please. Soon.
• So far it seems that when they keyword the images for you, they are very sparsely key worded. I think that while it seems like a very good idea, I’m not sure they will have the time to do it properly.

Obviously, since the site is still very much in development, there will be a lot of problems; but assuming you can actually receive payment from them, give it a try. And make sure you tell them any problems you encounter so they can improve the site as fast as possible.

If you enjoy reading Dan Heller, then you need to listen to EXIF & Beyond: Dan Heller Interview - The Business of Photography over at JMG Galleries. It’s over an hour long, but well worth the time.

I recently added Empty Easel to my daily reading list. While it focuses mostly on traditional arts, there are a number of interesting articles on selling your own art. A few months back there was a post on the best websites for selling your art.

Reading through it highlights a problem of trying to sell your art on the web, if you don’t want to do it yourself, then you need to find a site dedicated to selling other peoples art. Seems like a good idea, up until you realise that most of these sites are filled with other people trying to sell their art. It’s like trying to sell you photos at a business class at art school, everyone else is trying to sell their own work, and thus don’t have any interest in what you are selling.

One need only look at internet search patterns to realise where the problem lies. Using overtures search history tool for search strings buy art and sell art. These values will change over time, but right now while I am writing this, buy art was searched for 1088 times, and sell art 1392 times. More people are interested in selling their own art and there are in buying it.

Then of course you can do a Google search on the term Buy Art. The results are not entirely what one might hope for. There are some giant online art stores (art.com and allposters.com) which won’t directly accept new artists, and a whole host of smaller shops; most of which either won’t accept unknown artists, or are there for selling original art (which is fine if you are wanting to make the prints yourself, but then why not just focus on your own web page).

The 10th result (at the time of writing) is for a small online art store called Blink Red. They appear to accept new artists, and will do print on demand sales for you. So why are they not mentioned at empty easel (or anywhere for that matter). Well one only has to look at the traffic they receive; with compete.com reporting a mere 424 visitors per month, they don’t seem like they could make you many sales. So if being in the top 10 of a search like “buy art” gets you a mere 400+ visitors a month, how on earth does art.com and their ilk receive the reported 2 million plus? Simply, they receive a large portion of their traffic through advertising, and of course through the many artist searches where they come up tops.

Of course, if you are just getting into selling your art, then this isn’t going to help you. So you’ve got to try and figure out what site drives the right kind of traffic to your work. While writing this article, I decided to focus on three sites: Image Kind, Artist Rising, & Deviant Art.

Imagekind
I recently found out about Image Kind, and while their site wasn’t anything to write home about, the shear number of options available for paper, sizes, mattes, & frames makes it an attractive option for the photographer who wants provide a variety of options to their client. You can submit images with any aspect ratio, so if you are into your 3 x 1 panoramas, this is the place for you. They have recently added integration with Flickr; so if you have a Flickr pro account, you do not need to upload your images to Imagekind again. The number of frames and mattes available is amazing, possibly providing just a little bit too much choice. You get to set your own mark up from the base prices, and you also get a percentage of the frame cost (if the buyer chooses to frame their order).

While there is free membership, you are limited to 25 images and 1 gallery. Upgrading to a pro account gains you unlimited galleries, but only 50 images. A platinum account is needed if you want to get rid of the image count limit. The biggest drawback if you don’t want to market your own work appears to be the buyers. Much of Imagekind’s traffic appears to either be artists themselves, or buyers directed to the site through individual artist’s galleries.

Imagekind appears to be a good option for the photographer who is marketing his own images, but doesn’t want to get involved in the printing and shipping himself.

Deviant Art
I have been a Deviant Art member since 2001; it was large back then, and has grown rapidly ever since. The traffic there rivals that of art.com, and you’d be hard pressed to find a site with more artists on it.

The shopping side of deviant art isn’t as well done as the rest of the site. It looks good, but seems to lack any desire to be marketed to the outside world. The site is filled with poor artists looking to sell their own work, and very few art admirers with the credit cards to back their purchases. So sales are slim to non existent; with even the most popular of artists there reporting low sales numbers.

That said the prints are beautiful; done on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper, they are vibrant and long lasting. There are many other print options, such as canvas, puzzles, calendars, mugs, and many more. The sizes are limited, so if you like panorama’s or some other lesser used aspect ratio, you may be out of luck.

Artist Rising
While merely looking at Artist Rising’s traffic would lead one to believe that it is not worth the effort, a closer look at who owns them will probably change your mind. Art.com (and thus allposters.com) owns Artist Rising, and while you can only show your art on the Artist Rising and Sistino sites right now, they are apparently working on giving some access to their two much larger sites.

While the selection of print sizes is very limited, and the system slow, the promise of gaining access to that many buyers is extremely tempting. However a post from Empty Easel today casts some doubt about the long term future of Artist Rising. With most of the staff apparently retrenched, and the possibility of being brought back directly under the art.com team, I wouldn’t want to make any commitments to them just yet. The potential is there, but we just have to see what they do with it.

When I started doing a little bit of research for this article, I was hoping to find a good site for the photographer who was just beginning to sell prints of his work. Obviously to make any real money selling prints, you are going to have to market yourself, and spend a lot of effort doing it. Yet I was hopeful that there would be at least one option that could make you a bit of money while you build up a portfolio. Unfortunately it seems that the only option that seemed to have any potential is in a state of flux, with the other options providing a good printing service, but not much in the line of bringing customers to you door.

JMG-Galleries has an interesting article on the 5 Most Common Digital Photography Mistakes. An good selection, and I have been guilty of all 5. Of course I am very careful when changing lenses, so #2 hasn’t really affected me at all. Yet the one that I have heard many times and still don’t believe is “3. Not Reformatting Your CF Cards Between Use”.

I formatted my CF cards when I bought them; and that has been the only time I ever did it. I have shot many thousands of photos, and to this day have not once suffered corrupt data. Admittedly I have only bought CF cards that are not cutting edge in terms of capacity, and this in turn leads to them being more stable.

So of the question is, just how many people have suffered from repeatedly corrupt data due to not formatting their CF cards?

I first heard about eye-fi about year ago, and while interesting I soon forgot about as it was far from complete. Well apparently it is finally nearing official release.

Unfortunately for me, and many other DSLR users, this is only available in SD for now; but I can’t see a reason why this couldn’t be incorporated into the larger CF format in the future.

Strobist has launched Lighting 102 today, and it looks to be a great learning experience. So go over there and give it a try.

Now I didn’t get back into film photography just so I could scan the negatives and then print the image just like any digital photo. I figure if the image is good enough to put up onto the web, you may as well spend a bit of effort in the darkroom and make a print yourself. At least then I can scan in the final result and keep the post processing to a minimum. At least this is the reasoning that I’ve used to keep myself from blowing my cash on a film scanner.

Of course given that I don’t even have a fully functional dark room right now, this means that I don’t get to post anything unless I get the images scanned in at the 1 hour photo place when they are developed (which wont work with my B&W stuff since I am developing that myself). This costs money, and the results aren’t exactly something to write home about. So I thought, why not use my DSLR, I have flashes and I have close up filters. A proper macro lens would be nice, but with the close up filters I could get the lens close enough to fill most of the image with a single 35mm frame. Here is a brief run-down of the experiment.

I took a Tupperware container that I placed upside down over some white cardboard, placing my flash to the right pointing directly to the side of the container. This would provide a relatively diffuse light source.

At first I placed the film on a piece of paper on top of this container, but the fibres of the paper were immediately obvious in the resulting photos. So I scrapped the paper idea, and put two piles of books on either side of the Tupperware, putting the film on top of these, held down with some light objects that I hoped wouldn’t damage the surrounding frames (in this case a CD and my lens cap). This kept the plane of focus far enough away from the container below so that none of its surface texture could be seen.

I took a few shots at various apertures until I had some options to work with in Photoshop. These were shot in RAW as I would need the added bit depth.

It took a bit of playing around in PS to get things right. Just converting the negative image and then inverting it results in terrible results, the colours were off, the contrast almost non existent. So how do we get a better image?

The first thing to do is make sure that the white balance is set correctly. The problem with colour negatives, is that they have a very strong orange colour cast. So the first thing you do is take the white point selection tool in RAW converter, and select the blank film around the picture. This is the white of the negative image.

Now select the highlights option (this will show the blown highlights as red) and increase the exposure until you have as much of the film around the picture red without any of the picture itself over exposed. Reduce brightness to 0, and increase the shadow slider until the negative image looks about right. This will take practice, but after a few tries you will get a feeling for it. Now you can open the converted RAW file in PS.

Once you have your negative image in PC, go to the Image->Adjustments menu and select Invert. This will turn the image in to a positive image. The resulting image should be pretty close to what you want. I found simply using Photoshop’s auto color option did the final touches to the image to make it decent. In no way do I think you’re going to get a quality image that you could print from out of this, but the result is definitely okay for posting your holiday snaps for your friends to view. Improving the lighting consistency across the frame, and a true macro lens might result in images worth of enlargements and art prints, but I don’t have the time or the desire to test that right now.

The image I used for this test was from a batch that I had gotten processed and scanned in at one of our local 1 hour labs. The resulting scan from that lab was horribly saturated and sharpened so much that there was no chance of getting any decent enlargements out of it. Given that it doubled the cost of processing the film, I just don’t feel it was worth it. The canon shot that I did with this quick setup had much more faithful colours, and due to less sharpening had way fewer artefacts in the image. With a proper macro lens I would have been able to achieve close to the camera’s full 8 megapixels, and even with just my close up filters, I was able to achieve an increase in size over the 2.2 megapixel scans. The thumbnails below link to web sized versions of the photo, as well a 100% crop comparison.

Fuji Scan

Canon Photo

100% Crops