Category — Photo

If you’ve watched any of the Olympics, you’ve no doubt seen the masses of photographers covering the event. (All those lust-worthy white lenses.) Vincent Laforet is covering the games for Newsweek, and while I’ve known he’s been blogging about it, I really haven’t been keeping up with my feed reader lately (work has me pretty busy right now).

If you want a sense of what it’s like to cover the largest sporting event, go read his post that he filed on covering Phelps historic 8th medal win and the men’s fencing final. Looking at the photos he has up, he was in that scrum of photographers that Phelps climbed through to hug his mom and sister.

In an effort to actually participate, I’m formally announcing here that I’m going to participate in Brian Auer’s latest photo project - The $50 film camera. Since the Fujica camera I got earlier this year had the shutter freeze on it and the Mayima has major issues with the focusing system, I recently set out to pick up a new film camera.

My brother is an art professor and turned me on to the Pentax K1000 (pictured), which I just picked up off of eBay for $46 (plus shipping, which put it over the $50 mark, but I’m not counting the shipping.)

The project basically has a few concepts:

1. Find a film camera for under $50 (check)
2. Shoot some film with the camera (in-progress)
3. Write a review of the camera
4. Publish a photo of the camera
5. Publish an entire roll of photo (including the duds)
6. Submit a link to all of the above on Brian’s blog here
7. Do it by September 12, 2008

The project has a couple prizes attached, namely a Diana+ camera from Lomography and a whole punch of Ilford film. I’ve got a roll of Velvia in the camera already and have taken a few frames with it.  The last time I shot some film I took forever to develop it, so hopefully this gives me some impetus to move quickly.

If you want to participate, you can check out the full details on Epic Edits.

I had a freakin’ amazing day yesterday that I felt was worthy of a blog post to immortalize it.  What was so special?  Glad you asked.

It started in the morning. It was my first day back to work after "super-sizing" the holiday weekend. My cell phone rang and it was a 212 area code. My first though was, "Funny, who in New York would be calling me?"

It was an editor at Photoshelter.

She was calling to have me add some keywords to one of the images I have for sale:

(click on the image for a larger version) 

I guess they had a buyer who was looking for a boy blowing a dandelion and the way I had it keyworded it was not showing up in searches. If it took the researchers a while to find the image, I was probably missing out on a lot of sales of the image.

Before I could voice my next thought of, "Why are they are calling little old me me about keywords?" she went on to tell me, "We just sold it for [a lot of money]. You just made [70% of said huge chunk of change]!" It turns they’d been working on this deal for "several months" and just closed it yesterday.  Evidentially the image is destined for a very specific use (I do know for what and who), but they bought an unlimited 1yr non-exclusive license.

All I can say is, "Hell yeah!"

I then rounded out the day in the evening by taking my son to the Brewers baseball game.  Those of you who know me personally know how obsessed my son is with baseball.  This was his first game he got to go to this year and he was amped to say the least.  It was C C Sabathia’s Brewers debut and a sellout crowd.  I’d been thinking about getting tickets to a game this week and taking him.  When I heard Monday morning the Brewers signed Sabathia and he was starting Tuesday night, I decided to go to that game.  The game went from a low attendance weeknight game to a sellout in a mater of hours Monday afternoon.

The energy in the stadium when we got there was palpable.  When they announced C C in the starting line-up, they crowd erupted. When his first pitch was a strike, it did again.  He went on to struggle a bit in the new few innings. The energy didn’t leave the building, it just took a different form as folks squirmed in their seats a bit, hoping the Brewers didn’t blow the lead.

The Brewers ultimately went on to win, but I honestly had more fun watching my son watch the game.  In the 7th inning, Eric Gagne came on to pitch and gave up a lead-off hit.  The crowd sort of moaned, and waited nervously for the next batter.  My son, the optimist says to me, "It would be nice to see a double play." and lo and behold the Rockies hit into a 4-6-3 double play.  My son jumped to his feet and cheered with the rest of the crowd.

Walking to the car after the game in the warm summer night with the 42,000 other fans, my son said to me, "Dad.  Thanks for taking me to the game."  A simple moment packed in a walkway amongst thousands that was the perfect ending to the day.  I looked down at him told him "You’re welcome. I had a great time taking you." I then took a mental snapshot, knowing it was one of those times you don’t get many of as a parent.

The amazing Chase Jarvis posted this video by Guy Ritchie as a nod toward point-of-view (POV) photography (he had a version off of YouTube, but this one seems of better quality). 

It especially hits home since my son and I have been playing FIFA World Cup 2006 on the XBox 360 every night this week (and keep getting handily beat by the computer - even stacking the deck by playing Brazil vs. Angola).

In case you’re wondering, the song in the video is “Don’t Speak (I Came To Make a Bang)” by Eagles of Death Metal.

There is a super high res version on Nike’s site.

UPDATE: Nike posted a longer version of the video earlier today.  Even better!

I’m way behind on my feed reader, but came across a link to an online petition against the Orphan Works Act of 2008. I really question the efficacy of these online petitions, but the stance taken by the petition isn’t too radical and is worth supporting.

I also stumbled across a link to help you take action and send a message directly to your Congressperson and Senator opposing the legislation.  Again, writing your own letter or calling might be more effective, but every little bit doesn’t hurt. Given the terse, non-committal response I got from Sensenbrenner after my first letter to his office, I figured re-iterating my position wouldn’t hurt.  I really like the closing paragraph of their letter:

This bill was planned behind closed doors, introduced on short notice and fast-tracked for imminent passage. THERE IS NO NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO JUSTIFY RUSHING THROUGH ANY BILL THAT CONSTITUTES SUCH A RADICAL CHANGE TO THE OWNERSHIP OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. Please vote no on this bill and send it back to committee with a demand that it be subjected to an open informed, and transparent public debate.

[via Lessig.org & JMG-Galleries]

Continuing on the recent trend covering the "crime" of photography,  security expert Bruce Schneier weighs in on why harassing photographers in the name of national security is complete garbage:

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

[via my Twitter friend, Michelle]

A couple weeks back I mentioned that harassment of photographers seemed to be on the rise.  Scanning through Google Reader this morning I came across two more cases, this time involving video photography.

The first comes via Chris Nixon at Photografr.com.  An Albuquerque news photographer gets roughed up and arrested:

APD is supposedly reviewing the tape. The story goes that the photographer setup to cover a shooting and thought the suspect was in custody. The police said he needed to move to a media staging area. The photographer asked where it was, and the police couldn’t tell him. They later told him where to go and the photographer says, "Was that so hard?" and that is when the beating commenced.

Yeah, it’s 3am or so and everyone is tired, but I really don’t know if the snaky comment was necessary. Worth beating the crap on of someone, definitely not. Even still, the cop really goes off on the guy and does not tell the photographer he is under arrest until well after he roughed up the guy and almost broke the camera.  Your tax dollars hard at work, Albuquerque!  Keeping the streets safe from photographers.

The second comes via Attorney Carolyn Wright who runs the Photo Attorney blog and it is related to the article I linked to earlier about photography in Washington DC’s Union Station. While the local Fox affiliate is interviewing an Amtrak spokesperson, Joel Lawson, in Union Station, a security guard tells the news crew to stop filming and cannot answer why [link to the video - I couldn't get it to embed]. (Carolyn also links to the Albuquerque story).

It makes one thing you could almost start an entire blog dedicated to photography not being a crime.

I just realized I’m almost a full week behind on posting pictures to Project365.  They are all taken, just sitting on a CF card waiting to be processed. I guess I’ve got entirely way too much other stuff going on right now.  Hopefully I can carve some time out this evening and get through them. Otherwise, they’ll be up this weekend.

BTW - Welcome to all the new readers.  I saw a slight rise in hits after a link from Scott Kelby’s blog. You can subscribe to updates via the RSS feed which includes both my meandering posts and photos.

Weird. A whole bunch of stories on photographers getting harassed for taking pictures hit the blogs this week:

• Two FBI agents just showed up at my door… (I think I’m being investigated) [via Thomas Hawk]
• Almost Arrested for Taking Photos at Union Station
• Shooting with Permits (and hey…isn’t that Julia Roberts?) (no threat of arrest, but a good explanation on why you should secure permits)

A few weeks back there was a video on Flickr (quiet, all you haters) showing some UK blokes getting harassed by law enforcement.  I’ve fortunately never had a run in with the law yet.  I think all of these of these have decent endings that one can gleam advice from.  Namely, when confronted, be calm, if asked to leave, do so.

Probably also a good time to print out the Photographer’s Rights PDF and stuff it in the ol’ camera bag.

Ok, I really try to avoid politics on the blog, mainly because I hate political blogs, but John Harrington has a great write-up over on Photo Business News & Forum regarding the Orphan Works Act of 2008. If you make any amount of money of photography, it is worth reading.  Orphaned works are definitely a dead spot on in the current copyright law, but John goes through the analysis of why the current legislation is bad.

Lawrence Lessig published a great counter-proposal last year on his blog. His proposal is more akin to what is done on patent maintenance. Let hope Senators Hatch and Leahy know how to use a browser and can read.