Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

I was disappointed to read a post that Paul Buchheit posted on FriendFeed today regarding recently passed legislation in the UK which might make it illegal to photograph the police there. The article, from Prison Planet, cites the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 as containing the relevant legislation:

From Prison Planet:

“According to the British Journal of Photography, the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which is set to become law on February 16, “allows for the arrest and imprisonment of anyone who takes pictures of officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.” The punishment for this offense is imprisonment for up to ten years and a fine.

However, even before the passage of the legislation, police in Britain have already been harassing and arresting fully accredited press photographers merely for taking pictures of them at rallies and protests.”

In the UK, the section of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 that deals with this is in section 76, where it states that it will now be a crime to “elicit, publish or communicate” information about members of armed forces etc.

From the legislation:

“(1) A person commits an offence who—

(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been—

(i) a member of Her Majesty’s forces,

(ii) a member of any of the intelligence services, or

(iii) a constable,”

While I’m still not exactly 100% sure what “ellicting and publishing information” about members of the police might entail, I could certainly see the issue being raised where an officer was identifiable, perhaps even with their name on their uniform. In any event, it certainly would seem to give the police more ammunition, so to speak, to be able to use when asking photographers not to photograph them.

This legislation would appear to be yet another chilling move by the UK in encouraging harassment of photographers. Last year you might remember that the London Metropolitan Police launched a very public advertising campaign asking people to turn in “odd” looking photographers.

Retaining our rights to photograph the police is important. Whether the Rodney King case or the more recent case of BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle’s killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland, it is important that as citizens we be allowed to record the day to day activities of our police officers. Police officers wield an incredible amount of power over the general citizenry in our day to day lives. Being able to record their activities (as certainly they record ours) is an important right and power in ensuring that they handle their own power with the responsibility with which they should.

This law in the UK is unfortunate. It further muddies the water for what photographers can and can’t photograph with regards to the police and further paves the way for police officers to harass photographers. While the law seems to be targeted towards people who would photograph the police with the intention of using it for terrorism, I could easily see how it could be used by any police officer to try and stop photographers from photographing them. I would much rather have seen wording in this legislation that specifically said that regular citizens have every and all rights to photograph the police at any time.

I’ve taken a lot of photographs of the police here in the U.S. You can see my photoset “Cops” here.

I had the opportunity to hang out a bit with Natalie Dybisz (pictured left) last summer at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit in Seattle. Natalie also goes by Miss Aniela on Flickr and has some really interesting self portrait work among other things. Natalie’s coming to town next week and hosting four photowalks sponsored by Microsoft, Samy’s Camera and Eye-Fi. I think it’s pretty cool to see some of these companies getting involved with sponsoring photowalks.

I’m planning on showing up and shooting at the Ferry Building Photowalk on Monday night at 6:30pm. If you live or are visiting San Francisco on Monday, come on out and shoot for a while. It should be an interesting group of photographers and a great way to catch up in person. I’m not sure where the walk from the Ferry Building will be headed, but the Ferry Building itself is very photogenic and there’s lots of interesting things to shoot around the downtown area there. Here’s a link to my set of images from the Ferry Building. Hopefully there will be beer involved at some point later in the evening

I set up an upcoming event page for Monday night’s walk if you can make it and want to RSVP here.

The other four walks that Natalie is hosting in the Bay Area will be in Berkeley on Monday afternoon, at the USS San Francisco Memorial on Tuesday morning and another walk up in the Haight on Tuesday aftternoon.

In addition to the four Bay Area photowalks Natalie is doing, she’s also hosting two additional photowalks down in Los Angeles on Wednesday as well. I’ve shot at both Union Station and the Santa Monica Pier in L.A. and think both are fantastic places to shoot. Time and details for all the photowalks below:

Berkeley – Eastbay/Berkeley Photowalk
Date: Monday, February 2
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:30pm
Place: UC Botanical Garden, Berkeley

Ferry Building – San Francisco Photowalk
Date: Monday, February 2
Time: 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Place: Ferry Building entrance, San Francisco

USS San Francisco Memorial – San Francisco Photowalk
Date: Tuesday, February 3
Time: 7:30am to 9:00am
Place: USS San Francisco Memorial, San Francisco

The Panhandle to Haight Ashbury – San Francisco Photowalk
Date: Tuesday, February 3
Time: 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Place: Meet at Oak and Cole, San Francisco

Union Station – Los Angeles Photowalk
Date: Wednesday, February 4
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Place: N. Los Angeles St., Union Station, Los Angeles

Santa Monica Pier – Santa Monica Photowalk
Date: Wednesday, February 4
Time: 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Place: out on the end of the Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica

Recently I blogged about a new project that I am starting called $2 portraits. The idea is that I will offer $2 to anyone who asks me for money from now on in exchange for their portrait.

Earlier this evening I went up to shoot some “Adios Douchebag” George Bush graffiti that I’d seen earlier this morning by the off ramp from the Bay Bridge from my carpool on the way to work. When I got to the graffiti I ran into Johnny.

Johnny was sitting immediately below the George Bush graffiti and asked me for money. I told Johnny about my $2 portrait project. Johnny told me that I could take his portrait as long as he got to keep his sunglasses on. I said that that would be fine and took a few shots of him. Johnny kept his sunglasses and tie on, but he had his shoes off.

I asked Johnny if he voted for President, and he said back to me, “Me, nahhhh, people like me don’t vote for the President. We’re the underclass.” While I was shooting Johnny he asked me if two women on each of his arms would look good. I told him I thought they would and he laughed.

I asked Johnny where he slept and he said out at the bank. I asked him what bank and he told me that he couldn’t tell me but that it was one of the 1,400 banks out there with a wide gesture of his hand.

I asked Johnny if he was from here and he said he was from all over. I asked him if he had a favorite place to live in the world and he said, all over man, all over.

Finally I asked Johnny what his favorite song was and this time I struck a chord. Without skipping a beat Johnny immediately shouted out “Neil Sedaka!” and with that began belting out the song. “Ooooooo, I hear laughter in the rain, walking hand in hand with the one I love, Oooooo, how I love the rainy days, And the happy way I feel inside.”

Johnny had a great voice. After he sang for me a bit I gave Johnny his $2. He said thank you brother and held up a fist for me to bump him back with instead of a handshake. I gave him the bump with my fist and then headed on out my way.

This one’s for Johnny.

This sea of heartbreak.

Sometimes you get a happy accident. I forgot to resize this photo for my blog and WordPress distorted it for me. I’ve left it distorted because I kind of like the effect. Click through to see the undistorted version of this photograph.

One of the things that continuously pisses me off to no end is how capriciously and callously Flickr goes about deleting accounts with no warning. The latest example comes from Flickr user Shéhérazade. After paying for a Flickr Pro account and uploading photos to a stream on Flickr that had been visited over 150,000 times, Shéhérazade found that one day her account was in her words, “deleted without any reason or warning.” According to Shéhérazade, when she tried to contact Flickr about the problem, “Terrence” from the Flickr Censorship Bureau (FCB) told her that her account had been deleted because it included photos that had not been taken by her.

Although at first Shéhérazade had said that all of the photos in her stream were taken by her, she later admitted that 10 of the photos in her stream were not taken by her. But it turns out that, according to Shéhérazade, those 10 photos were actually of her from a model session that she participated in and she claimed that she had rights to them as the model being photographed. Now apart from whether or not Shéhérazade actually has legal rights to those photos, what pisses me off here is just that Flickr without warning continues deleting user accounts.

To make matters worse, when Flickr deletes your account it really is gone. There’s no going back. It’s permanently deleted. Gone forever. There’s no undo. There’s no, “I’m sorry we accidentally pressed the delete button.” Not only are all your photos gone, but thousands of comments left by users throughout the site are also permanently gone. Same goes for images that they delete from your account, like they’ve done to me in the past.

Anyways, so Shéhérazade gets pissed of course. You would be too if your Flickr account were deleted. So she does what anyone might do, she goes to the Flickr Help Forum to express her dissatisfaction over this and try to get some sort of response from Flickr (see screenshot above).

It should be noted that some of Shéhérazade’s photos were of a shall we say “adult” nature. But all of her photos had been correctly marked as “restricted” by her pursuant to the Flickr rules.

So her response back from Flickr? Well the only response she got back in the help forum was a rudely worded message from Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ locking the thread.

Here first response she got back was:

“Apologies… I’ve been battling a cold and a little less observant that normal. This topic is way over heated. I’m going to close it for 24 hours to let people chill out. I would ask that once the topic is re-opened that we dial back the name calling and ugliness towards members and the team.”

but before the thread could be reopened, Champ then posted this follow up message:

“I’ve gone back and had the opportunity to read through the back and forth. While it might serve to continue to further the discussion, I think that attitude of the OP isn’t something that I want to give a further venue to. I think it would be better served via 1:1 Help by Email. As such, I’m closing this puppy permanently.”

Now this doesn’t really surprise me. In fact in my own thread the other day where I complained about five of my images being censored (a museum painting, a sculpture from Beverly Hills, and some screenshots critical of Flickr) that thread ended up locked as well (but at least I got Flickr to agree to uncensor 4 of my 5 censored photos).

But the point is this. Flickr should NOT be permanently deleting anyone’s account. Especially a paid account. And especially without warning. In the event that Flickr really feels that they need to delete an account, I think that they owe it to their customers to first engage in a dialog about the images. Were there images in Shéhérazade’s account that were not hers? Maybe. But maybe a perfectly reasonable explanation was that she was the model in the photos and had permission to use them.

Are there photos in your Flickrstream that are not yours? I know that I have a few photos in my stream that are not mine. For instance, this photo of me can’t possibly have been taken by me because I’m only about 6 months old and clearly was in no position to handle a camera in 1968. Should I deserve to have my Flickr account deleted without warning for this?

Shéhérazade set up a new account on Flickr and posted a single black image in protest of her account deletion a few days ago and the image already has 106 comments on the image, mostly all expressing how much they will miss her work on Flickr.

“Kodachrome. They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.”

Well everyone has known for years that the move from film photography to digital photography would not be good for Kodak. But after cutting about half their work force in the past four years it looks like still more job cuts may be in the cards for Kodak in the near future. From Bloomberg:

“To see any sort of meaningful turnaround, they have to get costs way more in line with their peers,” Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Erik Kolb said in an interview. “That means cutting jobs, cutting anything wherever they can.”

Kodak sliced its projected 2008 operating profit in half in October and withdrew the forecast altogether in December. The moves have caused some investors and analysts to doubt the success of Chief Executive Officer Antonio Perez’s overhaul that eliminated 28,000 jobs by the time it ended in 2007. “

Since Eastman Kodak’s (ticker EK) high of a little over $90 per share over a decade ago, the stock now is down about 92% to $7.17 per share. The once great company that once was a part of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average was removed from that Index in 2004. Despite a significant initiative to move from a film business to a digital business made by the company over the past few years, the question that still lingers is can the company survive even the next few years ahead.

Especially given a bad economy right now, things will be even more difficult for the company which was already facing considerable challenges. Quite a different world than when George Eastman first invented roll film back in 1885.

On a related note, from the NY Times: “Polaroid Fans Try Making New Film for Old Cameras.”

Update: It looks like Kodak is in fact going to be laying off another 4,500 workers, per reports out today.

I just got done listening to Yahoo’s quarterly analyst conference call. Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new CEO, gave a rundown on what we should expect in the quarter ahead and took her first round of questions from Wall Street analysts. There will of course be plenty of financial analysis on the web about both their quarterly performance and her first analyst call as CEO, so I’m not going to get into much of that here except to say that I did think it was interesting that she mentioned “micro blogging” at one point in the call and that makes me wonder if Yahoo might be interested in buying Twitter or FriendFeed.

One of the things that I was struck by on today’s call though is that my favorite Yahoo property Flickr was not mentioned a single time, not once, nada, nilch, it’s like they didn’t even exist. Many of Yahoo’s other properties were mentioned of course, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, etc. — she even mentioned Buzz. But the word Flickr was not uttered a single time on the entire call.

Analysts asked questions about Facebook and myspace and Bartz even mentioned at one point that one of her daughters wasn’t as interested in posting pictures to Facebook any more as she was now more interested in reading Yahoo Finance etc. Posting photos on Facebook? Why not Flickr? There were many points in the call that it would have been appropriate for Bartz to mention Flickr, but she didn’t. Which to me was a bit disappointing. Especially given that Alexa rates Flickr as the 23rd most visited English internet site in the world. Certainly well ahead of almost every other property that Yahoo owns.

But then I got to thinking more. Maybe Bartz just doesn’t know about Flickr. Maybe she’s just not familiar with it. So I did a search for her on Flickr to see if I could find an account for her to add her as a friend, maybe she just needs me as her friend on Flickr. The closest thing I could come up with on Flickr for Bartz was this account. Unfortunately, if this account (screenshot above) is actually Carol’s account, well, then it’s no wonder she’s not familiar with Flickr, she doesn’t seem to use the account at all. The account has no avatar, is sharing no public photos, has no testimonials, has no contacts — heck, the account isn’t even a paid Pro account.

Now there is a chance of course that this account is not Carol’s. That it belongs to some other Carol Bartz and that she has some other sort of handle on flickr like hotmama28787, but then again maybe not.

Now I’m not suggesting that every CEO needs to “dogfood” their own company products. But as one of the most trafficked and highest profile Yahoo property, I certainly think it makes some amount of sense for her to use Flickr, or at least to have a halfway presentable account on the site. Everybody has photos right? Even if she didn’t want to share photos of her kids or her dog or things like that, she could at least share a few photos that she’s snapped of flowers or sunsets, no?

On the analyst call she talked a bit about how Yahoo’s traffic had spiked during the inauguration. What a great opportunity for her to have plugged Flickr and mention that some of the best photos of the entire event came from Flickr, Yahoo’s users. Instead she didn’t, and I think that’s too bad.

By the way, one thing that Bartz did say over and over again on today’s earnings call was that she hoped to make Yahoo successful by having a “maniacal focus on our users and their experience.” She used the words maniacal many times and it seemed to be a focus of hers. In the spirit of this maniacal focus on my own experience, I’d like to offer my own comment as a very heavy user of one of Yahoo’s top properties, Flickr (which I hope she and her daughters join and are active on the future).

Carol, if you want to focus on *my* user experience on Flickr, the best thing that you could do is to have Flickr stop censoring my images. Oh, and it would be nice if Yahoo would agree to notify users if their photos on Flickr are censored in the future. That’s all for now. Carry on with the new job as CEO and dropkicking friggin’ ass.

I took the shot above at Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery. I love cemeteries and spend lots of time exploring them. They are like parks to me. Mountain View Cemetery is within walking distance from my house and is one of the places that I shoot most regularly. I love wandering around the cemetery there with my kids, watching them play, wondering about the people who lived the lives buried there. A single one line entry on a tombstone seems so little to give someone for an entire life of living — and even then only the simplest of phrases “Thomas Hill, California Artist.” Turns out there’s a lot more to Thomas Hill than just that. He was making amazing paintings of Yosemite before Ansel Adams was ever even born.

I wonder about the other people buried in Mountain View and other cemeteries. We have no Pharaohs anymore, no King Tuts. It seems like even the grandest of figures in life oftentimes are ignored in death. Recently I visited William Randolph Hearsts grave at Cypress Lawn in Colma. It took me a long time to find it. The tomb is large as far as tombs go and impressive, but nowhere near something that you’d think about for the man who built Hearst’s castle.

When I was down in Los Angeles I went by one “Henry Charles Bukowski Jr.’s” grave at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. Bukowski got more than just a single line on his tombstone. Along with his nickname “Hank” he’s got an etching of a fighter, with the words “Don’t Try.” Somehow in his case that almost seemed appropriate.

When I visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I visited Lafayette Cemetery up in the tone Garden District of the City. My friend Anthony told me that the cemetery used to be full of great statuary but that thieves had stolen most of the great pieces there a few years back. After we visited the cemetery we walked around the Garden District. Anthony showed me Nick Cage’s house there. On his front lawn was one of the most beautiful sculptures I’d ever seen. I thought to myself that it probably came from a cemetery just like Lafayette cemetery, and thought about the irony of the rich having their graves robbed so that their statuary could adorn the lawns of movie stars.

If you like exploring cemeteries like I do, you might like this site “Find a Grave.”

My collection of cemetery images is one of my works in progress. I plan to visit as many cemeteries as I can and shoot them before I die. You can see my cemetery collection, “The World Belongs to the Living,” here.