I use a Huey Pro but if you don’t want to buy additional equipment, here’s a quick way to make sure your brightness and contrast look right.

Photo Friday have produced a neat page to test and calibrate your monitor. Follow the link below to check your monitor.

Photo Friday: Monitor Calibration Tool

Digital Photography school has just put up a very amusing article on the 10 Deady Post Processing Sins. These include:

1. Don’t buy photoshop right out of the gate.
2. Processing fads rhyme with “stay away for the love of all that is holy.”
3. Radioactive eyes are so last season.
4. Skin should not look like it was grafted from Barbie, Ken, or Skipper.
5. A heavy vignette does not a professional photograph make.
6. Just say “NO” to over saturation.
7. Selective colouring died circa 1990.
8. Don’t make your clients look dead.
9. Fake Sun flare . . . looks fake. and stupid.
10. Textures? I’ve only ever seen a hand full of photographers who can really pull them off.

Check out the link below for the full article complete with suitably bad example images!

DPS: Warning – 10 Deady Post Processing Sins

The first is part of the Digital Economy Bill and relates to orphan works usage rights, which will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified. Assuming most people are not going to try and find the owner for images they download online, that’s potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

As the Copyright Action site indicates:

Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist, since there is no ineradicable way of associating ownership details short of plastering your name right across the image.

One of the more galling aspects of the UK Digital Economy bill is that it has been specifically drafted (at the behest of the music and movie industry) to further protect music and movie copyrights but then seems to strip any need to worry about copyright for Photographers. What is worse is that despite the Lords Select Committee stating that the definition of an “orphan work” should be included in the bill, Lord Mandelson (who is the one pushing this through) refused on the grounds that:

“the need for flexibility in specifying what comprises an adequate search makes this difficult. That what is an orphan work will change according to evolving methods of determining its status.”

If this is passed it means that any image that turns up on a Google image search or personal website could be used commercially with the user just claiming they tried to find the owner and hoping they aren’t caught out. Time to dust off the watermarks I think, however this is a shame as ultimately watermarks go against the idea of showcasing your work on personal sites or places such as Flickr!

The other half of this story is that the Information Commissioners Office is proposing a new code for personal information online. It should be noted that the proposal is still in consultation, but should it be passed, as well as the obvious personal data items it also includes new rules that will all but prohibit photography in public places where anyone who’s in the photograph might be unhappy about being photographed. However in order to avoid impacting tourist photos, this new ruling will only apply to pro photographers. Without even getting into definitions around who is pro and who isn’t this still poses massive problems.

Imagine a demonstration through a city. There are bound to be pro documentary/news photographers there shooting the crowd. However unless the photographer walks around and collects consent from every single individual in the crowd they will now not be allowed to take a photo of the event!

Again, as the Copyright Action site puts it:

Minor considerations like journalism, history, social documentary, freedom of expression – and even the simple logic that if you can eyeball it in public, it can’t possibly be private – all are just collateral damage. At a stroke, ICO is redefining allowable photography to exclude all that contentious street stuff that has made the record of the last 150 years so insightful.

Visit the link to the Copyright Action site below for a far more extensive post, along with links tot he relevant bills. If you’re in the UK then I also urge you to write to your local elected representative about the Digital Economy Bill and the orphan licensing rights expressed within it.

Copyright Action (for photographers and photography users): UK Gov nationalises orphans and bans non-consensual photography in public

I’ve long thought it strange that whenever you add a link in Flickr, either as part of your profile within a caption for one of your images, they rewrite it to add in a rel=”nofollow”. The effect of this tag is to stop a search engine (which obviously ranks Flickr quite highly) from following the link and therefore helping your own site’s search ranking.

This is a common thing to do in comments (in fact this blog’s comments do that) as a means to avoid spammers improving the search ranking of their phishing sites. However to do it in my own profile and captions has always struck me as ungenerous and somehow against the community spirit of the web.

The above issue aside, as you will know I have this site, and my portfolio site www.importedlight.com and recently I began experimenting with adding links from some of my travel photography to one or other of these sites. However I ran into a problem.

Working in the web analytics industry and using Google Analytics on both my sites, I of course wanted to include the Google Analytics utm_source, medium and campaign tags on the links so I could see how effective they were at driving traffic to my sites. The problem is, if you do this and then make the linked text anything that looks like a URL or domain (i.e. www.importedlight.com) Flickr would rewrite the linked text to be the same as the actual link href. Linked text that didn’t look like a URL (i.e. “My Site”) works just fine.

For example, if I wanted to add the following:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com</a>

Flickr would convert it to:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr</a>

Which is not very pretty!

Despite the issues Thomas Hawk has had with Flickr help (example here) and the general bad reports of staff that don’t really help, I decided to have a go at raising what I thought was a bug in the Help Forums. It seems everyone’s reports of how bad Flickr help is were true!

You can see the post I made here. Within seconds the response from one of the Flickr staff was it wasn’t a bug, it was that way by design to stop phishing and the thread was closed denying me any chance of responding! Frankly the phishing argument is bull!

So what they are saying is that I can post a link which says something like “Follow Me” and gives no clue what-so-ever as to where the link is going and that all fine. But if I actually try to be helpful and say use my domain as the linked text its a massive phishing risk and is not allowed. This just doesn’t make sense. If it was for phishing then they certainly wouldn’t let me use text such as “Follow Me” or “My Site” either.

So come on Yahoo – either sell Flickr to someone who cares and wants to develop and grow the service. Or pull your finger out and start spending some money on it yourself. Its definitely starting to stagnate!

One such committed individual is Brandon Oelling over on the X= Blog. After soliciting feedback, one reader emailed to indicate that they wanted more information on the items in the right-hand menu of the Develop module – especially things such as the tone curve and detail panel.

Thankfully Brandon has come to their aid with a great post listing each of the tools available in the Develop panels along with links to articles that go into more detail on each.

So if you’re having trouble with the develop module or just want a refresher on what a particular panel does then check out the X= article “Everything in the Right Hand Menu“. As for my Lightroom series I’ll see if I can get something out this year (but no promises!).

From both personal experience and that of my friends there seems to be a general belief that if an image is licensed with Creative Commons then anyone can use it pretty much however they want. Unfortunately this is not how the license works and at a minimum you are often required to provide a credit and link back to the image owner. Creative Commons is also frequently used to allow hobby bloggers, etc to use the image but to restrict commercial use. However again there have been cases where images have been used for monetary or commercial projects under the mistaken belief that Creative Commons allowed this.

As mentioned, I think Creative Commons is a good idea (in principle) however the organisation behind it needs to do a lot more promotion and publicity to educate people on the ground about how it works. In addition, its not clear what you would do if your license was violated. The Creative Commons team itself cannot provide legal advice or support. Finally, even the creator of Creative Commons – Lawrence Lessig – when asked whether using an image marked “Non-commercial” on a blog that contains, for example, Google Ads would be a violation responded “I don’t know”. This is due to the fact that many of these cases have not yet been tested in a court of law.

If you’re really worried about people stealing your work, then don’t put it online! However if you do, certainly for now, I would recommend using an “all rights reserved” note at least until Creative Commons is better understood and better tested.

Like many of the other articles (and me!) he recommends converting to DNG and listed a selection of the concerns and comments around why others might not feel comfortable doing this.

Follow the link below to check out the full article on his site.

To DNG or Not to DNG? (Lightroom Killer Tips)

Above is a video showcasing my favourite shots from the past twelve months. Enjoy!

Happy New Year – and here’s to another great year of photography!

Well I’m back from a brief trip to Turkey and must say I’m very impressed with Istanbul. There’s so much to see and do within a nice compact area it makes it a great destination for a short break. Although if you’re a photographer there’s so much to shoot you’ll definitely want to return!

I don’t think I’ve ever taken as many dusk and night shots as I did on this trip but some of the main attractions, such as the Blue Mosque above, look so good lit up its difficult not to!

I’m still working through all the photos I shot during the past week and once complete I’ll be putting the gallery up over on Imported Light. I’ll be posting more then on the trip.

I’m about to head off for a few days to Istanbul, Turkey. Hopefully with the weather we’ve had over the last few days I’ll still be able to get there so look out for some new images in the new year.

So all that remains is for me to wish you all happy holidays wherever you are and whatever you’re doing and I hope 2010 is full of perfect photography moments for you!