My image went viral on Pinterest (and I didn't know)
I was going through my Google+ stream earlier tonight and came across a reshare of this image ... only it wasn't reshared from me but from someone else! Cranky! Theft! Piracy!
I contacted both my contact who had shared it to me and the original person who had it in their stream with no attribution. They got back really quickly and apologised meaning no harm and promptly removed it as I requested ... it still had my old 'Lushpup Images' watermark on the bottom left of the picture! I asked where they found it and they said #pinterest and sent me the URL (they really were quite helpful and I became less cranky). Sure enough there was my image with the watermark ... no attribution. What caught my eye was the list of 200+ reblogs listed on that page. When I did a Google Image search for the picture I was returned 15 pages of exact matches from all blogs and sites all over the world ... I stopped looking after that.
Interestingly, downloading a copy of the image from a number of sites to my machine (coming home in a way) the Author metadata still listed Lushpup Images as author and copyright holder ... not that anyone looked at it ;-)
Now, in the rare times I go searching for my own images using Image Search I come across one or two sites. I send them an email and in 99% of cases we resolve it through removal or attribution. In this case, where the image has clearly gone viral, what to do? I have heard that Pinterest throws copyright and intellectual property pretty much out the window by leaving it up to the individual account holder...
My image went viral on Pinterest (and I didn't know) ... What would you do?
thewalkdownunder 2012 Google+ Photowalk
I participated in the inaugural 2012 Google+ Photowalk held here in Canberra yesterday. It was an early start (7am at Regatta Point) but the day was an absolute cracker weather wise. A beautiful dawn with balloons saw about 30 people gather, score a t-shirt and set off on 4 hours of chatting, meeting and of course taking photos. Great to put some names to faces and to meet people I'd never seen nor heard of before. It was fun. I even found an iPhone on the way back and managed (via calling their recent calls list) to track them down and return it. How nice am I? ('very' is the correct answer to that) Did you take part in thewalkdownunder 2012?
Melbourne across the Yarra - Tiny Planet
I learned how to do a 'Tiny Planet' image from an existing panorama last night. This was taken last year in lovely Melbourne. Shot from the south bank, it's a view of Melbourne across the Yarra River. A 5-shot panorama stitched together in Photoshop before being 'planeted'.
The tutorial I followed was this one published by www.photoguides.net and it was ridiculously simple to produce something gorgeous.
Go and give it a go and be sure to let us know how you got on :-)
Add EXIF data to your scanned images
OK ... so you've been out taking pictures with film. You've got the film developed and most likely had the negatives scanned so you can add the images to your digital library.
Perhaps you like to use keywords to index or sort your library. Maybe you like to see only those photos taken with a particular model camera ... like your film camera? Digital cameras record information about the image captured in the form of a series of EXIF tags (Camera, Lens, Aperture, Exposure etc). It's these tags that applications like Picasa, Lightroom and Aperture read when importing your images. Scanners apply EXIF data to the images resulting from scans. Film cameras do not (with some rare exceptions) record EXIF data so you'll need to create it. So here you are, seeking to add EXIF data to your scanned images.
Since Adobe’s Lightroom and most of the other tools that I use are geared towards DSLRs, I have felt the need to add as much EXIF data to my scanned images as possible. The more photos I add to Lightroom, the more important Smart Collections are getting to me and the less I want to rely on keywords. Things become even more complicated when I started using more than one film camera and wanted to use the standard ways to sort my photos by camera. Besides, I have this blog and display my photos online, my visitors want to inspect the EXIF data to get a feel for how I arrived at a particular exposure.
If you have googled how to update EXIF data in an image and you have landed here ... you have probably also come across the ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This tool can do everything and more, but in the end it is a Perl script with a command line interface. What was needed was a graphical user interface to the ExifTool and Bogdan Hrastnik has stepped up and developed the ExifToolGUI Windows tool for which you can find all information here. Strongly recommended!
After a little bit of time spent in the 'Newbie' stream of the ExifToolGUI forums I worked out how to alter the EXIF data of my scanned film images to reflect the Camera and Lens used to capture the image. Voila! Best of all I can modify the files as a batch. Since my images were already in Lightroom, I selected the images in the Library view, right-clicked them and selected 'Metadata > Read metadata from files' to refresh the image tags reported within the library.
From here they arced across the sky - Mamiya 645 Super
I recently 'inherited' a Mamiya 645 Super medium format camera. I just got my first negs (and medium resolution scans) back from the lab. I took a roll of expired Ilford SFX 200 to see if the beast still worked. It did but the battery died about two shots before I took this. I remembered that the camera will shoot even if insufficient power is contained in the battery but that the shutter speed is fixed at 1/60sec. So this one's fully manual and literally a straight scan from the neg ... ooh I'd forgotten how negatives are just the most beautiful things.
From here they arced across the sky
With These Hands I Will Make The World
With these hands I will dig
and hold
circle
and fold
shape
and grow
caress, create
with these hands I will make the world
Out in the backyard, playing in the dirt ... the simple joys of finding a creature alive in the soil. Then crushing it and loving it until it's alive no more ... I hope that if there is some kind of spirit guardian of the invertebrate realm that they perhaps look the other way when small children play with their kin.
Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers
I don't recall the very first time I heard the expression 'Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers'. I have always loved flowers and blooms, their myriad colours and forms ... and scents. My love of flowers has stayed constant while the way I look at them changes constantly. When I learned about plants and what flowers are for, the way they entice and mimic ... the way the look different under ultraviolet or infra-red. The way we use flowers to say things ... from red roses for love through a whole spectrum of colours to black roses for death ... 'say it with roses' indeed! Flowers as symbols of the transience of life. Fake flowers ranging from the trashy to the profoundly elegant. I learned about flowers as genetic markers, indicators of weed species, the passing of seasons, their rarity and their basic commonality. The sound of bees in trees in Springtime. The carpets of riotous colour beneath flowering camellia. I learned their smells ... I'd like to retire somewhere where I can smell the scent of frangipani blossoms ... the heady scents of Spring and warm breezes. Native Australian flowers whose scents pass into honey, bulbs, trees, bushes dripped with rain or dew. And then I started to take photographs of them.
And sometimes I don't see them, or smell them, or sense them ... I'm busy doing something else, preoccupied. Sometimes I sit and just watch them and think as I'm doing now about all the different ways I see them. The day I saw my children learning to sniff their first flower nearly made me cry. My advice ... don't forget to stop and smell the flowers :-)
2012 Royal Canberra Show - Clean Sweep
The Royal Canberra Show is held every year to celebrate and showcase the very best that the region has to offer. I have been entering photographs into the Canberra Show Art Prize for the past three years. There are four classes in which to enter photographs;
- Open
- Landscape/Places
- People & Portraits; and
- Black & White
I always try to enter a photo into each class and I have picked up several 1st places over the years in various classes. This year though something quite remarkable happened: I won every class! I still have not quite gotten my head around quite what this means but really it's an excellent result! The photos and their classes are presented below;
Princesses Aplenty - Riverfront Theatre Company
Towards the end of last year I received a lovely email from Paul Coleman at the Riverfront Theatre Company in Windsor Ontario, Canada. He was putting together a youth theatre production called "Princesses Aplenty - A Fractured Fairytale". Paul had seen a photograph of mine and thought it would be great to help promote the production and asked if he could have my permission to use it. Here's a part of Paul's letter...
"I work with a group of kids at a non-profit organisation called the Riverfront Theatre Company in Windsor Ontario Canada. We provide theatrical art programming to over 80 young people at absolutely no fee for the participant. We are entering our 8th season we are spreading our creative wings to present an original production entitled Princesses Aplenty. There is a dragon in our play and we would love to use part of your image in our poster. Attached is a rough draft of what I would like to use. (with your permission of course) If you are willing to allow us to use it could you send me a higher resolution copy. We would gladly credit you on the poster and on our website."
I was chuffed and not least because it's nice to be asked. I said yes and provided a high resolution copy of the dragon image below to Paul. Anyways, time passed and every now and then I'd receive an excited email from Paul letting me know how things were going and how everyone loved the image and it looked great and then yesterday I picked up a parcel from the post office. Inside (see top picture) was a t-shirt, two tickets, a program and two posters ... cool! I was especially impressed with the t-shirt. Thanks mate, it made my day.
Now it transpires that Paul, as well as running graphic design house Creation Design is a photographer too and has some nice photos up on his website. Go have a look and tell him I said 'Hi'.
Sweet White Noise
When I first published this self portrait of me sleeping like a bat, I was listening to the album The Sound of White by Australian artist Missy Higgins.
Listening to the title track got me thinking about the sound of white noise and how relaxing I found it. About how white noise is the sound made by all the frequencies randomly occurring together at an equal or flat power. About how the sound is there but there is no discernible frequency or signal that stands out (because there isn't one!). It's like experiencing thick fog, an aural isolation chamber. Listening to white noise I find my mind exploring it, looking for a handle, something familiar. Rationally I know it's not there but my mind searches anyway, fumbling and groping. Then comes a strange feeling of floating with in the white noise as it surrounds me with no detectable source ... the sound comes from everywhere - omnidirectional.
White noise gets its name from the term white light which describes a light where all the frequencies are of equal power. I like exploring that too.
Wikipedia has a more thorough and technical description of white noise and it's myriad uses.
Flying foxes with lightning - Elizabeth Bay Sydney
Here's a lucky catch! A crop from a 30second exposure during a twilight thunderstorm at Elizabeth Bay in Sydney.
I didn't see until post-processing that I'd caught two flying foxes. Cool huh?
So ... Flying foxes with lightning - Elizabeth Bay Sydney :-)
In the Garden: jumping spider
Found this little one on the curled leaf of a lime tree in the backyard. A cutie huh? Very inquisitive critters ... I'm not overly fond of spiders (the larger ... the less so) but I like these ones.
D80 - Tamron 90mm SP Macro
In the Garden: jumping spider
'wall works' (a preview) - ANCA Gallery
'wall works' 7th - 22nd December 2011
Last week I was given a heads-up by friend and artist Nicci Haynes about an exhibition on at the Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery in Dickson. Apparently ANCA are repainting the gallery over the new year period and have invited a select group of artists to use the walls of the gallery as their canvas. The show is called 'wall works' and I went along on Friday afternoon to take some photographs and was impressed by the scale and quality of work going on in there and I present a selection of images below. I highly recommend anyone interested to do the same.
The show opens officially on Wednesday 14th December but is open to the public now for anyone interested in the creative process. Of particular interest to me were the wall size works by Byrd and Hanna Hoyne, the intricate musings of Paul Summerfield, the 'there but not there' figures of Nicci and the vibrant etchings of Tesss Horwitz.
From the ANCA website "Six local artists transform the gallery by working directly on the walls. Byrd with Hanna Hoyne, Mariana del Castillo with Gus McGrath and Alex Asch, Nicci Haynes, Tess Horwitz and Paul Summerfield. Curated by Narelle Phillips"
A second post with more images from this session can be found HERE
'girl on the floor' by Nicci Haynes
Hanna Hoyne
Byrd applying some fine detail
Entry Designs by Paul Summerfield
'fire extinguisher surrounds' by Paul Summerfield
'white crouching figure' by Nicci Haynes
Artist Byrd
Hanna Hoyne
Tess Horwitz
B+W ND110E 10 stop filter - testing
I recently tried out my B+W ND110 filter on some coasty water. I liked the results. These were shot using a Sigma 10-20mm on a D80 body using a tripod. Exposure time was around 30seconds each. I shot in Manual because the camera kept underexposing by a long way ... I had this idea that the body would adapt to the 10stop reduction in light and adjust shutter speed accordingly but it didn't seem to. Anyways, I liked the results. Read more