Self Portraits, 2011-08 SM

In our workshops, we love to hand out challenges. These are designed to pique the imaginations and creativity of our participants and push them beyond what they might normally do. After all, as photographers, if we are going to continue to grow — something that Arnie and I hope we never stop doing — we have to keep pushing and challenging ourselves.

In Summertime on the Maine Coast, we asked everyone to do a self-portrait that would let the rest of the group know who it was.

In our workshops, we get to know one another pretty quickly. After all, we are living, eating, doing, and sharing photography with one another! The joking and camaraderie starts on the first afternoon.

We got a big kick out of the breadth of approaches, and when we shared them in class, quite a few of them elicited a chuckle.

Unfortunately, not everyone did the exercise (their loss, as it was fun), but one of our participants did two showing a great sense of humor!

Several other people used shadows, too.

Tags: patterns, texture

The Glory of Black and White 2012-01

Over the weekend, I took time off from our regular work to do some black-and-white images.

Some people see in color, and some people see in black and white. Arnie and I see in both.

What it really is all about is seeing values. You know, that range from lights to darks. As did Arnie, I started out in black and white, but for me, it was with my trusty Brownie Hawkeye. Some of those images that I made when I was eight stand the test of time today. But that’s not the point of this blog except that I have been around black and white for a very long time. Even when I was shooting mostly color, I was also admiring the black-and-white photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Curtis, J. Walker Evans, and a plethora of others.

There were some images from Death Valley that I knew at the time would make good black and whites.

As those of you know who follow this blog, we ran into the sand/dust storm of all storms in Death Valley last month. Locals hadn’t seen anything like it in decades. While it was challenging to keep the camera safe, it was also great for photographs. The one above was made when the storm was beginning. The valley floor was still clear, but the mountains and hills were being obscured as the storm got lower and lower.

I didn’t want to lose that feeling of the storm lurking above the desert floor. I had already processed my color image, but after I took it over into nik Silver Efex Pro*, I brought it back into Lightroom to complete my tweaking. In this case, I wished to maintain the subtle outline of the mountains across the desert floor, so I darkened the exposure in that upper part of the image and brought out a little more detail in the salt ridges in the foreground to contrast with the storm.

Very often, I vignette by darkening the edges to draw the eye into my subject, but in this case, I actually lightened the edges a tad to lessen the impact of the salt lines as they drifted out of the frame.

In the next image, there were signs of the storm in the distance. The “scooty” rock in its setting was my subject, which meant that I could not allow the mountains to intrude too much.

Again, I took my image over into nik for my base black-and-white conversion, did my normal tweaks there, then

SOPA, PIPA & the Internet

Updated January 20, 2012

As you read this blog, know that as of Friday late morning, east-coast time on January 20, 2012, the votes on both SOPA and PIPA were tabled for the nonce. Read the announcements at the end of this post.

SOPA? PIPA? We’ve heard a lot about them in the news, but how does it affect us mere photographers and creators? And I’m not talking about BIG business such as the Time-Warners, Rupert Murdochs, and others who have had a checkered history of respecting the copyrights of small entities.

SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, the US House of Representatives’ bill, while the US Senate’s PIPA refers to Preventing Real Online Threats To Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 — only the government could come up with a name that unwieldy — or the easier-to-remember Protect IP Act.

They sound good on the surface. And yes, there is no question that the Internet has made it so easy to steal the creative property of others. Who could argue that protecting everyone’s copyright by going after those who allow it is a bad thing? It really isn’t so black and white; rather, it depends upon what the legislation involves. Already changes have been made to the two proposed bills in response to the hue and cry from many.

Various large websites, including Wikipedia, blacked out for the day on January 18, 2012 in protest of these proposed bills. Others feared that government might gain too much control, much as in China, and infringe on freedom of speech.

Frank James summed up the two sides of the issue succinctly in the third and fourth paragraphs of his January 18, 2012 NPR blog, referred to in this blog by permission of NPR.

PC World also wrote an even-handed article on what these two proposed bills mean. I could find no permissions link from this article, so I must assume that it is alright to link to the article.

First, we need to remember that there are already powerful laws in place to protect our copyright. The main problem is in effectively and affordably being able to take advantage of the protection the US Copyright Office gives us creators.

The other issue is the fact that many of our Internet bases are offshore and therefore beyond our reach. Any new laws are quite simply not going to affect them. We already know that China has no respect for our copyright laws. They, however, are not alone. We can’t change them. We can only effectively deal with what is within our legal reach. That is reality, like it or not.

Alas, many of us feel that these bills are designed to protect BIG business, not us individual creators. BIG Business has BIG corporate lawyers who can sift through all the ins and outs of dealing with the ramifications of these bills and go after infringers of copyrighted material. We mere photographers, writers, painters, etc. are generally not endowed with deep pockets, and thus, there is probably no way we could afford to work within the parameters of these proposed bills as currently written, especially if the infringers happen to be BIG Business.

Some of you read my blog on © Is for Copyright, in which a major stock agency had several instances of look-alike copies of Arnie’s photograph at the right. They claimed the photographs they were marketing were distinctly different from Arnie’s, but when we pointed out that the image was copyrighted, the photographs on their website quietly but blazingly quickly disappeared. We were lucky, as there is no way we could have afforded the time, effort, and money up front to fight a case against such an entity with financial resources far beyond what individual creators could battle.

As you read in the links above, these proposed bills, if enacted, could also create Internet mayhem and not address what we individual creators need.

I see a much simpler approach, one that addresses the