Recently in photography Category

A couple of days ago I received through the post a copy of Diplomat Magazine - a magazine which is sent free to all foreign embassy staff in the UK. It took me a minute or so to remember why they would send a copy to me.

This issue contains an article about the London Livery Companies. The online version of the article uses one of my photos (the one of Girdlers' Hall) but the print version uses three or four more. The publishers had contacted me a few weeks ago telling me that they were going to use my photos and asking if I would like a copy of the magazine.

Notice that I say that they just told me that they were using my photos, not asking if they could use my photos or offering money for the use of the photos. This is because of the way that the photos were licensed.  When the magazine found the photos on Flickr they were available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence - which basically means that anyone can do what they like with the photos as long as they a) credit me and b) license their work under the same terms.

On investigation, I found that many of my photos were under the same licence. But the licence I now prefer to use is the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence. This licence is the same as the previous one, except that it only applies to non-commercial use. Anyone wanting to use the photos for commercial purposes would need to contact me and negotiate a seperate deal.

I've now gone through and relicensed all of my Flickr photos under the non-commercial licence. But I'm starting to have doubts about whether that is really what I want.

You see, this isn't the first time that something like this has happened. A while ago, I was contacted by an archeaologist who was using some of my photos of Cahal Pech to illustrate an article she had written about Mayan archeaological sites. Also, like many other people, some of my photos are in a couple of the Schmap guides.

In all of these cases, I'm pretty sure that these companies specifically search Flickr for photos that they could use without worrying about licensing issues. Flickr's advanced search specifically allows you to search for photos by the Creative Commons licence they are released under. If my photos had been under a non-commercial licence when those searches were carried out then my photos would not have been found and the companies wouldn't have even know of their existence.

So I need to have a bit of a think about why I take photos and why I make them available on Flickr. Clearly I'm not a professional photographer, so I don't expect to make a living selling my photos. It would, however, be nice to sell the occasional photo for a small amount of money. I do like to see my photos being used by other people, but do I want to allow people to make money using my photos without me getting a slice? There are plenty of people putting photos on Flickr who don't care about the issue (or haven't given it any thought) so there's no incentive for people who are looking for photos to look for ones that they have to pay for - even if it's only a small amount.

Currently my photos are all marked as non-commercial use. That means that they aren't showing up in commercial use searches. Will this mean that no-one ever uses my photos on a commercial project again?

I know that many of my readers put photos on Flickr under a wide variety of licences. I'd be very interested to hear how you chose the licence that you use.

(Well, stage one of the project, anyway.)

A couple of years ago whilst I was working in the heart of the City of London, I noticed that my lunchtime wanders were taking me past a few of the City Livery Halls. I'd always been aware of the Livery Companies, but I'd never really investigated them, so I didn't know how many of them there were or how many still had Livery Halls. So I decided to find out a bit more about them.

I also started taking photos of the halls that I passed. Of course, when you have the collector gene that I have, just taking pictures as you wander past buildings randomly isn't enough. I had to find out where all of the remaining halls were and get pictures of them.

And finally, a couple of months ago (as I was walking to a London.pm meeting) I took photos of the last three. I only uploaded them to Flickr last night as I had some trouble with Shozu (which may or may not be related to the general phone weirdness I mentioned last week). But anyway, I fixed the phone last night and was able to upload the final pictures.So now I have a set of photos which (as far as I know) contains all of the Livery Halls. There are forty-one pictures in the set, but one of them is a plaque marking the site of the Cooks' Hall which is no longer there (they kept burning it down). If you know of any I've missed, I'd love to hear about it.

Why do I say that this is just the end of stage one of the project? Well, I was a bit disappointed to see that there was no good site on the web to get information about the Livery Companies. What information there is out there is scatter amongst a number of sites. So I decided to put that right. I'm in the process of building liverycompany.org.uk which will hopefully become the definitive place on the web to find information about these fascinating institutions.

I've been playing with the new Flickr stats pages. I can't give a link as each page can only be seen by the owner of the account, but your page will be at http://flickr.com/photos/<username>/stats. You need to visit that page initially to opt in to the service. It will then start crunching all your numbers and will suggest that you come back to have another look tomorrow. I signed up yesterday, so I've just been looking at what you get.

From top to bottom of the page:

• A line graph showing the number of views of your account each day for the previous month or so. From this it's easy to see when a picture of yours has attracted some kind of attention which causes a spike in the graph.
• A table showing the numbers of pages views for your photostream, individual photo pages, sets and collections. Numbers are given for the previous day, this week, last week and all time.
• Lists of your ten most viewed photos both yesterday and for all time. Each of these lists has a link to a full list.
• Information about the referrers for your photos. This is a list of the pages that people were looking at just before they came to your page. From this you can find pages where people are linking to your photos. Obviously most of the links come from within Flick (clicking on the "next photo" link, for example) but it's interesting to see where else links come from. I particularly enjoyed exploring the Google referrers. It's nice to know that this photo is the first result on a Google search for "frobisher crescent" and I'm really rather proud to see that a search for "working in banking" returns this photo in the first page of results.
• Finally, there's a breakdown of how you've organised your photos. There are graphs showing how many of your photos have the various privacy levels assigned, how many of them are tagged, geotagged, in sets and in groups, and how many of them have comments, are in someone's favourites list and even how many have never been viewed. It seems that thirteen of my photos have never been viewed by anyone except me.

All in all, lots of interesting information. I recommend having a look.

Update: Oh look. There's a help page that explains it all.

My D70 arrived yesterday. What a lovely shiny toy. Seems to play well with all my old lenses too.

Now I just need to work out what all the buttons do before setting off on holiday on Sunday.

Problem solved. I've bought a second-hand Nikon D70 from Ebay.

Current Mood: Happy (but poorer)

I'm prevaricating on buying a digital SLR. I have been for over a year. I'm pretty sure I know what I want, but I've been prevaricating so long that it's now become hard to get hold of.

I'm pretty sure that I want a Nikon D50. I'm tied to Nikon because I have an old F65 (which hasn't been out of the house for years) and I still have some Nikkor AF lenses that I'd like to continue to use.

But the D50 seems to have been discontinued and replaced by the Nikon D40 - which is cheaper than the D50. So why not buy that, you ask. Well, because the D40 has had the on-camera autofocus motor removed, so that my old AF lenses won't autofocus on that body.

I'm looking on Ebay. And it seems that I can a D50 with its standard 18-55mm lense for about £300. That would seem to be the best answer to this problem.

Except.

I'm off to New Zealand in ten days time. That's going to be photogenic, so I definitely want the camera before I get there. But we're stopping in Singapore on the way to New Zealand, so there's a chance that I could pick up something in Sim Lim Square. But will they have a D50? And, if they do, how much will it cost? Can I get one cheaper on Ebay?

Or should I just go straight for a D80?

They still need a lot more tagging and reorganisation, but I've just dumped about 350 photos from the cruise onto Flickr.

Enjoy.

Dave Gorman has an interesting story that neatly illustrates the way that the world has changed in the last five years. Whilst taking this picture of Battersea Power Station just after midnight on Saturday night, he was stopped and questioned by police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Just for taking a photgraph.

(via Bloggerheads)

I'm subscribed to an RSS feed which shows me any new photos on Flickr that are tagged with balham. Mostly I just get too many photos of people getting pissed at various parties, but occasionally it throws up real treasures.

This photo appeared a few days ago, along with a few similar ones. And I've just looked at all the photos uploaded by this person. There are a number of great photos from early in the last century.

This is the kind of thing that makes the web great.

Update, July 2008: And also a good demonstration of the kind of thing that makes the web intensely frustrating at times. It seems that these photos have been removed from Flickr.

Two scenarios.

In the first you have spent a nice day out with a group of friends. Many of you took interesting photos which have all now been uploaded to Flickr. It would be nice to easily be able to find all of those photos and perhaps automatically create one URL that will show them all.

In the second scenario you've been out taking photos of some tourist trap. You've uploaded your photos to Flickr, but you'd like to see if anyone else was there taking photos at the same time. Or maybe six months ago before a particular building was knocked down. It would make it easier to find coincidences like this.

In both cases you would need to match photos on two kinds of data, the location of the photo and the time that it was taken. In the first case, you'd also want to filter the matching photos so you only get photos taken by your friends.

Flickr knows which photos are taken by your friends. That's not a problem. And all digital cameras include the date and time data attached to each photo. And Flickr has access to that information. Of course this relies on the clock in the camera being correct and ignores any timezone issues.

It's the location information that is interesting. Of course in the future we'll all be using cameras that contain GPS units so that data will be included in the photo data in the same way as the time currently is. But tha'ts still a few years off and I want this system now. There are already standards evolving for "Geotagging", but doing that manually for every photo would be incredibly painful. There are people who carry a GPS with them at all times and can get this information by comparing the GPS data with the timestamps on their photos - but I'm not one of them. And I can't see that procedure getting mainstream acceptance.

So I suppose we're left with using the existing tags. Most people seem to tag photos with some kind of location information. But in most cases it's probably not precise enough. And, of course, different people use different formats for their tags.

Anyway, this is just a braindump from an IRC conversation. The original idea came from Candace. If anyone knows of any experiments going on in this area, then I'd love to know about it.