Recently in photography Category

Last weekend I went with my parents to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. For those of you not familiar with the festival it's a yearly festival downtown on the mall that celebrates the living culture of states and nations. Every year a different nation, state, region or theme is picked. This year is all about Texas (the state), Bhutan (a country in the eastern Himalayas, bordered by China and India), and NASA (who is celebrating 50 years).

I think my mom was a little surprised when I asked if they were going to go this year and if they were, if I could come along. Admittedly it was not one of my favorite things to be dragged to growing up -- I remember it being hot and humid and crowded and boring. The heat, humidity, and the crowds were all the same, but I had more patience for listening and learning than I did growing up and it wasn't nearly as boring as I remember -- they had a ton of activities for kids this year (I don't know if they had the same thing when I was growing up or if I was too shy to want to participate). We had some interesting conversations with monks from Bhutan and engineers from NASA.

This year as part of the festival, the smithsonian has started the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation Project group on flickr for people to share their photos taken at the festival.

The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Photo Sharing Project strives to strengthen both the mission of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to promote cultural democracy, visitor participation, and cross-cultural conversation and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's mission to document how photography plays an integral role in our lives and throughout the Smithsonian.

If you have a chance, check out some of the great pictures being posted to the group on flickr. It's really neat being able to see the festival from so many points of views and perspectives.

The Smithsonian has also joined The Commons project on Flickr. The commons got a brief mention in my blog in my tagging post but deserves a greater mention. As stated on flickr:

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

If you haven't taken some time to explore the commons, you should. There are some great photos reflecting our nation's and our world's past. So much of this content was hidden away or only viewable from a single location. Now it's available to everyone. How great is that?

There was a lot of talk about photo books this holiday season and I had been asked on numerous occasions if I had used Blurb to create one. I had not used Blurb before. But I had heard of them because of their association with Flickr. After the craziness from the holidays died down, I decided to investigate a little further. I was immediately impressed with their pricing and the number of pages their books were able to hold. The books I've made in the past were limited to under 100 pages. Blurb books are expandable to 440 pages.

Next question was what kind of book should I make. Blurb has templates for all sorts of books -- cook books, photo books, portfolio books, blog books, and more. Yup, you can actually import your blog into their software and make a book out of it. Since I have pretty much stopped scrap-booking when I started taking digital photos (way back in 2001), I decided to make a book about our 2007. I added blog posts from 2007 and photos taken from 2007.

The Blurb software was quickly downloaded and installed (even on my mac -- MyPublisher finally has mac software, but it took them a long time to get it). It easily integrated with my Flickr account and I was able to select and add pictures easily. Since I didn't choose a blog book as my book type, I couldn't figure out how to import my blog posts, so they were copy and pasted into the pages. I didn't spend too much time trying to figure that out. As far as the functionality of the software, it seemed to be on par with the others I've used. The software did allow me to use any fonts installed on my computer and they printed without any issues.

What about quality? The quality was decent. The pages aren't as high of a gloss as the other books I've made. The photos appear a bit too dark (which I have read in other reviews). But overall I am very pleased with the results and will probably continue the tradition of throwing together blog posts, photos and other mementos from the year and publishing a yearly book. (If I was smart, I'd work on it though out the year.)

Below are a few pictures of the finished book.

Above is the cover with a selection of photos summarizing the year

One of the first events of the year was Cisco's trip to the vet for stitches in his ear (which was blogged about here).

On the left is my blog entry about my Aunt Marianne. On the right are photos taken with my iPhone while we were in Cleveland with captions under them (one of the template pages available in the Blurb software).

On the left is a page from our Alaska book (which was about 4 times more expensive than the Blurb Book). The right is the same photo in the Blurb book.

All the pictures are up from Alaska. The really don't do it justice. Chris looked at them and basically said they sucked in comparison to what we saw. There is nothing like being there and seeing it with your own eyes.

The photos can be found at:

• My 101 favorite photos
• All 577 photos I decided to upload to Flickr
• A more organized collection of all the photos

I purchased some photographs of Cisco from an agility trial he ran in. I hate doing it but, since you're running with your dogs, it's kind of hard to take pictures of them yourself. They arrived today and I'm a bit disappointed. Not only is there significant pixelation around Cisco's feathers, but the photographer's logo is on them (nothing about this is mentioned on the website), a sticker appears on the back of them stating copyright all rights reserved, and there is a sticker on the packaging stating they're copyrighted, and any unauthorized reproduction of these photos is punishable under the copyright laws of the US. Ok, I get it.

I have in the past posted photos of Cisco and Berkley I've purchased from trial photographers on this blog. Sorry, readers you'll have to find me in person to see these. I've also been able to buy the digital images from other agility photographers (yes, there actually are people who specialize in this area of photography). I've given these photographers credit when I post pics from them. I did e-mail this photographer a while back and ask if I could purchase digital images (I have this idea of creating a digital photo book of their agility careers once they retire), I never got a response back.

I understand the right of photographers to copyright their work. I understand that they need to make a living.

By paying for the image, I would like the ability to do the following:

• Display the image in my home -- either frame on in a photo album, sans logo or other watermark.
• Show off my dogs on my blog or personal website giving credit to the photographer (hey free advertising for them!)
• The ability to use the photos for my own personal use -- like the photobook I talked about earlier.

I wouldn't expect to be able to without prior approval from the photographer:

• Duplicate and distribute for commercial or promotional use
• Allow to be published in a magazine or other publication
• Sell copies of or any work derived from said photo
• Used in part of a design (either print or web based)

So for anyone that's still reading, I know the line between the sides is a bit blurred, but what are your thoughts? What should the expecations of the photographer be and what are fair expecations of those that purchase the image?