Creative Commons Licenses

Hi Folks:

I shared this on the message board for our local photography group and thought I’d post it here as well. I received this link (Yahoo Starts Selling Flickr Users’ Photos) from a family member the other day, and since it’s likely to kick up a lot of controversy I thought I’d add a few notes here. Sometimes companies try really hard to shoot themselves in the foot, and sometimes they seem to prefer to go for the head shot… Be that as they may.

First of all, Yahoo is not doing anything (technically) illegal, nor have they changed their Terms of Service or anything to get people to give up their copyright. Rather they’re using permissions some people have already given them (and everyone else), perhaps without realizing it. We come back to Copyright vs. Usage Rights. Continue Reading →

Photographing Moving Water – Revisited

Hi Folks:

Last month I did a blog post on a technique I’ve been playing with for ‘Photographing Moving Water‘. I’m not going to reiterate that technique here so if you’d like to read that other post first, I’ll wait…

…welcome back!

Now, I’ve used this idea on several photos and it generally works pretty well, but I’d only used it on wave action down at the shore of the ocean. I’d been wondering how well it would work on a stream, waterfall or other moving water, so I went out yesterday to make some more images. This is my second ‘winter’ here on the island and I’m still not quite used to the idea of using ‘January’ and ‘spring’ in the same sentence, but the skunk cabbage leaves were already starting to unfurl when I was out… Anyway, I digress. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

Hi Folks:  Well, if you promise not to mention that the ‘photo of the month’ post was due yesterday, I’ll pretend not to notice!

At a meeting of our local photography group recently, several people did presentations of images based on a specific theme.  Mine was on ‘faces’.  I should explain that I’m not a people photographer, and people appear in far less than 5% of my work.  I shot a wedding, once, and swore I would never do it again.  However, as a landscape photographer one thing I like to do is to look for ‘faces’ and things in other objects.  Sometimes they’re fairly obvious and sometimes they’re more elusive.  If you go through my Flickr photostream you’ll find a number of such images, but I chose one to highlight as April’s photo of the month.  It’s a piece of driftwood I found along the shore on Dallas Road – nearly an entire tree, in fact, and there are some good size rocks embedded into the roots.  However, looked at from the bottom of the tree the shape forms a fairly good representation of a human skull. Continue Reading →

Celebrate What’s Right with the World!

Hi Folks:

This is a very quick post, but I wanted to point you in the direction of the following website.  Photographer Dewitt Jones has created a site called ‘Celebrate What’s Right with the World!‘ that will be updated weekly… Each week he’ll post a new image, with the underlying theme of celebrating what’s right!  Each image is beautiful on its own, and in taking a moment or two to appreciate it, give yourself permission to appreciate that moment and to give thanks for all that’s right in your world!  Practice senseless acts of beauty and random acts of kindness on a daily basis.

Hugs,
Mike.

P.S.  Our friend Samantha Standish has two blogs that also focus on this idea of beauty: Zuli Love and The Power to Flower.

P.S. II (the sequel)  If you’re interested you can click here to see some of my ideas of beauty in the world.

He Says, She Says…

Greetings:  Well, we’re now into our second month of having our blog site, of being ‘citizen journalists’, and this process has opened many different doors for us both.  With that in mind we thought we’d tackle the idea of what this means to each of us, taking on the subject of ‘Social Networking’.

Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View

Photo of the Month

Hi Folks:

I’ll get into the philosophic issues of pride and narcissism in another post perhaps, but since one of my great loves is photography, I thought I’d dedicate the last day of each month to a ‘Photo of the Month’ page. Basically this will be my favourite image of those I’ve made during the past month. If I go a whole month without making any photographs it will likely mean I’m in a coma or something like that. So, below is my favourite image for November, 2009. It may not be your favourite image from my work (you can see more here), and you don’t even have to like it. On the other hand, if you think it’s the best work you’ve ever seen I won’t be offended by that either!

Without further ado…

Driftwood Sculpture

Driftwood Sculpture

(click on the image for a larger version)

As humans we see the world in colour (or at least most of us do), but as photographers we can train ourselves to see the world differently – not just in terms of composition and ‘rules’, but we can begin to appreciate how to ‘see’ in black and white as well.  Some colour photographs are good specifically because of the colours contained in the image itself – the photgraph at the top of this page for example has a whole mix of colours from deep oranges through yellows and blues and into violet hues (although these show up better in a print than on screen) – but with black and white we strip away those colours, and the cues that we get from the colours themselves.  What we’re left with is form, shape, texture, hue, highlight, shadow…

This image was made along the shoreline at Dallas Road in Victoria, BC.  When I first saw it, this jumbled pile of bits and sticks reminded me of this story, one I wrote several years ago.  Using the power of the wind and the waves, with ocean water and stones for tools, a living sculpure is created.  If I’d come the previous day, or the following one, the image would have been different.  Sand castles are magical like that too.

Mike.

P.S.  As for the sign thrown back by the ocean, that’s closer to this story.