photomark

After the recent phishing debacle I changed my login credentials for photo.net (mostly because I couldn't figure out how to delete my account). I changed my email address to name+photonet@domain.com so I could identify emails originating from photo.net (or those who hack it). It will no longer let me log in (I can post this because I'm still logged in after changing it). Additionally, it won't send me an updated password because it says: "You must enter a valid e-mail". I think you should support tagged email address like that. But I REALLY think if you don't support them, you shouldn't let users change their address to such an email. At the moment, my account seems to be associated with an email address the system only occasionally recognizes as valid.

<p>Regan, I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest lawyers, school, or ASMP are wrong on this issue. I was hoping you had a specific example, though, because there is a lot of case law suggesting that magazine and book covers have a first amendment exception when they reflect the content of the magazine or book. </p><p>There are some classic examples of the courts favoring incidental advertising use for editorial content. One is Shirley Boot, v. Curtis Publishing Company. Shirley Booth was photographed and appeared in an issue of <i>Holiday</i> Magazine </p> <blockquote> Concededly, the publication in <i>Holiday</i> was not a violation of Miss Booth's right of privacy, for this was reproduction for news purposes as the phrase had been used in applying the statute. However, in June, 1959 defendants caused to be published the same photograph in prominent full-page advertisements of Holiday, in the <i>New Yorker</i> magazine and <i>Advertising Age.</i> </blockquote> <blockquote> To be sure, <i>Holiday's</i> subsequent republication of Miss Booth's picture was, in motivation, sheer advertising and solicitation. This alone is not determinative of the question so long as the law accords an exempt status to incidental advertising of the news medium itself. The exemption extends to the republication because it was illustrative of magazine quality and content, even though, realistically, it is recognized that the republication also served another advertising purpose, that is, initially attracting the reader to the advertisement. </blockquote> <p>There's another similar case between Joe Namath and Sports Illustrated where Namath appeared in the magazine and SI used his image to advertise the magazine. Namath sued and the courts said: </p> <blockquote> Where use of professional athlete's photograph was merely incidental to advertising of publisher's magazine in which athlete had earlier been properly and fairly depicted, and language of advertisement did not indicate athlete's endorsement of the magazine, there was no invasion of athlete's right to privacy in violation of Civil Rights Law. </blockquote> <p> A good example involving a book cover is <a href="http://www.onpointnews.com/docs/nickel&dimed2.pdf"> Christianson v. Henry Holt and Company, LLC</a> (page 6 - 11 for a quick rundown and related cases). In this case the person on the cover won, but reading the opinion spells out clearly that it is because she wasn't mentioned in the book at all - she was purely used as an advertising image. Had she been even a small part of the book, the use on the cover would fall within the first amendment protection:</p> <blockquote> …if Plaintiff’s identity was incorporated into that non-commercial speech, then her claim would fall within this exception.<br/> …<br/> When it comes to the use of an individual’s image on the cover of a book, the case law reflects a strong First Amendment interest in allowing authors and publishers to use images that reflect the free speech contained in a book. </blockquote> <p>So while using a random person for the cover of your novel without a release is definitely a bad idea, it's hard to understand why a magazine or fine-art photography bookcover would require a release or even why you would need a release to use images in the book to advertise the book.</p><p>Some of the state laws are explicit about how you can advertise works protected by the 1st amendment. For example <a href="http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2241&ChapterID=62 ">Illinois</a> has the standard appropriation restrictions:</p> <blockquote> A person may not use an individual's identity for commercial purposes during the individual's lifetime without having obtained previous written consent from the appropriate person…</blockquote> <p>But then says this (emphasis mine):</p> <blockquote> This Act does not apply to the following:<br/> (1)use of an individual's identity in an attempt to portray, describe, or impersonate that individual in a live performance, a single and original work of fine art, play, <b>book,</b> article, musical work, film, radio, television, or other audio, visual, or audio-visual work, provided that the performance, work, play, book, article, or film does not constitute in and of itself a commercial advertisement for a product, merchandise, goods, or services;<br/> (2) use of an individual's identity for non-commercial purposes, including any news, public affairs, or sports broadcast or account, or any political campaign;<br/> (3) use of an individual's name in truthfully identifying the person as the author of a particular work or program or the performer in a particular performance;<br/> (4) <b>promotional materials, advertisements, or commercial announcements for a use described under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) of this subsection;</b> </blockquote>

"Now, regarding art books and the use of street photography within those...the images contained inside the book are considered art and exempt but the image on the cover--the image presumably used to sell the book--needs a release" Regan, how do you know this to be true? Generally using work that originated in an editorial context to promote and advertise that publication (aka incidental advertising use) has been allowed by the courts.

I'm in Amsterdam on my way home from Turkey. In the past year I've shot I Japan, India, and throughout Europe. And guess what, I would never use the term 'International Photographer' in any of my branding. The reason is because it instantly indicates you are a poser. The only people who use this term are those who, like you, posted something online, or went on vacation and took some snap shots. Nobody who matters takes the term seriously and most people with any experience chuckle and shake their head we they see it. If you are serious about the business of photography focus on what you can do for clients, how you are truly different from your competition, and forget cheap, easy, and ultimately meaningless terms like 'international photographer.'

The Oklahoma City case Ellis mentioned is worth reading if you want to understand some of the difficulties. Here's the opinion from the Court of Appeals: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/156/1244/481858/

<p>This went up on the aphotoeditor blog today. It's unlikely you'll be aiming at these numbers for your first commercial job, but I think it's helpful to see:<br> <a href="http://aphotoeditor.com/2016/01/27/pricing-and-negotiating-lifestyle-shoot-for-a-pharmaceutical-company/">Pricing and Negotiating: Lifestyle Shoot</a></p>

I agree with Craig. The WSJ isn't some fly-by-night organization in the business of stealing images from photographers. They hire freelancers and deal with image rights many, many times, every day. It seems unlikely that they would just grab an image and use it unless there's something else going on. It could just be a misunderstanding or maybe they feel the use is fair — it's impossible to know without more information.

Hey Skip, I'm in Anchorage and get out and about from time to time. It wasn't clear from your post — does your cruise finish in Sitka? Is the plan to fly to Anchorage and drive from there? Turnagain Arm is the body of water just south of Anchorage. As soon as you leave Anchorage to the south, you are driving along Turnagain Arm. If you continue, you will drive along the coast for about 45 minutes until you hit Girdwood, which is a ski town in the winter. In the summer, you can take the life up the mountain, which on a clear day has great views. Girdwood also has decent food. Although spendy, helicopter trips from Girdwood over the Chugach mountains are unbelievable. Continuing, you'll pass a turn off to Whittier which offers access to Prince William Sound. It's the clostest jumping off point for kayaking, fishing, and glacier cruises to Anchorage. It's about an hour drive. Whittier is accessed via a one-lane tunnel, which means inbound and outbound traffic alternates on a schedule. It's worth plannning around the schedule in advance if you don't want to park for an hour. Portage Lake is a quick and easy stop along the Whittier turn-off before you get to the tunnel. On a good day wind blows icebergs from the glacier at the end of the lake to the accessible shore by the road and visitor center. If you continue south past Whittier you can either turn off toward Seward or head to Homer. Soldatna doesn't have a lot of flashing stuff unless you want to fish the Kenai river (world class rainbow trout and salmon), but it has big grocery stores and gas, so it's good for a quick stop. If you instead head north, the Matanuska glacier is a nice side trip. It's a little out of the way if you're heading to Denali, but no too bad. Guides will give you crampons, axes, and instructions and take you on a glacier trek. It's good for the whole family (8 years-old and up), and has some spectacular photo ops. Of course, any time you can get in the air on a clear day, Alaska will blow you away. The flight seeing out of Talkeetna to Denali is truly spectacular. Operators from Homer (and probably Kenai/Soldatna as well) can take you across Cook Inlet to see bears on the Coast of Lake Clark N.P and buzz the glacier-capped volcanoes.

Jordan, There's a lot of nice work there and the site is clean and easy to navigate. I especially like the Urban/Suburbs work. You made a few choices that I would question. The main one is the diagonal sweep transition between images. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's slow and distracting. The editing with the Urban/Suburbs work is tight and consistent I love it. But the editing in the landscape work is a wreck with a mix of different aesthetics and subjects. Generally speaking, it's really hard to mix black and white and color in the same portfolio. I think if you want to show the grey, minimalist desert photos, great…or misty fall foliage, fine…or contrasty B&W long exposures of waterfalls, okay. But you need to decide because having them all together dilutes your work too much and it all ends up looking like student work. One last nitpick — why doesn't the link to your blog just go to your blog? Why do I need another page with a link to the real blog? This, incidentally, is sending me to yet another page from blogger saying I'm about to be redirected, which redirects to itself. This looks like maybe a DNS issue or other bug that hasn't been worked out.

Kristo- it was Safari and Firefox on the Mac. The slideshow is working as of this morning. It looks like it might have been a javascript problem. When I looked closer last night it was generating something like 900 javascript errors in the console. To begin with, I agree with Jeff — the glamour work is out of place, especially since you give it it's own top level category. And I wouldn't call it 'celebrity' photography. So now that I've poked around, I think it's way too busy. As a prospective client there is too much stuff on the page that I don't care about. I don't care about your tags, or categories. I don't need to know that the portfolios is 'Created By: Kristo Di Giorio' — I already know that. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the pencil icon or what the strange round avatar of you is. I don't need to know the date of the post. I *really* don't like the animated 'pin it' button. All of this stuff can just go away without negatively impacting my experience of your work. The photos are arranged in categories under the heading 'portfolio' but everything about the pages suggests 'blog post'. In fact, everything about this site from the coding on up suggests that you took a wordpress theme made for a blog and tried to force a portfolio site into it. From a branding perspective, it's a disaster. The logo is creepy, the typography is all over the place, with mixed centered and justified type (I'm looking at the about page). If I am getting married in Greece, what is there in the branding of your page that would make me choose it over say: http://www.vangelisphotography.com or http://www.annaroussos.com ? And — for me this is a BIG problem — on your contact page you are running a photo with the caption "Our Studio is always open to serve you." This was a red flag for me because the lighting gear in the photo is pretty nice, but I didn't see anything in your work that suggests you are lighting in a studio or shooting indoors. It appears that image is not actually your studio because a reverse image search finds the image everywhere. This is bordering on fraud. Considering how much care you put into explaining copyright on your disclaimer page (http://www.studiokristo.com/disclaimer/), there's no excuse for using a photo that is not yours to promote your business.<div>[ATTACH=full]1005087[/ATTACH]</div>

Kristo, I'll try posting a screen shot of what I saw on your home page. It was blank except for the side bar. Scrolling down revealed some links, but not much else. For most visitors, this is your only chance to make a first impression, and this was quite poor. From there I clicked on portfolios in the side bar and then 'outdoor portraits.' I was taken to a totally blank page with only the text: "Professional Photography Services in Greece. We are a licensed photography company. You are always welcome to visit our Studio and meet our creative team. E-mail: info@studiokristo.com" No menu, sidebar, links. Nothing, just plain text. At this point I gave up. I don't think it's quite ready yet. Have you considered just using a service like squarespace? Their templates are better than what 90% of designers can do let alone photographers.<div>[ATTACH=full]792307[/ATTACH]</div>

"Two wheels and a seat held together by metal tubes is pretty generic." Not to mention that these have useful functions, which are not protected by copyright. As far as the use of the people's image with the watermark, I don't think asking whether the watermark constitutes advertising is really the right question. You should be asking whether your use of these images constitutes a violation of your states privacy laws. Maybe the watermark could be a factor, or maybe not. Several states have clauses in their privacy statues that allow photographers to exhibit images about their business. For example, this is from the Illinois Right of Publicity Act (1075/35 b(5) - http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=2241&ChapterID=62): "use of photographs, videotapes, and images by a person, firm, or corporation practicing the profession of photography ("professional photographer") to exhibit in or about the professional photographer’s place of business or portfolio, specimens of the professional photographer’s work, unless the exhibition is continued by the professional photographer after written notice objecting to the exhibition has been given by the individual portrayed."

For the record, I didn't suggest she shouldn't shoot the job pro bono.

More power to you Michael — I've never been comfortable scheduling shots that tightly. There is definitely a history of great photographers working quickly. I was once photographed by Marc Hauser in Chicago. This was back in the film days. He took four exposures and told me he had it (he did). I still have that print on my bookcase. I also had the good luck to spend some time with a man in Texas who worked on some of the old Marlboro ads for Leo Burnett. He had all sorts of stories about photographers, including Ernst Haas who apparently would complain about 'bullshit photographers' always asking for 'one more shot' over and over. He said Haas would show up, find the shot, make a few exposures and call it good. You gotta respect that.

I understand that Jeff and addressed it. Nevertheless, she asked how we would price the job, which is the question I answered. What doom and gloom are you talking about? I don't think I mentioned her financial life — I did mention expenses, which at least in my experience are a pretty important part of determining how to price jobs. Maybe you do it differently.

Hi Christal, glad to see you've made it through part 1 of the course. Don't underestimate how huge this job is. Shooting 75 people is an enormous task. Even if you only spend ten minutes with each person (which I would consider the minimum), that's 12.5 hours of straight shooting without any breaks and assuming nobody shows up late or takes a little longer than average. Then you have all the shots from 12.5 hours of shooting to edit and sort through. Presumably you will be retouching the final selects, so that's 75 retouching jobs unless you plan on farming that out to someone else. If you are doing this pro-bono as a way to drum up some business, you need to deliver really polished final shots, otherwise it's not worth it. This is going to keep you busy for a long time. $100/person is quite cheap. I break my estimates into the various tasks and charge fees for online delivery, retouching, shooting, mileage, assistant, license (which with head shots is usually very broad). Even if you charged a bargain-basement price of $25/shot for retouching, that's $1875 in retouching alone — and who can argue with that? I don't think you could get a college student to retouch a photo for less than $25. I'm not in a market anywhere near the size of New York and I would consider $10k the absolute floor for a job like this. For a little perspective, I shoot quite a few commercial portraits for trade magazines and $1500 for a single portrait without travel expenses is pretty normal. Generally, they are a little more involved than a headshot, but not much. Also, because of employee turnover, businesses frequently need to shoot new headshots. The price you set with this job will be used when this client needs just one or two new shots next year. If you are working for businesses as a business, you need to get rid of the price model you have as a consumer and employee. As a business owner you will have a LOT more expenses, self-employment tax, no retirement matching, gear depreciation, etc. $1500 for a huge job like this is completely unsustainable. I often suggest people do a price survey for non-photographic business-to-business services as a way to reorient their pricing perspective. What would a commercial auto mechanic charge for a job that takes this long? How much do businesses pay for CAM (Common Area Maintenance) on their buildings? How much do they pay for HR software and support? Once you start doing this, you'll see that $10k for a job like this is not that much money, especially considering how much use a business is able to get from a headshot and how important they are.

I really couldn't get past the music. It's a horrible idea to have music auto-play. And if you MUST, it needs to remember that I turned it off so it doesn't start playing again every time I go to a new gallery. The music does not help your site in any way. The best case scenario is that somebody doesn't mind it; in all other cases it annoys people and many will immediately close your site rather than trying to find the off button.

<i>I'm using Adobe Kuler and even their RGB wheel using color rule "complementary" with value 255 0 0 gives green as complementary. <br /> Even Adobe are confused? </i> <p>Adobe seems to have made a conscious choice of using the painter's traditional primary scheme of RYB for Kuler. There's a discussion here: <a href="https://forums.adobe.com/thread/75007">https://forums.adobe.com/thread/75007</a>. <br> This choice leads to some weirdness, for example the hue angles reported don't correspond with the actual angle on the circle and the reported "complimentary" colors when mixed result in a third color rather than canceling each other out. </p>

JDM, I'm pretty familiar with the Berlin and Kay work. I think most people interpret the subject in terms of Prototype Theory — i.e. groups with the words blue and green in their vocabulary will form some agreement on the ideal blue, but where blue becomes green is less certain. There's a good overview here: http://www.blutner.de/color/Color_Words.pdf and a fun wikipedia article on cross-cultural blue-green terms here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_in_various_languages

Complimentary colors are those that when mixed together result in a neutral gray, white, or black. In an additive system like RGB this is really simple to figure out because mixing colors (i.e. adding colors) is as simple a adding the individual components together. If you want to know the complimentary color of this RGB (150, 0, 0) you simply supply the missing components that add up to neutral. In this case RGB (0, 150, 150), i.e. cyan. For something a little more complicated like RGB(150, 223, 20) you'll end up with RGB(73, 0, 203). If you set your info palette to HSB you'll see that these two colors have hue angles 180º apart. In other words they are on opposite sides of the color wheel. Photoshop's invert command does things a little differently — rather than adding up the nearest neutral color, it finds the color that adds up to white. So the invert of RGB (150, 223, 20) is (105, 32, 235), which when added together results in white. This causes light colors to invert to dark ones, but the hue angle still changes by 180º. You can confirm the additive math by setting two colors are individual layers (with no background layer) and switching the top layer to Linear Dodge (add). The result will be the sum of the layers. Put [150, 0, 0] on top of [0, 150, 150] and you'll get [150, 150, 150] Just keep in mind that by tying the concept of complimentary colors to the math of an actual color space, your complimentary colors are essentially device dependent. If the space is not perceptually uniform, the mathematically 'correct' complimentary colors in that space may not be visually complimentary. But in practice, it's going to be close enough for well behaved working spaces. Also keep in mind that the lexical categories in which we place colors is cultural. Not all languages agree where blue stops and green starts. Some languages use one word for both colors. So it's silly to argue about the exact line between magenta and red. It's a continuum that is arbitrarily segmented by our language.

<p>So many legal theories…unless I missed it, Richard didn't even say which state he is in. </p> <p>Contrary to internet lore, the subtitles of privacy laws differ fairly substantially from state to state. For example <a href="http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/CVR/5/51">New York's privacy law</a> governing the requirement for releases has this little gem: </p> <blockquote> …nothing contained in this article shall be so construed as to prevent any person, firm or corporation, practicing the profession of photography, from exhibiting in or about his or its establishment specimens of the work of such establishment, unless the same is continued by such person, firm or corporation after written notice objecting thereto has been given by the person portrayed. </blockquote> <p>Some states have similar clauses, others don't, which is why it's hard to get reliable information from the geographically diverse opinions that you will find on the internet.</p> <p>With that said, I agree that the studio should have followed through. But I think John H. has a pretty good point — It's hard to understand why you "chased down" the studio for a form you didn't intend to sign. If you didn't want to give consent, a simple 'no' would have been sufficient.</p>

Thanks Michael — that's my problem. I don't have an RFi speedring — I just have the old standard Profoto rings. I wanted to see if they had a different alignment before I spent a few hundred bucks buying the RFi rings.

I recently picked up a couple of Profoto 1x4 RFi strip boxes. I already have several of the standard Profoto speedrings (these: http://bhpho.to/Jz7T4C) that include holes marked 'strip' but assembling the box on these holes is tight enough to give me bruises, which makes me think they may not be in the correct location for these boxes. I'd rather not destroy the boxes with too much stress, but since I'm in Alaska I would also rather not ship up the RFi rings only to find them the same. Does anyone own both the original speedrings and the RFi rings? Can you confirm whether the placement of the (red) pins or the diameter of the ring is different between the two?