Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Famagusta Gazette reports that a partial Lunar eclipse will be visible from Cyprus tonight.  For the photography fans among you, it’s probably a good time to review moon photography tips.  The thing to remember is that even though shooting at night, the moon is lit by the sun, which means you’ll need to use pretty much the same settings as for the bright daylight - tele-zoom lens, tripod, f/16, 1/80 - 1/100.  Good luck, and don’t forget to share your pictures after!

Flickr user Amsterdamned! published this compilation - “The Flickr Portrait Gallery Hall of Excellence 2007″.  Click on the image  above to go its Flickr page, which has links to the original images in larger size.  These are so good - they are an absolute must see!

Here is some excellent food photography (found via Goblin).  Click on the image above for more photos.

I came across a really amazing LiveJournal community - photo_polygon (via thesz). Basically, it’s a stream of excellent journalism photography. Pictures of the world as it is. Strongly recommended.

TechCrunch has an excellent cover of the “photograph in the video” story that has been going on all over the web in the last few days.  Basically, somebody wrote a funny song and made a video for it.  In that video a bunch of images were used including one that was downloaded from Flickr without permission of the photographer.  The photographer got really pissed off and such.  The video was re-edited to remove the offending image, but there was plenty of discussion on how is right and who is wrong in this story.  Some really important questions on copyright, fair use, and free speech were asked, and some really smart people tried to answer them.

The rights of the copyright holder have always been balanced against the more fundamental right of free speech. And free speech in the Internet age, more so than ever before, goes way beyond words and text. The way people express themselves on the Web increasingly involves images, video, animations, and other rich media, often in mash-ups of pre-existing works. That is how people communicate today. Both copyright law and industry standards need to evolve to take that into consideration.

While I support the (copy)right of the author to command the usage of his or her work, I think that this particular case wasn’t handled properly by the photographer.