Photographer Simon Norfolk at Derby’s Quad
Photographer Simon Norfolk is speaking at Derby’s Quad gallery on 19 November 2009 at 6.30 pm. book now to avoid disappointment £3
Keywording is Scary…Official
With the global decline is media due to advertising budgets being cut, it is no surprise that many photographers are finding that commissions are becoming harder to get. This has meant that freelancers have started to look more at the photography stock as a way of earning additional income to fill the gap.
But selling stock is a bit of a mine field when you start as your images have to have keywords (tags) so search engines can find your images and this keywording is a skill in its own right; well it is if you want to sell the image.
You can obviously get some one to do it for you but this costs, it also takes time and in a recession you need to taking care of clients, finding assignments and not keywording hundreds of photos.
There is help though, if not in a scary way from Imense and there Annotator which can read the image and add the relevant keywords, so why is it scary? Well it is surprising to see that a computer/software can pick out how many people are in a picture, decide on their ethnicity read the background and the list goes on, this is a technology that will probably get better in the future and has obvious surveillance applications in addition to being a photographers tool.
Although I have not tried the system I did think it was a tad pricey as the top level package is the one that is needed and at the moment the pound is week against the dollar, so is costing a lot more than normal…result of the recession.
New York going the same as the UK?
Well it looks like the Police in New York are looking to the same draconian laws that snappers in the UK are in fear off according to the New York Post.
You may think that no one has been stopped yet under the new terrorism act and photography but that is not the case.
When I was covering the Put People First march in London (a few days before the G20 protests) I saw a a police sergeant and a snapper; the policeman was ordering him to delete the images on is camera, I tried to intervene and was threatened with arrest for obstructing an police officer. The snapper had just photographed some police waiting near their vans at Marble Arch.
The Bicycle Wheel
In a previous post I referred to the slope of the bath tub which was an analogy for proving your photographic gear. Of course the wise will do heavy testing at all ISO and lighting conditions to work out how the sensor records details in the shadows as well as the highlights. They will also test their lenses for sharpness, flaws and find the optimum aperture for it and so the testing goes on.
So back to the bicycle wheel; This is another analogy that relates to the business side of photography or outside services that you use, like printing, webhosting etc.
My webhosts recently disappeared from the face of the world wide web, reasons unstated. This left me with my personal websites vanishing, my 5 domains pointing to nowhere and a drop in email service and all just into the credit crunch, so my survival rate with clients going to empty 404 pages and email bouncing back must have thought I had gone bust in the doom and gloom of yet another recession.
This left me with at least a couple of weeks solid mess to clean up at a time when I was just to busy.
It would be easy to lay blame at the host, but my friend and photography buddy was notified of the closure ages ago, (oh yes the sod gloated about it as well…big time) with tools to move websites and domains to cause as little disruption as possible. Now for some time I have realised that I was not getting service notifications direct, for some years in fact and despite changing my email on there control panel, no joy. so this was a loose spoke in a wheel; as it happens it was not the first.
You see that spoke came undone because of another spoke, my ISP years ago was Wanadoo; who I had no problems with but for some reason, were taken over by Orange who decided they were not big enough as a mobile phone company and could play at being an internet service provider. It was these who gave me problems with service; so much so I ended up requesting the MAC code (several times and without internet) and switched and bang goes my ISP email with Wanadoo. Cancelled as I told Orange where to stuff there awful service, and not in a polite terms either.
Now what I did not realise at the time was that my email for the webhost was now dead and although I changed it in the control panel there was no way to verify/authenticate the change so this was the first loose spoke, which led to the second loose spoke, before the wheel became broken.
In the past I have remedied an alternative services because of poor service on an online archival system. I ditched them after 6 months because their servers went down and the backup failed; it took weeks for them to restore service and it was at a time when I needed to get images to a client urgently.
Indecently, it was a right move as before Christmas they went under leaving hundreds of photographers and agencies stranded. In comparison my current archive people have not been down once, since 2005 (or as far as I know, before then when I joined) Yes I pay a little more, but it is at least one weight off my mind, and the service is one to one via a phone, with people who know a lot about the photography business, so the advice extends beyond the archive. If I need help with a difficult pricing job I can phone them for advice, their success is my success as they see it!
There are lessons here of course:
- If a company niggles away at you because of poor service, ditch them, it makes you out as being un-professional and one day will catch you out.
- The other is to use an online webmail like Google, Yahoo etc for your logins and system notifications, that way regardless of your ISP it will always be available.
Remember a loose spoke puts the rim out of line, and other spokes will become loose or break, so when you notice a loose spoke….fix it
Winning Photographer Photographs Economic Hardship and Needs Work
Anthony Suau wins the World Press Photo for a second time for a photograph illustrating the current economic hardship – but the real story is that he had to persuade Time to run the photographs, and that he admits that he has only had one commission in the last two months
New Photography Challanges!
Fotdmike, has put up an interesting article about the current new law on photography which sums it all up rather well in showing its short comings and how easy it could be to fall foul of a ridiculous new law.
We’ re all up in arms about it
As from Monday last, 16th February, a new bit of legislation came into effect… Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008.
The event seems to have passed without too much notice being taken of it. By members of the general public that is.
Not so photographers. More specifically, photojournalists and other photog types who specialise in taking photographs at protests, demonstrations and suchlike.
Read More over at Adventures of an Idiot – ocassional ramblings of a photography freak
Photography Festival in Derby
Format 09 is due to start next week in Derby with a great line up of photographers from artists and documentary practitioners Check the website for more info www.formatfestival.com
Documenting Urban Exploration
For quite a while now I have been wanting to do a project looking at how a industry has changed the landscape and the community. For example, In north Wales they had the slate quarrying which employed some 3,000 workers at one quarry, some workers lived in cold and damp barracks because the quarries were high in the hills and away from the established villages; some even had to walk 20 miles on a Monday morning to start work. The waste slate tipped on the hills and remains are still visible today; but such an industry had its price, the workers suffered more deaths than working coal, and many died of lung disease from the dust of the slate as well as TB.
Myself and my friend were looking at the old Friar Gate station the other day and it is hard to see such a beautiful building going into decay, but the roads around have pretty much made it aloof on the landscape, hardly noticed by most derby folk, further some buildings are going to be demolished near to it to make way for a new road that nobody seems to want.
Researching such a topic that fits my documentary and photographic interest is not easy, especially if you don’t want to travel far and stay in your locality so to my surprise while searching for a Derbyshire villages history I found two great sites Urban Assault and Derelict Places which has a wealth of info from across the country.
These Urban Explorers often have to gain entry in unorthodox way just so the history can be documented, as getting permission is nigh impossible these days, so well done to all the explorerers of derelict places and thanks for documenting our history, nice one… I think I have found my project 
Anyone can be a Journalist
Reports from the attack on Mumbai have been sent in by Citizen Journalists (CJ’s) and picked up by the mainstream media using ‘Twitter‘ but it has not all been good news with the reporting:
- Rumours that terrorists were using it to communicate what/where the police were doing proved to be false.
- The police had to ask for CJ’s not to report information at sensitive times that where part of the operation, in case the terrorists were picking up the ‘tweet’s’
- A further slowing of the information channels was the fact that a lot of the tweets were just re broadcasting the news that had come from the main stream media and re-posting already broken news; this re-posted news has to be shifted through by journalists though to find the real news.
As yet there is little in the way of this service for photographers to send in images that will go out on an open news wire, yes there is Flickr and ShoZu that sort of does that, but not as easy as Twitter with a mobile phone.
The biggest concern to me is that again, we have the malicious rumours that terrorists are using Twitter service that was flagged up ages ago by the FBI as a possible threat.
With the new amended terrorist laws coming out in the UK any time now that could limit photography in public places and that the government ministers want the DA notices (previously known as D notices) to be enforceable to protect sensitive information being published in the press (leaked documents etc.)
Freedom of speech is seriously going to get undermined, authorities are just waiting for twitter users to stuff up in a big enough way to get the service shut down!
Now that anyone can be a twitter user, it would not be hard to deliberately sabotage the Twitter service
See Forbes: Mumbai Twitters Moment (full of distracting adverts! Do they really want you to read this?)
A difficult job…Chaos outside Taj hotel
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/11/27/sidner.bpr.live.shot.chaos.cnn
CNN’s Sara Sidner describes the chaos outside the Taj Majal hotel as bystanders began to disrupt her live shot
