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I'm not a terrorist

sniker — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:31:47 GMT

In March last year, I was on a vacation in London to visit some of my girlfriends family - of course I brought my camera. So we spend a couple of days roaming the streets of London and taking photos. That was when I had my run in with a man wearing a black trench coat, black floppy hat, black pants and shoes who was quite interested in my photographs.

I'm not a very touristy photographer. I rarely ever take pictures of my girlfriend or myself or any landmarks for that matter when I'm on vacation. I always save my SD-cards for something that speaks to me. But when we got of the tube in London's Westminster station I got my camera out and starting shooting away.

Big Brother Station

I like the dystopian surreal look the station has to it. The concrete and steal, the chains and the high open space. A reporter in a The Times podcast about the station said "It feels like something out of Blade Runner." And that's exactly how I felt. The station caught my attention not because it was such a pleasant sight, but rather because it made me think of headlines about the Big Brother State, CCTV and the such. I thought it was a great embodiment of the dark visions of big brother England.

It didn't take long before I realized that this vision might be closer to the truth than I thought. After about 10-15 minutes of happy dystopian picture taking I felt a tap on my shoulder.

The man in black

When I looked up from my view finder a man in a long black trench coat, black turtle neck, pants and shoes and a black floppy hat looked at me and my camera and flashed some sort of ID at me. He started asking me where I was from, what I was doing, what I was taking pictures of and why...

I explained to him, that I was from Germany on vacation and that I was just taking pictures of the station. He looked at me and I noticed his laptop case, thinking he was going to download my pictures to his desktop and take my name and address.

Apparently after having a closer look at me he decided I might not fit the profile of a potential terrorist after all. He asked to see the pictures on my camera (praise digital photography) and after viewing those he disappeared as quickly as he had previously appeared. The whole thing made me feel pretty uneasy and I took only a couple more shots before I left.

Thinking about it, this wasn't the only time this happend to me during that vacation. I was chased of by a security guard at the Gherkin as well, as I was taking pictures of it.

I'm not a terrorist

Why am I writing about this almost a year later? Because apparently this has been happening across large parts of England and more and more street photographers in Britain feel like they are being criminalized. They have started an campaign called "I'm A Photographer Not A Terrorist":

Photography is under attack. Across the country it that seems anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer.

Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording.

This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not just photographers.

I can absolutely relate to their cause and think it is support worthy. So check it out and spread the word - and if you're from the UK you may want to see whether they have an event planned some place near you.

Custom Comfy Camera Strap

sniker — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:53:53 GMT

Once again, Photojojo inspired me. A while ago they had a tutorial on there blog (or what the call a newsletter) about how to make a cover for your camera strap. It's not that I really needed this tutorial to get it done, but it reminded me that I had been wanting to improve the strap. It had been bothering me for a while.

My camera is a Nikon D80. The Camera itself has a nice weight. Not too light, not too heavy. But when you attach a heavy lense to it, the camera strap will start getting uncomfortable after carrying it around your neck for a while. The edge of it will start rubbing especially if you walk a lot and the camera dangles.

So when I saw the tutorial on Photojojo I saw it as a nice way of improving the feel of the strap rather than the look. What I did was, I took black jersey cloth for the inside of the strap. For the outside I just chose something, that looked nice.

Here's how it turned out - it looks awesome and feels sooooo good. ;)

A little tip at the end: I decided to fix the cover to the strap, so that it won't start to get crinckly. I just sowed the ends of the cover to the strap. It makes it less removable but even more comfy!

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

sniker — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:49:01 GMT

I just came across a neat stop motion film posted on photojojos Twitter feed. Admitted it's one of this damn ment-to-be-viral ads (and I hate it when these things work and turn me into a salesperson) but it's still worth the 3 minutes of your lifetime. Hot Tip: If you stop the video at 3:00 exactly, you can pretend this isn't an ad at all.

Enjoy.

We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production!

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

sniker — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:06:56 GMT

I came across a very beautiful tilt-shift video the other day and found out that it is part of an ongoing project by Sydney based photographer Keith Loutit. He creates stunning little videos combining tilt-shift and time-lapse photography portraiting ordinary places around Sydney. Worth a peak!

So this is the video called Bathtub IV (you better watch this in HD on vimeo):

Not only is the music just yummy but I love the look and feel of this stuff. The good part is: there is more. Keith is doing an ongoing personal project to "document 12 months of life in 'Little Sydney'". The rest of his videos can be viewed in HD on his official vimeo channel.

But how?!

So after drooling for a while I started wondering how this had been done. I looked around for a while and found a great interview with Keith in which he explained the process:

My technique combines thousands of photographic stills into short films that each last less than 3 minutes. My process begins with the identification of subjects and the planning of locations. Once these elements are established, I move onto more detailed planning around timing, lighting, and weather, with the aim of getting the image sequence right first time.

He than confirmed to me via e-mail that the videos "are all timelapse sequences of real subjects shot using a DSLR with tilted lenses." What an extraordinary effort!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

For those of you not familiar with tilt-shift and time lapse Wikipedia has some pretty informative entries on the topics (as usual). And for everyone interessted in creating your on there is some more nice sites for you to look at:

Use Photoshop to make your tilt shift and safe to money for a lense.
Too cheap for Photoshop? No Problem use this neat webservice called Tiltshiftmaker.com
Last but not least a tutorial I found on a forum on daytime time lapse.

Seconds & Thirds

And now for those hungry for more: some nice examples of timelapse.

Again HD on Vimeo recommended.

This great examples can only be watched on the creators site. Be sure to check it out!

Last but not least a classic, that probably a lot of you have seen before:

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

sniker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:33:15 GMT

Today I came across an interessting website. It's a search engine but stay with me, here. TinEye does what they call "Reverse Image Search". Pretty interessting concept with a downside: the still very small index.

Since reading is exhausting, let's just watch the pretty lady explain it to us.

In other words, you can enter an image URL or upload an image and with the help of a "digital fingerprint" of the image TinEye searches its index for dublicates, crops and altered version. Pretty amazing.

Possible uses

Okay, now how can this come in handy?

First of all, you can find out where an image came from that you found on the web.
Got an image of the web and need a higher resolution? Test your luck.
Afraid someone might be stealing your photos? Find out who.
But also: You have released something as public domain or under a CC license. See who uses your work where and for what purpose.
Last but not least, find altered versions of your pictures. See what other people make of it.

But does it work?

That's what I was wondering. The video shows a nice little demonstration of Mona, but would it work with my images? The technology must be somewhat alright if Adobe has licensed it.

Well, I tried it with some of my older photos. None of them were indexed. Then I tried it with my public domain atom feed icons. No luck either. One of them didn't turn up any results. The other quite a few, but nothing I had hoped for.

As this icon uses a fairly common symbol the search turned up quite a few results, but no dublicats of my icon but rather a bunch of other images using the standard atom icon. No hard feelings. Apparently the Twitter clone indenti.ca has not been indexed, yet (they use this icon e.g.).

I was impressed to see, though, that the images found were very similar and although they all used slight variations of the symbol they all were decent matches.

So what now?

Would I say this works? Yes, but... Since the index is still very small the results are fair but not great. But if we are to believe the lady from the video TinEye's busy crawling spiders are at it. So let's give it some time, shall we?

Click

I'm not a terrorist

Big Brother Station

The man in black

I'm not a terrorist

Related Links

Custom Comfy Camera Strap

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

But how?!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

Seconds & Thirds

Related Links

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

Possible uses

But does it work?

So what now?

Related links

*Click*

I'm not a terrorist

Big Brother Station

The man in black

I'm not a terrorist

Related Links

Custom Comfy Camera Strap

Stop Motion On So Many Levels

Tilt-shift + time lapse = awesome

But how?!

Tilt-shift? Time lapse?

Seconds & Thirds

Related Links

Find out who's stealing your photos with TinEye

Possible uses

But does it work?

So what now?

Related links

Click