""I was just gathering shots around the scene and then all of sudden heard a pop and felt something on my left back. And then the medic behind me, you don't got to be so jumpy. I said I just got hit by something. And I lifted up my shirt and he said you're bleeding and were shot by something," said Hankins.
Both photographers were taken to Methodist Hospital. Hankins has since been released.
The other person was a freelance photographer doing work for a township fire department. He is not severely hurt. Police say he was struck in the arm."
Police have arrested a suspect in the shooting, 30 year old Derek Matthews. (via Lost Remote).
I've been bitching a bit lately because I thought the $15 per month rate hike by AT&T on the new iPhones was a bit extreme, so I was pleased that maybe at least they were giving us back a little something in the form of free hotspot wifi access.
""AT&T knows Wi-Fi is hot, and free Wi-Fi even hotter, which is why we are proud to offer iPhone customers free access to the nation's largest Wi-Fi hot-spot network with more than 17,000 hot spots, including Starbucks. Now users can relax and access music, e-mail, and Web browsing services with their favorite blend in hand from the comfort of their favorite location.""
Turns out it was a big trick on iPhone users. PSYCHE!
Allow me to rewrite the message from AT&T:
"AT&T knows Wi-Fi is hot, and free Wi-Fi even hotter, which is why we are proud to offer iPhone customers free access to the nation's largest Wi-Fi hot-spot network with more than 17,000 hot spots, including Starbucks...
PSYCHE! Haha, suckaaaaa! April Fools!!!!!!!!!!! You idiots! Don't you know better than to believe what we post on our own friggin' website. You all are a bunch of L-O-S-E-R-S! You'll pay through the nose for our service AND YOU'LL LIKE IT! We rule! You SUCK!
Now users can NOT relax CAN NOT access music, CAN NOT access e-mail, and Web browsing services with their OVERPRICED blend in hand from the comfort of their favorite location. Of course you can still use our crappy Edge Nework service if you refuse to pay us $15 more per month by upgrading to a new phone and locking yourself into two more years of our supreme trickery!
digital Photography School is a fantastic blog and resource for articles on digital photography and especially for articles on ways that you can improve your digital photography.
This time they are out with 25 Great Photography Tutorials and Links From Around the Web.
He said: ‘The children wanted to go on an inflatable slide and I started taking photos of them having a good time. Moments later the woman running the slide told me to stop.
‘When I asked why, she told me I could not take pictures of other people’s children. I explained I was only interested in taking photos of my own children and pointed out that this was taking place in a public park.
‘I showed her the photos I had taken to prove my point. Then another woman joined in and said her child was also on the slide and did not want me taking pictures of the youngster.
‘I repeated that the only people being photographed were my own children. She said I could be taking pictures of just any child to put on the internet and called me a pervert. We immediately left the show.’
Mrs Crutchley, 37, a teaching support assistant and qualified nursery nurse, said: ‘I was shocked by the reaction of those women.
'It is very sad when every man with a camera enjoying a Sunday afternoon out in the park with his children is automatically assumed to be a pervert.’ "
Microsoft's 2008 Professional Photgraphy Summit and What Microsoft is Up to With Digital Photography
On Wednesday and Thursday last week I attended the Microsoft Professional Photography Summit at Microsoft's Conference Center in Redmond Washington. This was the third year that this invite only two day conference has taken place in Redmond.
One of the things that I was impressed by with this conference was that it really was product neutral. Although this first post is going to mostly be about Microsoft photo technology, most of the conference presenters were not affiliated with Microsoft and came from many of the leading companies in photography today -- Adobe, Getty Images, Canon, Epson and many other smaller photography related businesses all were involved in various presentations.
Additionally Microsoft brought many of the world's most outstanding professional photographers to speak at the conference including Franz Lanting, one of the top nature photographers working today and Melina Mara, a top photographer who works shooting politics for the Washington Post.
As part of the conference Robert Scoble and I were also able to spend some one on one time talking to Microsoft's Rich Media Group Directer Josh Weisberg, who also served as the event's moderator. Josh briefed Robert and I about a lot of the new things we have to look forward to from Microsoft with regards to photography.
There will be several upcoming posts coming out of this conference and a lot of the cool photography tech that I saw, but this post will focus mostly on what Microsoft is up to in the world of digital photography. Most of the presentations about Microsoft were done in 5 minute "Wow" sessions as part of the conference.
1. JPG XR. Microsoft is pushing ahead with the new JPG XR (formerly called HD Photo). Bill Crow, Group Manager, Microsoft Live Labs, talked about this new format and the standardization process that it is going through at present. JPG XR will not replace RAW and photographers who still want the post production flexibility of RAW will likely continue using it -- but JPG XR is being positioned as a replacement to today's lossy JPG format. JPG XR is a much superior format to the current JPG standard that exists in most digital cameras today. It supports lossy as well as lossless compression. JPG XR will likely replace JPG in the near future and provide digital SLR owners a better photo format. Additionally, you will likely begin seeing JPG XR files showing up in camera phones and point and shoots -- not as much for the higher quality but for the smaller image sizes of the format.
According to Josh Weisberg at Microsoft, although Microsoft will retain the patents associated with JPG XR, the standard will be license free for anyone to use.
The big question that remains is how quickly the major camera manufacturers will begin to adopt JPG XR. Chuck Westfall, Canon's Technical Advisor/Professional Products Marketing Division, was on a panel on Thursday and commented that Canon would "love to put JPG XR into our cameras." Chuck suggested that camera manufacturers would still keep their proprietary RAW formats but would like to adopt the more flexible and better quality JPG XR in the future to replace JPG.
2. Photosynth. Microsoft showcased the latest on it's Photosynth technology. The exciting thing about Photosynth is that the technology is poised to move from a Microsoft Research project to an actual user software offering later this year. Photosynth batches together your photos from a single location and stitches a collection of the 2D photos arranged and explored in a 3D organization based on the environment where the photos were taken.
Microsoft showed the video above at the conference from a recent episode of CSI NY where the technology was showcased. I asked if Microsoft had to pay "product placement" money to get that technology in the CSI NY episode and was told no.
As part of the Photosynth presentation Microsoft also showcased a real life example of where a bunch of photos from a baseball stadium that turned the stadium into a 3D showcase. The idea of the presentation was to show how easy Photosynths could be created from even a small batch of photos.
Microsoft's Channel 10 has a great video interview that covers more on the Photosynth technology and other Microsoft photo tech.
I hope that along with Photosynth that Microsoft builds some type of blog widget to embed these into blogs. This will be a very helpful new way to explore places around the planet.
3. Live Mesh. I enjoyed the talk by Microsoft's Jeremy Mazner about Microsoft's Live Mesh technology. Live Mesh has multiple applications in the world of photography. First, Microsoft is developing technology to allow you to use Live Mesh to synch your photos both with other people as well as with cloud storage. By allowing you to synch your photos in multiple places, this serves as an important backup and safeguard strategy.
Mazner also showcased Live Mesh technology that allowed you to literally control your PC through remote desktop connection and both transfer and edit photos remotely from the field. By being able to access your desktop PC remotely photographers will have greater processing power and other resources to edit photos than they might have on hand at a remote location. The technology allowed the different versions of your edited photos to synch to multiple locations and multiple devices after the editing was done.
There were several other technologies that Microsoft showcased as part of the conference including Windows Media Home Server (which I hope to test out myself soon), interesting dehazing photo processing technology, image deblurring technology that will help the more broader consumers take clearer photos, and a keynote talk by Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch.
Vaskevitch talked about the role that photos play for Microsoft. "The more emotional attachment people have to their photos, the better for Microsoft," said Vaskevitch. Although I was not expecting much information, I did ask Vaskevitch about Flickr and whether or not he thought it was a mistake for Microsoft not to buy Flickr back in the day. Vaskevitch said that deals like the Flickr buyout were complicated and that it was hard to know if it was a mistake or not, but he did call Flickr a "sharing phenomena." Of course with a Microsoft/Yahoo deal that seems to be on again / off again on a daily basis, it would be interesting to see what Microsoft might do with Flickr if they ever did end up owning it as part of a company merger.
As an aside, it was interesting to see how much Canon seems to dominate the Pro Photography market. At one point the mostly Pro photographer audience was asked how many used Canon and how many used Nikon and Canon had a much larger show of hands, by a landslide actually.
I also enjoyed talking one on one at a reception Wednesday night with Mary Kae McCullough, who as Microsoft's photo editor oversees all of the places that Microsoft buys stock photography. According to McCullough, even though stock agency Corbis is 100% owned by Bill Gates, this does not factor into where they buy their images. She told me that Microsoft buys lots of images from Corbis as well as Getty and also images directly from photographers themselves. McCullough said that Encarta used to be one of the top places that Microsoft bought stock photography for but that now MSN is one of the big buyers of stock photography as the images on their front page change frequently.
Another tool that was mentioned during the Summit was Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools. This is an excellent free application that you can use to keyword and geotag your photos at the file level. By adding this metadata into your photos *before* uploading to sites like Flickr or Zooomr, you save time and ensure that this valuable meta data is always kept with your original photo files.
I think the location that I enjoyed shooting most on my trip to Seattle last week was the Seattle Central Library. This library is a testament to contemporary architecture and design. I could spend weeks shooting just this one building -- it is my most favorite building I've ever photographed.
The building is 11 stories high with dramatic interior ceilings and color splashed throughout to complement the design. Bold red staircases, glowing yellow escalators, an ocean of green chairs, everywhere you go in this library you find more and more eye candy.
Reflections, shadows, glass, lighting that transforms with the day. This building seems made to be photographed -- seems designed for photographers. And best of all, not once in a very aggressive four hour or so shooting session there was I ever questioned about my photography in this very open and very public space.
Rem Koolhas was the architect who designed the space. A taxi cab driver that I met in Seattle told me that it cost the City $150 million to build it. According to wikipedia, in 2007, the building was voted #108 on the American Institute of Architects' list of Americans' 150 favorite structures in the US. And I can see why. It's comfortable, functional, and absolutely beautiful.
I've just started uploading some of the photos I took of the building (I suspect I'll have several hundred posted over time). If you want to follow my set of images of this grand structure you can check out this set here. The RSS feed for it is here. Seattle Central Library photos sorted by interestingness on Flickr here.
Update: thanks to Ole Begemann for referring me to this TED talk about the design of the Seattle Central Library.
Microsoft is out with an announcement today regarding a new alliance with Netflix where beginning in late Fall XBox 360 Gold Members will be able to stream "a growing library of more than 10,000 movies and TV episodes" to their XBox 360. In addition to an XBox 360 Gold Membership, users will also have to have a Netflix subscription.
Although I think that this offering might be interesting for people who don't have Media Center PCs, it is a bit discouraging for those who do have Media Center PCs. Personally I'm not interested in signing up for for an XBox 360 Gold Membership at $45 a year or so. I don't use XBox 360 live at all and don't have an interest in the service.
What's frustrating for me is that outside developers have already developed a free way to get Netflix "Watch Now" on your XBox 360 Media Center Extender here and now today without having to buy an XBox Live Gold Membership, but it's just been hamstrung by Microsoft DRM -- at least in my case.
I do think that Netflix Watch Now *should* be an offering on Media Center PCs. I just don't think people should be required to buy a Xbox 360 live gold subscription in order to get it.
I met Frederick earlier this morning at about 1:30 a.m. around the Pike Place Market area. I was wearing my headphones while shooting and he got in front of me and starting waving his hands to get my attention.
When I took my headphones off Frederick asked me if I had seen him dancing. I told him that I hadn't and so he asked me if I wanted to see him dance.
I told Frederick about my $2 portrait project and he agreed to pose. At first he asked me for $4.75 instead of the $2. He said he wanted to get a hot dog. Then when I told him that the project was for $2 he asked me for $3. When I said no to that he said ok but added that he got to pick the pose.
I asked Frederick if he had family and he said no. I asked him how long he'd been in Seattle and he said he didn't know.
As I took my wallet out to pay Frederick he said, "don't worry, I'm not going to rob you." I told him that I wasn't worried about him robbing me and smiled at him.
As we parted ways Frederick saw these three younger college age looking kids walking by us and said, you all, this guy's paying $2 for portraits, but the kids did not seem interested.
While attending the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit I'm staying at the Bellevue Hyatt. Last night my wife and I were taking a few photographs in the lobby when we were approached by hotel security who informed me that taking photographs in the hotel was not allowed.
I argued with him a bit and told him that I was only taking pictures of bamboo. He still pressed on with his no photography policy. I finally got him to relent that if my wife were in the photo that I could still take the photo. As soon as he went the other way I started taking pictures again. Illegal, renegade photography.
I think that it is absurd that any hotel would prohibit photography in their public lobby and will never stay at another Hyatt again unless they change their photography policy and apologize.
Flickr Getty Licensing Deal, Code Named "Project Populace" UPDATED, to Launch With Tens of Thousands of Images in the Coming Months
iStockphoto's Lise Gagne and iStockphoto VP for Content Development, Joseph Jean Rolland Dube.
See important update below.
I'm presently at the Microstock Pro Photo Summit in Redmond. Lise Gagne, one of the top iStockphoto sellers as well as an artistic director for iStockphoto just finished speaking. Joseph Jean Rolland Dube, iStockphoto's VP for Content Development is also on stage.
I asked Gagne and Dube to provide some color on the upcoming Flickr/Getty deal. iStockphoto is a 100% Getty owned business.
According to Dube, the Flickr deal had been in the works for a while before yesterday's announcement. At Getty the deal was code named "Project Populace." Dube said that in it's initial launch the Flickr collection at Getty will only include 2,500 images hand selected by Getty Editors -- a tiny fraction of the images available at Flickr or for sale at Getty Images.
"The goal from Getty images perspective is to come up with a singularly different collection that is fresh, completely different, handpicked from the corpus of Flickr," said Dube. "These images will have nothing to do with traditional stock photography or microstock."
Given that, at least initially, this Getty Collection will only include 2,500 images I seriously wonder how meaningful or significant an effort this will be. It would seem to me that 2,500 images would hardly represent a meaningful economic effort to Getty, Yahoo or the photographers involved. It also makes me wonder how the community at Flickr might react to this deal. With likely far more photographers at Flickr interested than might be room at the inn for, I would suspect that many Flickr photographers who are not selected for this program might feel slighted at not being included. Even if the initiative only included a single image from 2,500 Flickr photographers, I'd think that there would still be many unsatisfied and very talented Flickr photographers left out in the cold.
On Getty's website they claim that they serve up over 3.2 billion thumbnail images per month. 2,500 would seem to me to be a mere drop in the bucket in terms of what the company offers.
After his presentation, I asked Dube if and when Getty's Flickr collection might be extended beyond 2,500 images and he would not comment. Dube would say that one of the big reasons for choosing Getty for the deal was that iStockphoto is one of the best companies in the world at clearing images.
JIm Pickerell, who runs the site "Selling Stock" and publishes a stock industry newsletter also shared the stage with Gagne and Dube. Pickerell expressed concern that Getty might not want to spend the money or time editing Flickr's large collection and also suggested that existing Getty Pros would probably not like the Flickr deal because they have already been seeing declining sales and this would likely only create more competition for their images.
Of course if Getty did not seriously allow very many Flickr images into their collection or gave them less than equal marketing footing this might not represent much of a threat to Getty Pros at all. Update: I just received a clarification email from Bridget Russell at Getty Images. According to Russell, the 2,500 photos at launch number that was presented today by Dube is not in fact correct.
From Russell: "You have in fact been given an incorrect number. We intend to launch our Flickr collection in the coming months with tens of thousands of images, with thousands more added to the collection each month."
"We are excited and proud to be partnering with Flickr to offer our customers even more choice for their projects. Our customers will be able to select and use the best imagery from a fresh collection of high-quality images chosen by us from Flickr's diverse and prolific community," said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. "Flickr is the ideal partner as we continue to move the imagery industry forward by offering the broadest range of high quality digital content to our customers."
Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein
Although the press release issued on the new joint venture doesn't spell out many of the details of the program, an article over at CNET provides more information as does an article over at the Seattlepi.
According to CNET, photographers interested in participating in the new Flickr collection will "have to simply wait to be contacted."
The Seattlepi reports that, "Flickr users will be able to declare whether they want their images considered for commercial use. Klein said Getty's customers will likely prefer scenic or creative images, not those of news events." the Seattlepi adds:
"Flickr users, many of whom are amateurs, will be paid in the same manner as professionals if their images are used commercially. Getty customers usually pay between $29 and $200,000 for an image, depending on how freely they may use it. Photographers receive 30 percent to 40 percent of the licensing fee if the customer's rights to use the image are limited in scope or time, or 20 percent if the image may be used with fewer restrictions."
Personally I think that this partnership is a very promising development, but I'm reserving judgment on its merits until I see more how the deal will actually play out.
What surprises me most about this deal is that in the past Getty has seemed to make a very strong distinction between their "Pro" quality Getty Images photographs, which represents their bread and butter business, vs. "amateur" images which have largely been pushed towards their microstock offering iStockphoto.
iStockphoto sells images for much less than Getty's traditional stock photography business, typically marketing images at $1, $3 and $5 per image.
It would appear that with this new offering, Getty is going to treat at least some of Flickr's images as they would their own "Pro" photographer imagery. My own expectation would be that current Getty "Pros" are probably none too happy about having a new horde of "amateurs" jointing their ranks and competing with their own image sales.
At the same point there is simply no denying the quality of imagery that many of these so called amateurs are posting to Flickr, nor the breadth of photography that has been accumulated, organized and ranked.
It will be interesting to see how Getty balances out this conflict and whether or not their new "Flickr Collection" will receive the same marketing emphasis as their own Pro photography collection.
Although this relationship will probably not be significant from an economic standpoint in the short term for either Yahoo or Getty, it is hugely important from a strategic standpoint.
At present, in Flickr, Yahoo owns the largest organized and ranked collection of imagery in the world. By opening up access to much of this collection, Getty stands to dramatically improve image search for their buyers. Whether or not those buyers buy Flickr images or other Getty images this partnership should still create a far more meaningful stock search experience on Getty vs. #2 Corbis and other competitors.
Although Getty's payout to Pros in the 20-40% range may seem low, with Getty's marketing muscle in this space and their ability to correctly price imagery at the Pro level this may represent a lucrative new source of income for many Flickr photographers.
The big question though is how seriously Getty will market this collection.
On a personal level I'm very interested in participating in this new partnership and will be blogging about it much more in the future.
Flickr has an FAQ up on the new program here as well as a topic on the subject in their help forum here. According to Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ, today's partnership announcement really is just an announcement that Flickr and Getty have "started dating," with more information coming out, "as we move forward with the development of the platform, etc."
Welcome to Drobo 2.0 -- Two Times Faster and Now Offering Firewire Support
Yesterday I had lunch with Tom Loverro, Drobo's Director of Product Marketing, where he briefed me on the next big thing coming out of Data Robotics, the second generation Digital Data Robot aka Drobo -- what I'm calling Drobo 2.0.
Beginning today people can now begin placing orders for Data Robotic's second generation Drobo storage device. Drobo 2.0 will cost $499, the same price as the previous model. For a limited time (until they clear their shelves of the old units) Drobo will be selling their first generation Drobos for $349. I blogged about Drobo's first generation device about a year ago here, but this new device is even better -- pure white hot donkey awesomeness.
Boasting new and improved Firewire 400/800 support, the Drobo 2.0 is now twice as fast as the old Drobo, according to Tom. The core processor in the unit has been upgraded to improve speed and performance and a new fan has also been installed in the unit to make it quieter as well. Personally I've never had a problem with the noise on my Drobos except on very hot days when the fan seems to kick on in my 110 degree attic. Tom told me that they actually bake their drobos in an oven when testing them to make sure that they can withstand super high amounts of heat.
Additional enhancements and modifications have been made to the Drobo Dashboard software that will also help boost speed and performance under the hood. A new version of the Dashboard software will also be released shortly for existing Drobo owners who will be able to benefit from software based speed increases as well.
So how much faster is the new Drobo than the old one? Like I mentioned before, about twice as fast. According to benchmarking statistics provided by Drobo (see above), The second generation Drobo can now read about 52MB per second and write about 35MB per second.
So why should you buy one of these things? Simple. Because Drobo represents the easiest to use, most economical, way that you can back up and store your digital photographs today. I'm blown away when I talk with photographers about their back up strategies and hear that so many photographers simply have no back up strategy. I've met some truly amazing photographers who simply have all of their photos on a hard drive and are hoping that it won't fail. It will fail. All hard drives fail. It's not a matter of "if" it's a matter of when.
Drobo allows you to put up to four internal hard drives into your unit (internal hard drives are cheaper than external hard drives so you get some of your money back there). Your photos are then spread across these four drives and if one drive fails you simply pull the old failed drive out and swap a new working drive in and you've lost no photos. The system heals itself with the new drive and it's like you never had a drive failure at all. Your data is replicated across all of the drives in a pooled sort of environment.
Because you can use your Drobos as primary storage you don't have to remember to institute daily back up strategies. And because replication doesn't require 1:1 drive space, (four 750GB hard drives in a Drobo gives you effectively 2TB of replicated storage) you can save money by not having to buy additional back up hard drives.
The beauty of the Drobo most of all though is that it is super easy to use. You simply slide your hard drives into the Drobo's bay, plug in the power supply, plug in the USB or now Firewire cable and your Mac or PC reads your Drobo as a single drive. It's that simple. There are no raid arrays to configure or servers to set up or networking devices that need to be added. It's simple plug and play.
You should remember that just because you have a Drobo though that your back up strategy should not end here. As good as Drobos are at protecting photographers from disk failures, they still can't protect against things like fire or theft. One solution here though is buy two Drobos and put them in different parts of the country or world and back up your files periodically on both machines.
It should be disclosed that Drobo has supplied me with one of their new units to test out. I've also purchased two other Drobos in the past on my own.
"...this weekend a Flickr contact (stargazer95050) let me know that my photo Out of the Gloom, which like all my photos has the “All Rights Reserved” license designation, was being sold as cell phone wall paper through MyxerTones.com. It turns out everyones Flickr photos were available for purchase through MyxerTones.com from July 3rd to July 5th, but Myxer disabled their Flickr integration after receiving numerous complaints."
"I contacted Dave about this, but strangely he would only carry on a conversation through blog comments. He in essence refused my invitation to talk about how his application worked over the phone or via email. His comments created more questions than they answered. In the end it left me scratching my head as to who the responsable party is in such application development. Is Dave immune because he’s leveraging RSS feeds that pulls content in a set format determined by Flickr or is Dave responsible for constructing an application that properly factors in photo licensing information contained with in Flickr’s feeds and/or API?"
Now Jim cares a lot more about protecting image copyrights than I do. Several times in the past he's expressed strong opinions when photo licenses are not regarded. And I suppose to a degree there is nothing wrong with this. He is a blogger and is entitled to his opinion and free speech. And he is also certainly legally and technically entitled to vigorously defend his copyrights to the extent that the law allows.
Now I'm also entitled to my opinion on the matter and I guess I respectfully disagree with Jim in a lot of ways here. I do not think that it's Flickr's job to enforce copyright through their site or through their API. If someone is putting up a photo on the screen on Flickr, personally I see nothing wrong with someone using Winer's Flickrfan (I actually use Slickr to do the same thing myself on a PC as Winer's app is Mac only) to scrape the site and pull off copies for personal use at home. I think that this ought to fall under the "fair use" category and I don't think that Flickr should do things to disable Winer's API key or app.
One of my favorite ways to consume Flickr images is by pointing my Media Center PC to my Flickr favorites folder (that I downloaded from Flickr using Slickr and the Flickr API) and watching these images roll across my screen while I have music playing in the background, a glass of wine and my kids all around. Without Slickr, or Slickr's access to the Flickr API, I would not be able to enjoy my Flickr favorites this way. Without Slickr and the Flickr API I would be tethered to a computer to see my Flickr favorites instead of being able to enjoy them and consume the way that I choose, privately, in my own home.
Now, am I "technically" violating copyright by downloading a copy of a photo using the Flickr API to my local hard drive and watching it on the Media Center PC? Probably. And I'm probably also "technically" violating copyright by sharing an mp3 with friends on FriendFeed or Pownce. And I'm probably "technically" violating copyright when I use Hype Machine to listen to a song that some other blogger posted on their blog (that frequently causes me to go out and buy an entire CD by an artist that I like I'd add).
Me personally? I don't want to live in a world where copyright is that restrictive.
Now in terms of my own photography, I gave up worrying and fretting over unauthorized use a long time ago. To me this falls under the "life's too short" category of things. There have literally been hundreds of unauthorized use cases with regards to my photos on the web.
To me I look at my photographs like birds. When you take a bird and open up your window and let it go, it's gone -- even if you paid for the bird and legally "own" it. You and everyone else can still appreciate the bird. You can hear it sing. You can watch it in the sky. It can still even technically be "your" bird. But once you release it you lose control over it. It's gone. Me personally, I think birds in the sky and trees enjoyed by all are better than birds in cages trapped in someone's home.
This is the way that the internet works. Put your photos online and if you are any good, someone, somewhere, somehow will technically violate your copyright. It *will* happen. And you have two choices with what you can do about it. You can get worked up and get upset and let it eat at you, or you can let it go and move on content that you are making the world a more beautiful place.
I'm not saying by the way, that my way of looking at copyright is any better than Jim's. I'm just saying this is how I see my world and how I want to live in it.
My pal Robert Scoble has a blog post up entitled "Is Microsoft Trying to Capture the Photography Market?" Robert's post is in part a reaction to Microsoft's invite only Pro Photo Summit which is taking place this week up on Wednesday and Thursday at Microsoft's campus in Redmond. Scoble is going to be attending as am I.
This is the third year that Microsoft has held a Pro Photo Summit, so I'm not entirely sure that this event is predictive of any change in Microsoft strategy towards photography per se. This is the first year that I'm going though and I'm excited to check out what Microsoft has in store to share with us.
Some of the agenda for this year's events include a keynote talk by Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch and a photographer keynote by photographer Frans Lanting. Additionally, summit topics include microstock photography (Lise Gagne, Artistic Director of iStockPhoto will be there), an update on the orphan works act, Eric Chan from Adobe on camera profiling, a talk about photographing the Presidential campaign from the Washington Post's Melina Mara and a number of presentations from folks doing interesting things with photography from the Microsoft Research groups.
I was surprised that I didn't see anyone from Corbis on the agenda. Although Corbis, as a 100% Bill Gates owned entity would certainly be held within arms length from Microsoft, I'm surprised that someone from Getty (iStockphoto) would be there and not Corbis.
In the past what I've seen most visible coming from Microsoft about photography has typically come from their Research group, interesting stuff but not huge application here and now in today's markets. I'm not sure that they have made a significant push in the photo space as of yet. Microsoft doesn't really compete in the photo software space dominated by Adobe and more recently Apple's Aperture product, but maybe this is going to change at some point.
There was a rumor of course late last year that Microsoft was getting ready to get into the photo sharing space in a serious way. And then of course, earlier this year Microsoft bought the photosharing site WebFives (formerly known as Vizrea). I suspect that perhaps a lot of the push towards building out a photosharing play by Microsoft though has been put on hold with all of the Yahoo acquisition talks. If Microsoft were to buy Flickr along with a Yahoo acquisition it wouldn't make sense to really build out their own new service.
In any event I'm excited to be heading up to Microsoft this week and excited to be learning more about what they are up to with photography. You can check out Microsoft's Pro Photography site on the web here. They have a great free application, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, that you can download on the site to keyword and geotag your photos on a PC.
I'm also participating in a Photowalk in Seattle if you can make it on Friday night. It looks like we have a great prospective turn out with 65 people RSVPing for the event over at upcoming.org so far. Come on out and join us if you are attending the conference or will be in Seattle on Friday.
One of my favorite things to shoot is neon. I'm not sure why I've become so obsessed with it but it's one of the things that I've shot the most. So I was super excited to hear about a night neon photowalk that Trevor Carpenter (who runs photowalking.org) is putting on. Robert Scoble, PhotoCycle producer Rocky Barbanica and I will be joining the photowalk and filming it for an upcoming Photowalking episode over at FastCompany.TV. I'm also excited that Tom Spaulding will be joining us. Tom has one of the best collections of Sacramento neon on the internet today. That's Tom's photo up at the top of this post. Check out more of his great Sacramento neon sign photographs from his Sacremento signs set, he's got 600 of them there.
Of course I'm sure that people will be shooting a lot more than just neon, but Sacramento does have some of the best vintage neon around. So come on out and join us and sign up at the upcoming.org page here. It doesn't matter what your skill level is, what kind of camera you use, etc. Beginners to pros are welcome, so bring your DSLR, your point and shoot, your Polaroid, your Holga, your camera phone, your tripod, whatever and come hang out and shoot with a bunch of other photographers.
