Photographing people often requires a completely different bag of tricks comparedto photographing landscapes or static objects. As someone who personally loves taking candid shots, it’s taken me a lot of practice to get used to working with models in such a way that I get the perfect look and feel I want for my photo shoots every time. If you’re Continue Reading
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“Whatever kind of victory all those protests achieved, it wasn’t one for consumer rights — if anything, Instagram is the real winner here. The company just managed to score a round of positive press for retracting an unpopular change and give itself the ability to actually use photos in ads.” — Nilay Patel, The Verge
Over at the Verge Nilay Patel makes a case that the backlash earlier this week against Instagram’s unpopular TOS update was actually a loss for consumers not a gain. He argues that Instagram’s current TOS is broader than their more explicit proposed one and so consumers are worse off, not better off. Because Instagram technically still holds the rights to sell your photos under their current TOS, and even more broadly, the consumer backlash was misguided and really did more harm than good.
I disagree with Nilay and feel that actually this week’s backlash was one of the more significant movements yet for photo sharing on the web.
It’s not that Facebook (whose TOS is equally broad) and Instagram couldn’t legally sell your photos on the web under their broad TOS in the past or in the future, it’s more that *politically* it is now far more difficult for them to begin selling your photos out from under you on the web using their broader TOS.
Who cares what the TOS says, the message that Facebook got loud and clear this week is not to f*** with your photos. Your photos are important. You care about them. They are much more personal to you than Facebook may have previously considered. They have emotional importance and significance and collectively your users will rise up and bash you in the face if you try to exercise terms of your TOS that your lawyers have allowed you to screw around with photos. Whatever your future monetization strategies might be, they will not be based on a loss of control over OUR creative efforts — even our duckface creative efforts.
No, there is no question about it. Instagram lost this week and they lost big. This is in no way a positive for Instagram. People trust them less and they had to turn around and eat crow, they gained nothing.
Flickr won big at Instagram’s expense and Google+ won a little. Flickr won more because like Instagram their site is 100% about photography. They also just released a pretty awesome new iPhone app that is in fact even slickr than what Instagram currently offers.
Flickr also went out of their way last year to really drive home the ownership rights of your photos. This old forgotten post was revived with new life as a stark contrast to what it felt like Instagram was trying to pull. Kevin Systrom eventually even had to parrot back some of that “yes, we know your photos are your photos” stuff in his awkward non-apology apology.
Dan Lyons wrote a post that talked about Google+ winning some here too. Google+ smartly has a provision in their TOS that specifically limits their rights to your photos to basic operational use. Google+ is probably the most active community of photographers on the web today and are a natural beneficiary from what Lyons’ refers to as “Facebook Greedheads.”
The biggest winner or all though was you, the photographer. Whatever Instagram’s original intention was in being more specific in their TOS, it backfired on them. The idea that they could/would profit off your emotionally significant photos without your consent, authorization or most important, sharing the dough, hit a nerve with photographers and likely won’t be tried again by anyone in a long, long time.
The thing is, this didn’t have to be such a painful learning experience for Instagram. There was/is in fact a HUGE opportunity for some smart social media property make a ton of money off of your photos, Instagram just went about it wrong.
As much as Flickr’s deal with Getty sucks (photographers get a miserly 20% payout) photographers on Flickr still went bonkers for it when Flickr released it. The idea that you could actually get PAID to post your photos on a social network, paid ANYTHING, had most users on Flickr clamoring to get into the program, not out of the site.
Even though Flickr/Getty’s call for artists group is now closed (due to overwhelming demand) almost 90,000 photographers joined this group hoping to get selected by Getty for the right to sell their photos for the paltry 20% payout.
The difference with Flickr’s deal though was that 1. you CHOOSE to opt in and 2. at least you got paid something.
What if instead of Instagram saying, “hey, we might sell your photos without your consent and pay you NOTHING,” they said, “hey, do you want to sell your Instagram photos and if we sell them for you split the money 50/50″? Instead of losing accounts and becoming the scourge of the internet for three days, they would have had photographers rushing to sign up and begin marketing their images on their site.
Although there are sites out there like 500px and SmugMug that let you sell your photos now, Flickr is the only larger social network that has a selling program. Google+, Instagram, Facebook, even Twitter, all have a major opportunity to become the first large social network to allow us to license our images through their service and share in the revenue with them. This is a multi-BILLION dollar industry dominated at present by Getty who is not paying creatives enough for their work. What the internet does best is get rid of middlemen when they are being unreasonable, and an 80/20 split with photographers is unreasonable.
Instead of stealing our work and paying us zero, how about using your significant reach in reputation, marketing and search to partner with us and empower us to sell our work together. I guarantee you that whoever comes up with the best program first has some of the best photography on the web flooding your network. Even if 99% of us never sell a single photo, simply giving us the feeling that we have the opportunity to sell a photo would be a powerful incentive to get us active and humming on your network.
Thomas Hawk Digital Connection
Coldplay London Emirates Stadium 1 June 2012 Last 3 songs of the day: Clocks, Fix You, Every Teardrop is a Waterfall Apologies for the shaky camera work – I was not permitted to shoot as I was holding “an oversized camera”, so I had be a bit more discrete than I wished. Hope you could still get a bit of the atmosphere and enjoy the live music despite the bad quality. Shot with Nikon D800 with 24-120/4
To learn more click here — bit.ly — To take a DEEP DIVE into how wings work! Click here to tweet DeepDive2 bit.ly I hope you never look at a bird in flight the same way again. I know I won’t! Artist Info: Sarah Xu, a student at the Vancouver Film School made the awesome introduction Drawing. captainpillow.blogspot.ca Gordon, the guy in charge of “Scary Parrot Monsters” at the end of the video wrote this song. It’s called “Black Rhino”… and is available for download online: ashellinthepit.bandcamp.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How to get there yourself!: I coordinated the travel with Rainforest Expeditions www.perunature.com Tell them Destin sent you. You can checkout what they do on their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/Rainforest.Expeditions They ran me up and down the river in a boat, gave me lenses, a clean bed, awesome food etc. It was pretty amazing! See the research project’s website here: macawproject.org The project is led by Dr. Don Brightsmith Schubot Exotic Bird Health Center Department of Veterinary Pathobiology College of Veterinary Medicine Jeff Cremer was my hook-up for all things photography once I got on site. He’s very good at technical photography and is more than capable of handling anything you can throw at him. Check out his chops and tell him Destin sent you: bit.ly ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SMARTER EVERY DAY – DEEP DIVE #2 How Bird Wings Work – Smarter Every Day bit.ly How Wings Work — A reference for creature props bit.ly How do …
A Still Image from the Movie “The Night Porter“
SO much is going on that I barely have time for anything other than taking care of what’s right in front of me. David had surgery last week, all is good there, he’s recovering nicely. We’re packing up our house, downsizing for the move to NYC! You never realize how much stuff you accumulate until you move! We’ve got a lot of exciting things going on with the Blog that I can’t exactly share just yet, but I think you’ll all be pretty stoked when the news breaks! And I have been working: I shot an ad campaign last month for some nice $$. I shot another Harper’s Bazaar Arabia editorial, this time I shot the cover too! Have an editorial coming out in KURV Magazine in Australia that I’ll blog about once that hits the newsstands and my portfolio now officially is in NYC full time and won’t come be in my possession again until I’m living there! It’s been called in about once a week to various advertising clients and magazines. The transition is going smoothly but it’s non-stop work! AND, we’ll be back in NYC this weekend for our first ever NYC Seminar! We’re shooting at Drive In Studios in Chelsea and we have a great group of people coming that I’m really excited to meet and work with! Damian Monzillo, my brother from another mother, soul friend and hair stylist extraordinaire will be doing the hair for the seminar! He rocks the Universe with his hair, he’s that good! And he’s MY official hair stylist, giving me those razor sharp bangs, my signature trademark. One thing that makes me so happy to be moving to NYC is that Damian lives there! We have such a passion for inspiring work and we love collaborating so my excitement for the move is doubled by knowing Damian will be along side me on the crazy ride that NY surely will be!
Inspiration! I get asked what inspires me almost every day! Most people ask what blogs I follow and they’re disappointed to find out that I don’t really follow any other photographer’s blogs. I follow fashion blogs like Fashionista but I don’t subscribe to any photographer’s blogs. I don’t really check out too much photography either because I get my inspiration from my life experience much of the time. I know I have to keep current with the trends, fashion moves forward with every season and keeping up to date with what’s NOW is really important. Even fashion photography has it’s trends and of course I have to keep up to date with those trends as well. But I don’t sit on other photographer’s blogs reading about photography. If I really am honest here, and I know you appreciate this blog because I’m honest, I get my lighting inspiration from movies. I learn lighting from watching cinematography. I found the cinema before I found the camera. And I was completely hooked from a young age.
A Still Image from the Movie “Chinatown“
My parents were one of the first in our neighborhood to get cable TV. Yeah, way back in the day! We had ON TV. It was one of the first cable TV providers. ON TV had foreign films on it, late at night of course because they were “risque”. I was about 15 years old and couldn’t sleep one night so I was up watching cable and this film came on by Bernardo Bertolucci called La Luna. The story line was pretty racy: a mother and son’s “distorted” relationship involving heroin and opera! Epic drama! But the lighting! I could’ve watched this film with the sound turned off because the visual imagery was so moving. Vittorio Storaro was the cinematographer on La Luna and his work has since then captivated me. He’s lit such other epic films as “Reds“, “The Conformist“, “Last Tango in Paris“, and my personal favorite, “Apocalypse Now“. Who can forget the richness of lighting in that film?? The Robert Duvall scene where he made his troops go surfing during a bombing. Or the deleted scene where Martin Sheen has an affair with the French opium addict. The lighting in the bedroom of that scene sits in the archives in my brain as “go-to” lighting monumental moments!
Shortly after I was transfixed by Bertolucci and his beloved Storaro, I saw a picture in the LA Times advertising a film by Francois Truffaut: “Small Change“. I fell in the love with the picture in the ad and begged my mom to drop me off at the local Landmark theater in Pasadena, The Rialto. The Rialto played all the foreign films on the big screen. I went by myself and sat and watched “Small Change” and “The 400 Blows” by Truffaut. And I was hooked. I went as often as my mom would drop me off to that little theater on Fair Oaks. I soaked it in. I was 16 when I first saw “Last Tango in Paris” and I nearly fell out of my chair. Ha!! But it was the lighting, mainly, in these films that really moved me. And it’s the lighting that still does really move me when I watch a film. And to be even more honest, I can forgive a movie for it’s weak story line or tepid characters if the lighting is profound. In other words, I will watch a movie deemed by the critics as “bad” if the lighting is interesting.
Still Image from the Movie “A Very Long Engagement“
Below is a SMALL list of the 10 movies that have made an impact on me as a photographer. This list is small because there are 100′s of movies that have inspired me. They’ve inspired my lighting, my aesthetic, my sensibility, my eye. Some of them have even inspired me in the way I shoot fashion. I’d love to hear what movies have inspired you as photographers. If I haven’t seen it yet, I will check it out because I am always looking for movies that help direct and guide me on my path of learning and growing as a photographer. ?
I had to keep this list short! There isn’t enough room or time (or memory in my own mind) to create a list of every movie that has ever moved me. But the above list is a start. Now I want to hear what films have inspired YOU!
Fashion Photography Blog – A Resource for Fashion Photographers, Created by One.
Tired of recipients claiming they don’t receive your e-mail? Force all e-mail to come with a delivery and/or read receipt request.
If you’re concerned that your e-mail sent with Microsoft Outlook 2007 is not reaching its destination, you can configure the software to request read and/or delivery receipts on every e-mail sent.
Note that delivery and read receipts will only be sent by software programs that support them, such as Outlook and Outlook Express. Also note that some people may have receipts disabled in Outlook, so you won’t receive confirmations from them….
Read more at MalekTips.
New Computer and Technology Help and Tips – MalekTips.Com
Obtaining correct exposure for your digital photographs really isn't all that difficult given that the entire process can be automated; but there are circumstances when proper exposure can be tricky.
Digital Photography Tips: How to get Correct Exposure and Avoid Blurry Photos in Low Light. from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.
Exposure is more than just regulating the amount of light that passes through your camera's lens and onto the digital sensor. Depth of field is controlled by the F stop setting and the …
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