Stolen photo and how to deal with it

I was expecting this to happen sooner or later. Someone copied a copyrighted photo from my flickr account to a blog. He did not ask permission and I have 'all right reserved' as a license. Actually, I could not have given permission as the photo features three students. They are clearly recognisable and I do not have model release from them so using such photo for commercial usage is out of question.

The blog happened to be a marketing tool of a company providing some kind of educational services. I contacted the company and requested to remove it. This happened soon but they ended up replacing it with someone else's copyrighted photo. I don't know if permission was asked... I doubt.

There are couple things a photographer can do to protect his assets. Watermarking is quite common but it adds an additional step to the workflow and distracts viewers. Uploading low resolution version only is another way to prevent photos ending up in magazines but it wont stop bloggers.

In case you see your photo used without permission you should contact the admin of the website. Sometimes they react and the photo is removed. In case of printed media like magazines removal is impossible so you should be able to receive some kind of compensation. I am not an expert so I have no clue how much and so on.

But sometimes the website's admin wont do a thing and photo stays online. Depending where the site is hosted a so called 'DMCA takedown' notice could help. I have not tried it myself but I found good information how to write such and to whom to send it.

Canon EOS utility and tethered shooting preview quality

Canon DSLRs come with a software bundle and one of the applications is EOS Utility. Among other features it allows you to transfer your shots right away to your computer over USB cable and it also displays a quick preview of the photo on the computer screen. This is pretty handy because it is much easier to see results on the big screen. Obviously the USB cable length limits your movements so I guess people will use this for studio shots mostly.

I was playing around with this feature and I noticed that the preview had rather bad quality. After trying out different settings it turned out that shooting in RAW+JPEG mode instead of RAW only resulted better previews. Apparently the quick preview's RAW conversion outputs only low resolution images.

More tips for moon and scenery photographing

If you have read my previous post about moon photographing you already know the basics at least. But photographing the moon with scenery can be tricky. Let's say there is a night time scenery like sea and the moon light casts nice lit path on the waves. Very romantic you know.

First you take a photo so that the sea is more or less correctly exposed. Because it is pretty dark, you have to use long exposure. Naturally this is not an issue because you have brought your tripod. When you check your shots, you will notice that the moon is badly overexposed.



Unfortunately most of the digital cameras have rather limited dynamic range compared to your eyes. This means that you cannot get both the sea and the moon correctly exposed. But you can always cheat a little bit and take two different shots. I used the image above for the sea and then I took another photo of the moon with my telephoto lens. With these two images it was simple to copy the correctly exposed moon over the overexposed one.



As you see, I also moved the moon down and made it bigger compared to the original. How good that looks is matter of taste but at least the moon is not overexposed anymore. Sometimes you have to manipulate your shots a bit and I think it is fine as long as you are not working as a photojournalist.

Becoming a strobist - YN RF-602 ordered

I ordered Yongnuo RF-602 radio trigger with two receivers yesterday. The reason for ordering this set is that I do not have any way of using my existing Canon 430EX II flash off camera. I was thinking buying a remote TTL cord but I dropped that idea after reading about radio triggers.

There are many different brands for radio flash triggers. Some are quite expensive like Pocket Wizards and some are cheaper. In my case I did not want to spend too much so I took a look at the eBay selection. Most cheap triggers like Cactus V2/V4 use 433 MHz frequency but Yongnuo RF-602 uses higher 2.4 GHz frequency. This should give longer range and better reliability based on reviews. RF-602 might be a bit more expensive but 40 GBP for a transmitter and two receivers is not too bad.

At the moment I have only one flash but I am trying to figure out what kind of flash should the second one be. It should have manual power control, reasonable power rating and low price. I do not need any automatic features so there is no point of buying another Canon 430EX II. Yongnuo produces flashes matching my requirements and they are pretty cheap (27-30 GPB ebay). Other option could be a second hand flash unit but popular models are hard to get.

Hopefully my trigger package arrives soon. Waiting new gear to arrive is always difficult...

Edinburgh Photocamp 2009

Today I attended a photocamp event and I have to say it was a day well spent. It was the very first Photocamp event in Edinburgh. Photocamps are very informal seminars and they share quite a lot with more IT specific Barcamp events.

The main idea of a Photocamp is that anyone is free to join, present and collaborate. There are no fixed plans and anyone is free to present a topic. In my case this meant having a quick presentation about camera lens qualities and how they affect the final photograph. I was not too well prepared so I felt a bit nervous. Luckily the atmosphere was warm and welcoming so it was not that bad thing to do after all.

Along many informative presentations there was also a possibility to try out small studio setup with several flashes, soft boxes and reflectors. I ended up in front of camera as well even though posing is not my favorite act. It was a first time for me to try out studio shooting with such a setup so I was a bit clueless what I could achieve but at least I got a chance to try out different light setups and so on.

In between sessions attendees were busy chatting about their interests, expressing their opinions and sharing their flickr contacts. For some people it was the first time they met their online contacts in real life. Such event is very good for networking and I also got plenty of advice for my plans to get couple radio triggers.

I understood that this kind of Photocamps are relatively new thing in the UK so you might not heard about such before. But if there is one being organized near you do not hesitate to participate. Having a presentation is not compulsory.

Edinburgh Photocamp