Category: Photography

I love photography. For me, it’s like painting, but better. And more accurate. And unlike painting, I can actually participate. I am not a big success or great master by any means. But I enjoy taking pictures. I also enjoy looking at other people work and sometimes sharing it. When I do, this is the category that I use.

Amsterdam in black and white

While I was walking the streets of Amsterdam, I caught myself many times thinking about how particularly nice the city looks in black and white.  Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of color and brightness in there.  But, the combination of rainy weather and straight lines of strict architecture forms was always suggesting desaturated high contrast black and white imagery.

Amsterdam Central

I wish I was any better in photography.  Maybe then I could have captured the black and white magic of Amsterdam as good as it deserves it.

Amsterdam skyline

Here are some excellent images from Flickr which came up in search results.

Beautiful women of my Flickr favourites

Once in a while I go through my Flickr favourites (unfortunately no RSS feed yet).  And every time I do so, I am amazed by this or that – models, lights, moments, post-processing, etc.  Today, I was impressed (again) by the beauty of women.  So much, in fact, that I decided to share the feeling via this blog.

 Muse

And here is another one, totally different:

Smoking

There are, of course, plenty of more, but most of those pictures don’t allow for bloggers to re-post.  So you’ll have to see them on Flickr. Because if you don’t, you are missing out.  Really.

On copyright, fair use, and free speech

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.