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.

A little something from the Flickr guidelines

After reading this post at Gonzo Engaged I decided to take another look at Flickr Community Guidelines.  After all I have more than 11,000 pictures there and I don’t want to have any surprises, if you know what I mean.

Here are two quotes that I think are worth a reminder:

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photographs and/or stuff that you’ve collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be terminated at any time.

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Oh, and just in case you noticed that somebody took your pictures and uploaded them into their photo stream, and done so without your permission, here is an advice from Flickr on how to behave:

Copyright Infringement
If you see your photographs in another member’s photostream, don’t panic. This is probably just a misunderstanding and not malicious. A good first step is to contact them and politely ask them to remove it. If that doesn’t work, please file a Notice of Infringement with the Yahoo! Copyright Team who will take it from there.
You may be tempted to post an entry in our public forum about what’s happening, but that’s not the best way to resolve a possible copyright problem. We don’t encourage singling out individuals or their photos in our public forum.

New features from Flickr

Flickr Blog has two good news:

  1. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is available.  Those of you using Flickr Uploadr to send pictures to you Flickr photo stream might want  to upgrade.  The new version offers a bunch of handy functionality, such as tagging, naming, and describing photos, as well as reordering.  These are much faster to do on your computer than over the network, so it should speed up your processing quite a bit.
  2. Statistics for Pro accounts.  If you have a Pro account, you can enable statistics and enjoy some graphs.  It takes about 24 hours for the stats to appear once you enable them, so be a little patient.  Finally, you’ll know  how people are finding your pictures, where from they are coming, and what are looking at the most.

Photography education anyone?

Via Digg  I came across this nicely written piece called “Photography Students Are Being Taught — But What Are They Really Learning Today?“.  While I’m more of a lazy guy with a camera rather than anything of a photographer, I still can relate to what Mike Sheil writes:

 So there am I looking at work which looked very similar to what I was doing 40 years ago and being told that this is now the real cutting edge of creative photography. It certainly had that rather off-centered, badly composed and poorly lit look that my work had 40 years ago — wide-angle shots of people’s heads, girls with sullen/bored expressions, oddly focused shots and peculiar distressed colours. In all truth, I think my work owed its peculiarities to the fact I did not know what I was doing and anyhow had just started smoking pot, whereas the modern idiom seems to owe an awful lot to a desperate desire to be different — and hence ending up turning out the same mediocre rubbish as everyone else who is also trying to be different.

But what can we do about it?

Amateurs like myself learn most of what they know from numerous tutorials on the web and from looking at a lot of pictures.  And I mean a lot of pictures. (Thank you, Flickr.)  While this certainly helps, it doesn’t offer a base that formal education provides.  And if formal education is getting worse by the year, where is the hope?  Where can one go to learn the “real stuff”?

Huge face

Somebody mentioned to me that I must have a huge face, since it’s not fitting anywhere.  Examples to the argument were the header image of this site and my avatar, which I use on many web sites.  To you, sir, I say – you’re wrong.  The About page of this site features a picture with a full face o’mine.  Thank you for the smile. :)