The more you look around for interesting scenes to photograph, the more you realize the power of reflections. They are everywhere. Reflections can both take your photographs to a new level of visual interest or ruin them by getting in the way of what is important. This post will give... The post 9 Ways to Try Creative Reflections in Your Street Photography appeared first on Expert Photography. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2Dz9RIP
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At midnight, Saturday January 20th, 2017 the United States government shut down. A government shutdown essentially means, at a high level, most non-critical aspects of the United States government are not operating. Government employees will be furloughed and active-duty military may not get paid. Many of those furloughed are National Park employees, including Park Rangers. But unlike the government shutdown in 2013, this time, National Park gates will remain open, essentially creating a free for all in many of the 278 sites across the country, including every National Park. While this sounds like a victory for those of us who love visiting National Parks, Zion Park Ranger and incredible photographer Christina Adele has reminded people on her Facebook posts that this is actually a very bad, and potentially very dangerous, idea. So I decided to list the reasons why you should do your part to help conserve our National Park Land by avoiding the parks during this shutdown. There is No One to Help if You are in TroubleMany National Parks are in remote locations, making cell service spotty at best. If a hiker gets injured, a car accident or other dangerous situation occurs, most times help arrives after someone finds a park ranger in person to report the incident. Using radios, the rangers are able to coordinate the help needed. In places such as Utah’s Zion National Park, helicopters are used often to rescue injured visitors and airlift them to the nearest hospital. But, with no Park Rangers, there will simply be no one to locate to get the emergency assistance needed. Zion is also home to the famous Virgin Narrows, a hike through the Virgin River that winds through stunning sandstone canyon walls. This is also a very dangerous hike. Not only is it easy to sprain or break an ankle by losing your footing on rocks that aren’t visible, but many have died in flash floods that overtake the canyon and its hikers without warning. Seven lives were lost in one day in a September 2015 flash flood. While this is not flash flood season, nature is always unpredicable. Bottom line. There is no guarantee of an emergency response. There is very limited “essential” personnel on to help with emergencies, but if they are busy, you are in trouble. You Will be Contributing to the MessSo you feel like you are a outdoor lover, and you practice leave no trace values. So you use the park toilets, which do not have plumbing, and you use the trash bins to discard your energy bar wrappers. While this is much better than litering, the employees who empty the trash bins and toilets will not be working. While this may be ok for a couple of days, what happens if the shutdown lasts a week? A month? Longer? You get the idea… Campgrounds Will Be LockedYes, you read that right. The Parks will be open, but first come, first serve campgrounds will be gated and locked. There is already a massive shortage on campgrounds in National Parks, so with the elimination of the first come, first serve sites, there will be a major influx of people visiting who will have no (legal) place to stay overnight. This will lead to more people setting up their tents in in illegal locations or car camping, which can be damaging to the fragile enviornment and contribute to the mess. Roads Will Not Be MaintainedBeing that this shutdown is happening mid-winter, many National Parks are getting snow. Usually, the snowplows are out in force to make sure that the roads are clear and safe for those venturing into the parks after a storm. But, no employees mean no one to operate those snow plows. It is snowing in Zion today. The roads will not be plowed, creating a major safety issue when there is no one respond in case of emergency. You Will Be Contributing to the Waste of Your Taxpayer DollarsSince their is no one at the gate to take your entrance fee, there is no income for the National Park Service for however long the shutdown lasts, but the staff will very likely get back-paid, resulting in the lopsided loss of critical National Park Service’s funds. In addition, as stated above, the parks will get very messy the longer the shutdown drags on. Less camping spots mean more illegal camping, potentially damaging fragile enviornments. When the shutdown does end, your tax dollars will be used to fund the cleanup and the repair of any damage done during this time. The more cleanup that is needed, the more repairs that have to happen, the more tax dollars are spent. With the National Park Service already losing a large portion of their annual funding under the Trump administration, every dollar counts to help protect these lands, so by saving the department money now, you are investing in the protection of your parks for years to come. Thank you to Christina Adele for her photo contributions to this article. Follow her adventures on her website, Instagram and Facebook.
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2FZeiv6 Raw vs. JPEG. Which one are you using? If you’re just starting out in photography, then it’s likely you’re shooting your images in JPEG format. You’ve also probably wondered whether you should be shooting raw images or not. In fact, even if you’ve been handling a camera for a while,... The post When Should You Be Shooting Raw? | Raw vs. JPEG | Best File Format ? appeared first on Expert Photography. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2DOL1m2 By Joe Naylor, President and CEO of ImageRights Photo by Fabian Irsara The internet and social media are unparalleled platforms to promote your work, but can also make it easy for people to steal your images. Understanding the importance of copyright law and what to do if you fall victim to infringement is something every photographer should know. Armed with a basic understanding of what you need to know when it comes to your rights, this guide will help keep your work protected online. What to Know About Copyright – The first thing to know is that the second you take a photo, you own all rights, including the copyright rights to it. Unless you shot the photo on the job for your employer or explicitly assigned the copyright rights in the work to a client you were doing a shoot for in a written contract, then you are the copyright owner of the work. – Copyright laws have not been an effective deterrent to the widespread theft or misappropriation of works online. In fact, there are many businesses, if not industries, in which infringement is strictly a cost of doing business: will they profit enough from the illegal use of the copyrighted photos more than the potential settlement payments they may have to make if they get caught? So, what should you do as a photographer to put yourself in the best position you can to protect your copyrights, your business and livelihood as a photographer? Register Your Work With the United States Copyright Office The U.S. is unique in that encourages registration of all creative works with the Library of Congress by providing creators the option to pursue enhanced damages should their registered work ever be infringed. Key points to know about registration include: – To qualify for enhanced damages, the work must be registered with the USCO within three months of initial publication or prior to the start date of the infringement for a given claim. Enhanced damages include statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work plus recovery of the costs of your attorney’s fees. – You do not need to register your work to pursue an infringement claim directly, but U.S. citizens must register their work with the USCO before they can file a copyright infringement complaint in federal court. How Does USCO Registration Impact Your Options to Pursue a Claim? Presenting your USCO certificate for the infringed photo can help you overcome a lot of obstacles when trying to negotiate a settlement, namely that it is proof that you are indeed the copyright owner. It also sends the message that you’re able to file a complaint with the court should it come to that. The difference in settlement is contingent on whether or not the image was registered in a timely manner. – If the image is registered but not registered timely, then the copyright holder can file a complaint and pursue actual damages and a disgorgement of profits. However, these damage amounts can be all but impossible to quantify when you’re dealing with online infringement, as opposed to, for example, a product that a company sold millions of units of with your photo on it. – With registered timely claims, your leverage in the settlement negotiation is much stronger, as you can then pursue statutory damages and attorney’s fees, which is key to finding a good copyright attorney to take on your claim. Attorneys are much less likely to take on a claim if there are minimal actual damages available to pursue and they have no mechanism for recovering their fees from the other side. If Your Photos Were Stolen… If you find your work being infringed and want to pursue some type of compensation for that unauthorized use, you should NOT do the following, as these actions are likely to undermine you if you ultimately need to seek legal representation. – Send an invoice or issue a demand via email or over the phone. – Call them out on social media. Instead you should: – Capture as much evidence of the infringing use as you can, including screenshots of websites and social media posts. – Present what you’ve collected to either a copyright attorney or one of a growing number of copyright enforcement services, which may be able to take the claim on directly or through a copyright attorney with whom they have partnered. Either way, they should be able to quickly assess your claim and present your options. Understanding your rights is critical to protecting your work and not losing out on revenue opportunities. Companies like ImageRights are great resources for professional photographers. They provide excellent tools and services to help both protect and enforce your copyrights, including recovering compensation and more. Visit ImageRight’s Website to learn more about how to protect your work. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2DRTIfe CVS, ya done it again! This pharmacy has just announced that it will ban all beauty images for its products that have been modified in post-production to change the model’s appearance in any way. CVS has been enacting change for the benefit of its customers for a while now—they’ve stopped selling tobacco products, they’ve begun delivering healthier food options, and have committed to removing certain chemicals from their store-brand beauty and personal care items, all with their customer’s health in mind. In today’s world, it is no secret that women are plagued with unrealistic beauty standards in all walks of life. We see retouched and enhanced images of women everywhere we go, whether it’s in an ad on the subway, while scrolling our Instagram feed, or watching TV at our houses—this all contributes to the incredibly narrow definition of attractiveness our society upholds. In the last few years, a lobbying to be more honest about the realities of what we look like has swept our culture, with things like the #nomakeup trend on Instagram and the wide-spread “self love” movements that encourage people to accept and embrace their bodies.
CVS recognizes this pressing issue, and has done what few others are willing to do: make moves. In a press release for the new announcement, CVS Pharmacy president Helena Foulkes says, “The connection between the propagation of unrealistic body images and negative health effects, especially in girls and young women, has been established.” She continues by adding, “We’ve reached out to many of our beauty brand partners, many of whom are already thinking about this important issue, to work together to ensure that the beauty aisle is a place that represents and celebrates the authenticity and diversity of the communities we serve.”
While completely banning altered images will be no easy feat, CVS has laid out steps in making the change happen in a timely, realistic fashion. By 2019, they will initiate a CVS Beauty Mark, which is a watermark that highlights imagery that has not been modified to change a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin, eye color, and wrinkles—basically anything that alters the model’s appearance in an unnatural way. By the end of 2020, the pharmacy will require a disclaimer on any products sold with images that have been enhanced.
We, as consumers, have made it known that we do not want to see these retouched photos, that clearly don’t emulate what we see in ourselves and other women on a day to day basis. The movement to come forth with our true selves, free of the societal pressures to reach unattainable beauty standards, has grown stronger and stronger, and hopefully now that CVS has joined the fight, other pharmacies will follow.
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2mVofSd The 8 Most Bizarre Products Of CES 2018
1/18/2018
This past week, the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show concluded after days of innovative announcements and exciting showings. As the forefront of technological advancement, where companies feature their newest inventions, we saw showings ranging from updates on existing products to products that look like they’re straight out of a Black Mirror episode. While undeniably unique and interesting, at the very least, these 8 products made up some of the most bizarre showings CES had to offer this year:
Buddy, the companion robot, is more or less a tablet on wheels whose job is to manage your smart home in a number of ways. Buddy’s main purpose is to “connect, protect, and interact with each member of your family” so says the official website. This includes acting as a personal assistant by managing calendar and alarm clocks, monitoring your house through its webcam-esque feature, serving as a playmate for younger household members, and acting as a hand free helper for questions and tasks like pulling up a recipe or tutorial. This robot is cool in theory, as it basically manages your home-life for you, but I would certainly jump 5 feet in the air every time I turned a corner in my house and saw this thing looking up at me.
Apparently we can not get enough of virtual reality, as VR products swept CES this year, and the TeslaSuit is of the craziest. This suit will simulate sensory inputs to give you an even more real-feeling virtual experience. The technology will simulate the feeling of hot and cold, as well as simulate nerves and muscles that react to the likes of a gun recoil and gun shots, and mimic the feeling of wounds and damage. Video games have never felt more real than with the TeslaSuit.
A surprising number of beauty products made a showing at CES and the HiMirror is one of the many directed at skin care and maintenance. The HiMirror is a smart mirror that’s linked to Amazon Alexa, which analyses your skin and tracks its changes. The product will act as a virtual beauty assistant, giving you make up product recommendations to fit your skin needs, as well as offer tutorials in using those products to your advantage.
Kohler Toilet
This toilet is sure to give you the ultimate bathroom experience, although I’m not sure why we need this many features for our toilet…even if they are pretty sick. The toilet is highly advanced, with features like a motion activated cover and seat for hands free opening, a deodorizer that pulls air through a deodorizing charcoal filter, heated seats and foot warmers, and a sound system so you can listen to music. As the toilet of toilets, this product wows by targeting your every possible need to complete your apparently very mundane bathroom experience.
Ok, now this is a very dope product. The foldimate is basically your laundry-day savior—you feed your clean clothes through the top of the machine and out comes a perfect stack of folded laundry, like magic. If you are anything like me, doing laundry is the worst and I have a habit of letting clean clothes sit in a basket for days without putting them away. With foldimate, this is no longer an issue as the machine does it for you! It may cater to the lazy—because realistically folding your clothes is not a task you need a machine to do for you—but if some robot is offering to do it for me I am certainly not going to say no.
As if our eyes weren’t already glued to our smart phones, the Vuzix Blade makes this more of a reality than a figurative saying. These Amazon Alexa enabled smart glasses are able to overlay information through the lenses over the real world in augmented reality. They will allow you to pull up things like maps, menus and weather reports right into the lens of the glasses, so you won’t ever have to go anywhere without your computer or smartphone. This strikes me as a potential safety hazard, but the product is still slightly in the works and far from consumer retail.
LG Rollable OLED TV
This product is basically a massive TV that looks pretty similar to what we have today but remarkably thinner. BUT, it is much more than meets the eyes. The TV is actually able to roll up, as if it were nothing more than a piece of paper, making it much easier to move and place in storage.
Toyota e-Pallete
Toyota’s e-Pallete was one of the bigger showings at CES, because it’s a car—well, much more than just a car. It’s a self-driving concept vehicle that will serve as a virtual shop front and parcel delivery service. Companies like Pizza Hut have already signed up for demos, so it is likely we will see a sharp decrease in the “delivery boy” job market as these self-sufficient vehicles take over the delivery system. By the way, this concept actually was featured in a Black Mirror episode (shout out to “Crocodile”). via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2ES01Pe When Canon Italy posted a picture on its Instagram of a sunset atop the Umberto Bridge, my first reaction was: “oh, what a pretty sunset.” Others, however, saw more than a sunset; they saw a stolen image.
Soon afterwards, Elia Locardi, of Fstopper’s “Photographing the World” fame, was alerted in a Facebook group that an image of his had appeared to have been posted, albeit in a highly-edited form, by Canon Italy. Soon afterwards, it was posted by Canon Spain as well. While a lack of accreditation and/or payment may certainly have perturbed Mr. Locardi, the bigger issue appeared to have been Canon’s: the image was shot on a FujiFilm. Almost immediately, Fstoppers Robert K. Baggs published an indignant article entitled “Canon Italy Posts Landscape Composite Without Credit, Stolen Elements, and Taken on a Fujifilm” …whoa.
Then things got even weirder. Because of the “enormous response” generated by the original story, Baggs continued to dig deeper into the case. Following a response by Canon in which they professed to getting the image from Unsplash–a free image-sharing platform–as well as pointed out notable differences between their and Locardi’s image, Baggs decided to find which user had in fact uploaded this image, landing upon a man named Greg Paul Miller.
Mr. Miller, it seems, follows Locardi on Instagram, and even “liked” the original photograph which he is being accused of stealing. Further, Baggs notes that, had Miller taken Locardi’s tutorial on “Photographing the World,” he would have gained access to the RAW file of the image in question. For Fstoppers, this was all the evidence needed to convict Mr. Miller of “blatant theft.” The problem is that there are both notable similarities–such as an identical bird atop a tree–as well as notable differences–like a group of people sitting on the bridge–between the images. Further, if Mr. Miller is the villainous con man that he is accused of being, why would he “like” Locardi’s original shot? If he went to the all the trouble of adding false data to the image to make it appear as if it was shot on a Canon (a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV with ISO 100, f/6.3 and shutter speed 2 seconds, to be exact) how could he fail to notice this key piece of evidence which would give him away so easily? Image stealing is a very sensitive topic at the moment as creative industries grapple with changing cost structures and figuring out how to make a living from work when its distribution and replication is free. However, just because a crime is rampant doesn’t mean we can convict all those we suspect of it on the flimsiest evidence. Without waiting for comment from any of the parties involved, Fstoppers had already published this diatribe:
As much as I understand their frustration with digital art-sharing practices, that’s no license for incivility, least of all blogger-on-blogger attacks.
[Update: Mr. Miller appears to have deleted his Instagram, so he totally did it.] via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2mP9CPs In exactly 13 days, 13 hours, and 2 minutes from the writing of this article, Kodak is set to launch KODAKOne, a blockchain-based “image rights management and protection system.” Unlike other companies using blockchain technology primarily as a marketing tool (I’m looking at you, Long Blockchain Corp.), Kodak intends to put it to its rightful purpose: a secure ledger for information transactions. Kodak’s CEO Jeff Clarke put it this thusly in a statement to BusinessWire:
The “problem” being referred to, of course, is maintaining control over your images once you’ve placed them on the web. Watermarks notwithstanding, Instagram is known as a feeding frenzy for sites and others looking for “free” content; there’s even whole blog posts dealing with what to do when this happens to you. So, how does KODAKOne combat this type of theft? That’s where blockchain comes in, using a two-pronged method to ensure your work is only published legally. First, your images are “registered,” serving as proof that they are yours, and saving that information, along with a “smart contract,” in the blockchain. Then, 24/7, AI-powered “continual web crawling” is enabled, continually surfing the net for copies of your image, alerting you when it has found any unauthorized publications. Finally, any and all transactions are stored in the blockchain as well, providing instant payment to the seller as well as peace of mind that they are protected. WENN Digital’s CEO, Jen Denecke, who partnered with Kodak on the venture, describe their motivations to BusinessWire:
Though these guys sure can talk the talk, we’ll have to see whether their actions end up being as noble as their words.
Feature Image Courtesy Kodak via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2DusuO4 Have you ever looked back at the days when you were starting out with photography and everything was fun and thrilling and interesting? Have you ever wondered where all that excitement has gone? Whether you are stuck in a photographic rut or simply looking for some creative photographic ideas, photoelasticity... The post Fun With Photoelasticity | Rainbow Effect Photography appeared first on Expert Photography. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2FLAjxa Have you ever heard the expression ‘the devil is in the details?’ In photography, the devil is called Chromatic Aberration. CA to its friends. It usually manifests itself in the form of purple/red/blue/cyan/green fringes alongside highly contrasted edges. It’s easily spotted if you check your photos at high magnification. This... The post How to Deal with Chromatic Aberration | Coloured Haze on Magnified Images appeared first on Expert Photography. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2EPRexB |
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