Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images

Subtitle: How to do a Photo Contest wrong.

Picture: Fall colors on grape vine leaves in autumn, vineyard in Alexander Valley, near Asti, Sonoma County Wine Growing Region, California

Twice in this last week I saw a request related to a Photo Contest for the Verde Valley Wine Trail in Arizona. The reason it caught my attention was because I’d shot a book called the Backroads of the California Wine Country. So anytime I see something about wine or vineyards, my antennae goes up a notch or three. The second time I came across the mention of this contest, I decided to take a look. (Pause for dramatic effect.) Ugh!

From Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “Can you smell it? That smell? The smell of Mendacity?” OK, maybe not mendacity, but a blatent attempt by an organization to garner free photos for their own promotional use. The first thing I like to do in a case like this is to see the type of images an organization is currently using to promote itself, since it’s apparent they want either “more” or “better”. See for yourself what images they’re currently using to promote the area as an attraction. Compare those pics to my images of California Vineyards. OK, no comparison. My bad.

That was “ugh # 01″ – now look at the rules for “ugh # 02″ :

Upon submission all photo entries become the property of the Cottonwood Chamber of Commerce. Contestants grant the Cottonwood Chamber of Commerce unlimited usage and unrestricted rights of any photograph submitted for the contest regardless of whether or not it is a winning entry. They reserve the right to use the photos in printed or on-line materials and for educational, informational, and promotional purposes without paying compensation to the photographers or the subjects.

Oh, the thrill… Translation: it’s the ‘ol “we can use your photos however we want, even if they don’t win, AND we don’t have to pay you one bloody red cent” line.

(Drum roll) Ugh! # 03 – they don’t even have any prizes listed yet. You’ll win something, but that part is “coming soon.”

L-A-M-E-! (eye’s rolling)

Come on, folks. If you want good images to promote your business, attraction, or area, hire a real photographer. Heck, they can even hire me.

Who knows, maybe “looking good” isn’t that important for a Chamber of Commerce trying to promote area tourism?

Picture: Students volunteer to run a Beach Clean Up Day sign up table at Oceano State Beach, Oceano, San Luis Obispo County coast, California

One question I’m always asked is how I save all of my photos. As I continue to work through a multitude of projects, I spent part of the weekend “archiving” a collection of images from my last book project. Now, this isn’t going to be a technical post of different types of RAID Hard Drive arrays. Rather, what I mean by “Archive” is how I appoach the strategy of long-term storage of my digital photo files.

Back in the days of slides, it was easy; Long-term storage was simply a four-drawer file cabinet. The trick now is to take all of my digital files, and treat them like something I’d file away in a ‘virtual’ electronic four-drawer filing cabinet. Yet I have to balance that approach with the worry that at any time, any one of my electronic hard-drives could fail, or in more technical terms, go “Poof!” To protect against that, I use both external Hard Drives and offsite media, i.e. DVD’s.

This weekend I Archived a collection of 540 images from the Central Coast of California. In this batch, the 30Gb of TIFF Files get archived on an external HD set up, as do the 5GB of HiRes Level 12 JPEG Copies. I then Burn two sets of each set (TIFF & JEPG) onto DVD’s. In this case, it took seven DVD’s for the TIFF’s and two for the HiRes JPEGS – per set. The total was 18 DVD’s which I burned bit by bit throughout the weekend. One set will live with me, and the other set gets sent to an offsite location about 10 miles away.

Finally, as one added step of insurance, I take many of the HiRes JPEGS and store them on my Archive site, so that if for any reason my office was unusuable, clients could still access thousands of my HiRes files.

Once my images live in at least three or four separate locations, then I can feel secure that my images have been properly archived.

Picture: Cal-Fire firefighters and forest fire. Courtesy: Michael Routh / Smoke Chaser Photography

And speaking of (shameless plug) my Facebook page from my last post, I want to balance the universal karma equation by giving a very selfless, and hugely well-earned plug to Michael Routh, and his new endeavor, Smoke Chaser Photography. He also has a new Facebook page, and I’m sure he’d love to have a few new fans join him and follow his work.

Michael first came to me as a consulting client a good number of years ago. Since then, he has become one of my best friends, as well as a tremendously-improved and talented photographer. But more importantly, Michael has done exactly what so many people wish they could do; chase their dreams. In fact, as a result of his pure determination and passion, he is now one of only two officially Cal-Fire sanctioned and approved photographers in the whole state of California. Even though he’s just started, his work has been picked up and used by newspapers and television stations.

Congratulations, Michael. I hope everyone will take a chance to visit his new web site, and follow him on Facebook.

Picture: Tourists atop a cliff on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon near Yavapai Point, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

I hope everyone here in the U.S. had a wonderful Labor Day holiday weekend. I’m now, like my kids, fully back into the grind after our summer vacation.

Those that know me are well aware that I’m not one to just jump on any new bandwagon. This could be software like operating systems, or photo production programs, or it could be the latest audio-video gizmos. But like shrinking cell phones that were once akin to portable bricks, there comes a time when you realize you have to take the plunge and just dive in. Such has been the experience that I’ve been having processing images with Lightroom. The pain of the learning curve is starting to wear off, and I think I’m finally learning to swim in this new environment.

If you’d like to see a few more of the images that I’ve been processing, I’ve been posting some of them over on my Facebook Business page. If you’re on Facebook, please feel free to join me over there as well.

Picture: Sunlight on cliff formations inside the Grand Canyon, from the South Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

OK, by saying “cutting through”, I suppose I should have posted an image that at least had the Colorado River in it, since it’s actually the river that cuts through the Grand Canyon. I meant a more photographer-literal cutting through. This is the first batch of personal images where I am using Lightroom (v.2) instead of the Photoshop & Adobe Camera Raw to process the images. So for me, this is all about learning the Lightroom program, especially what I like & don’t like. I feel like I am trying to plow my way through a feels of weeds using a weed-hacker. …. Slow & Steady.

As for the photo above, it seems that every time I’ve been to the Grand Canyon, about half of my photos are these type of landscape ‘details’, where the concentration and interest for me is on the playful border between light, land, and shadow.

More to come later. But for now, I hope you enjoy this.

Since I was gone for a week, there are a few extra links to explore, as a few are slightly older posts or ones that I found before I left town. I hope you enjoy them.

From Black Star Rising: 18 Tips for Being a Photography Original – With the premise that “the future of photography is in original, exclusive content”, photographer Paul Melcher gives a good list of Do’s and Don’ts on how to stand out & add value to your images and ideas. I did disagree with at least one of his 18 points, namely # 16.

Also from Black Star Rising; an older post: Should You Go Pro — or Keep Photography as a Hobby? What one photogapher / teacher tells his students about whether to go pro, or keep it as a fun ’sideline’.

From APhotoEditor: Selling Stock Independently – Following on the heels of Art Wolfe’s recent announcement that he’s taking control over the sale of his stock images, Rob Haggart puts up a nice post about the dream most photographers have of being their own ‘agency’. As per many of his posts, a lot of good discussion is to be had in the comments section.

From Thomas Hawk: Think You Can Rip Someone’s Image From the Internet and Use it For Free? Think Again, You Just May End Up Sued and Lose – File this one as a great story on how it ’should’ be. Why ’should’? Because as a couple commenters note, this lawsuit for unauthorized use was heard and awarded by a local small claims court.

From John Mireles and the Photographers Toolkit: Ounce of Prevention, Commercial Clients – written “in the hopes of helping you to avoid future hassles, expense and day-late, dollar-short solutions. If you’re like many readers of the Business Coach, you’re a wedding photographers who really doesn’t do commercial work. However, you will find yourself doing some from time to time and that can easily lead to trouble unless you’re prepared.”

From Harry Nowell: Exposed! :: Five Myths of the Photo Business :: A nice little read; reminded me of Brad Templeton’s famed 10 Myths about Copyright.

From Professional Photography 101.com: Email marketing for photographers – photography emailers and photographer promotions. A good primer on the subject that hits a lot of the key points and considerations.

From Adam Barker Photography: An Inside Look at Shooting Outdoor Stock Imagery – If you ever wanted to know what goes through the mind of photographers while they’re vacationing in the great outdoors, this is a good post to check out. Reminds me of my own personal saying, “If the alarm clock goes off in your tent at 4:00am, it’s work, dammit!”

Bonus Links:

From Marc Silber & SilberStudiosTV: Check out this brief video with marketing guru Guy Kawasaki where he talks about how photographers need to cut through the “noise”, and some lessons from his days at Apple.

Finally: I’ve had this on my Professional Business Resources page for awhile, but someone else recently posted the link so I’d thought to share it as well. Check out the Cost of Doing Business Calculator courtesy of the NPPA. Plug in your numbers & see where you’re at.

Picture: Elk in river during wildfire, Bitterroot National Forest in Montana; credit: John McColgan / Alaska Fire Service

Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve watched as photos have gone ‘viral’. In the Internet age, that means that photos receive immediate and widespread recognition and distribution on web sites across the globe. If you’re a photographer whose photo happens to go viral, the joyous side of the equation is that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may see your image. The one thing that always scares me about the viral nature of such instances is how we as photographers risk loosing complete control over how our images are used, where they might appear, or that they may even be turned into some other derivative type of artwork with absolutely no credit, attribution, or any other means of tracing the original image back to it’s origin or creator.

Viral means Exposure. If you’re an amateur photographer, and never thought to make money from your photos, it must be an awesome sense of pride to be able to strut your wings and say, “I took that.” However, if you’re a professional photographer, the exposure and any potential profit from an image going viral must be weighed against the risk of lost profits due to uncounted unauthorized or derivative uses. (Derivative means someone who either transforms or uses a portion of your art, and incorporates it into their art.)

Let’s look at a few examples, starting first with the above image, one that I’m sure everyone has seen before. It turns out that this image is in the Public Domain, having been taken while an employee of a US government agency, John McColgan of the Alaska Fire Service, was working in the course of his normal job activity. As they said in old newsprint parlance, “Read all about it!” As a Public Domain image, anyone can use this image (with proper credit) whether it’s for a blog post, poster, puzzle, calendar, greeting card, packaging, or even a full scale national ad campaign, any of which can result in thousands of dollars worth of sales to the end user, – except perhaps the blog post.

Of the two recent examples of going viral, the first would be considered as “mildy viral”, meaning pretty active, but not quite the global millions of views. A photographer I know recently posted an image on Flickr. At somepoint, someone posted a link to a large version of his image on one of the social bookmarking sites, DIGG.com. The next thing you know, he claimed he was getting a 1000 views a minute. I’m a fairly natural skeptic, so my first thought was, “Now this I want to see.” And sure enough, by refreshing his flickr page, I could see the views climbing by nearly 1000 views a minute.

On seeing this, the first thought is about what great exposure to be getting this kind of response to one of your photos; like a fine feather in your cap. On the flip side, the photographer had no watermark on his image, and only his name as the sole bit of metadata. Also, in looking over the comments, I was struck by comments that basically said, “Nice, but can we have a Hi Res version.” It seemed obvious that these people had clearly more use in mind than simply looking at the image on their computer screen, or leaving it in the original context. I was left to wonder how many people were there that didn’t ask, but simply took what was available to them under the guise of “If it’s on the Internet, It’s Free.”

We also know that many programs and web photo sites strip metadata, so without a watermark, there is virtually no way for someone to track back whose image that is once someone lifts it off wherever, reposts it elsewhere, or sticks it in an email and sends it off to two hundred of his/her closest friends. (And they send it again to two hundred of their closest friends, etc..) From a professional photographer stand point, this represents a huge potential loss of control regarding how or where your image is used. And with the impending Orphan Works Legislation, it’s even more important than ever to have your source of origin easily identified.

The last example was posted originally on the NGS Your Shot webpage, of a vacationing couple who happened to catch a case of squirrellus interuptus. (Aug. Week 1; image #9) Whammo! It goes Viral. Now there is a website where you can add this exact squirrel to any one of your photos. That’s a clear case of derivative artwork creation, and technically requires the photographers permission. Do you think they have that? Did the creators want to keep the value of the photograph for themselves, or do you think tht they knowingly released it under a Creative Commons License? Do you even think they had a clue about any of this when they first uploaded the photo?

I know that on the NGS Site, by uploading content, you are giving the National Geographic a Worldwide Royalty Free License. (”Free”, as in they don’t even have to pay you, free.) What would be the value for that kind of license for NGS, or even of use on the Squirrelizer site? For the latter, if you’re thinking of saying it doesn’t really matter because the squirrel represents such a small portion of the overall photograph, you’d be falling pray to one of the more common copyright myths. Technically, it’s the importance of an element that counts more than the percentage used that a court will consider if they have to determine damages for unauthorized use. For others, see also: 10 Myths about Copyright.

Picture: Worlds most scenic squirrel shower, near Mount Shasta, California

Opps, did I just violate a copyright? Oddly enough, on the Squirrelizer page you can read the following: “Disclaimer: the website owner takes no responsibility for the content of images processed by this website. Known images of obscene or copyright infringing content will be removed immediately. Please report any such images to the email address above.” I’m almost willing to bet that the squirrel itself is copyright infringing content.

So my question to those that read this far: How do you feel? Would you like to see your photo go viral and have gosh knows how many people posting wherever or doing whatever they want with your image, or would you rather it not go viral and maintain better control? For me: I wouldn’t mind if an image went Viral, but only as long as the image was featured with a prominent watermark; i.e. let’em know who I am and how to find me. And since you can’t count 100% on metadata or credit lines, the watermark is really the best insurance of being found if you get caught up in the virus world. Agree? Disagree? I welcome your opinions.

Picture: Layers of the land as seen in the late afternoon from Lipan Point, South Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

It’s been a couple days now since I got home from the Grand Canyon. I’m still playing Daddy Day-Care for the remainder of this week, which explains the delay in my posting this.

I wanted to call this post, “Tourists are Idiots”, but since I was primarily playing tourist on this trip, I didn’t want to paint myself with such an accurate label. I had another idea for a good post title, but I’ll save that for a few moments.

This was a special trip for me, in that it was the first time I spent a week traveling with my kids, without my wife, and previous to this, I don’t think my wife has spent any more than three days away from her offspring. Of course, they’re all used to me being gone for a week or two at a time, but this was quite the roll reversal. I will say right off the bat that the three of us had a great time, the kids were 97% well-behaved, which happily exceeded my expectations.

We spent three days camping at the South Rim of the Grand Central, err… Grand Canyon. My son, Brandon, kept saying he wanted to go swim in the Colorado River. Since we weren’t prepared or in-shape enough to hike down, I drove them to Lees Ferry for an afternoon swim in the surprisingly cold waters before driving the 125 miles back to camp. I’ve never had to, nor do I ever plan to drive over 200 miles to take my kids swimming again. But the benefits were that the kids got to see a good look at some of the Navajo Nation lands.

The only downer on the whole trip was the impetus for the second title thought; “How many chicken bones does it take to fill the Grand Canyon?” On one of the evenings when my kids and I were taking sunset photos right near the El Tovar Lodge, we came across a family having a picnic dinner right on the edge of an overhanging rock. The dad, munching away on his chicken pieces made a show out of hurling his eaten chicken bones over the edge like it was a huge garbage can. Let’s all say it together: “What an Idiot!” It reminded me of the time I saw a woman feeding an animal five feet away from a “do not feed the animals” sign, or the driver that stops traffic by parking their car smack in the middle of the road to take a picture of a deer.

Oh well. I hope the take-away lesson for my kids was how to be a responsible and respectful tourist, and as always, teach them about the importance of minimal impact on the landscape.

Picture: Rainbow and sunlight from the South Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Pop Quiz; What’s the most obvious vacation spot to go to after you’ve already fallen off a cliff once this year. A: The Grand Canyon, of course! That’s right, my psycho brain has determined that my ideal vacation spot that calls out to me should be a place almost entirely filled with super-high deadly cliffs.

Actually, I’m headed off for a week for a first-time adventure to take my kids someplace really special for their summer vacation. It’s because of my fall in February and the resulting hospital stay that wiped out a lot of the funds we would have used so the kids could do daycamp with their friends. Instead, they got stuck staying home with Daddy for a good chunk of the summer. This is my present to them for having had a kind of lack-luster summer.

In addition, this is the first time that it will be just me and the kids going off by ourselves. To make it a true adventure, just like one of my photo trips, all we have is a destination, and a time when we need to be back. We have no reservations for anything, or anywhere. My mind is already racing with “we could go here, we could do this…”. But whatever we do, it will be off-the-cuff and spur of the moment.

The real test will be seeing how well they do when I wake their butts up at 5:00am for sunrise shoots, with granola bars and gatorade for breakfast. No hanging out in the hotel or camper while Daddy goes to take pictures on this trip. Nope; this time they’re coming with me every step of the way.

Wish me luck, both in dealing with the kids, and the cliffs.

Picture: Sandstone Reflection at The Wave, Coyote Buttes, Paria – Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona

The current issue of Photo District News (Aug. ‘09) has been sitting on my office desk for the last week, unopened and unread. That is until today, when I got an email from a different magazine editor congratulating me on having my photo published in PDN as a finalist in the 2009 Great Outdoors Photo Contest, and would I be interested in making a submission to their publication? (That’s one of those, “Um, …yeah. Duh.” questions.) Sure enough, there is a whole section featuring the winners of each category along with a selection of finalists.

For those outside of the industry, Photo District News is a magazine on the business of photography. It’s a real treat to be both published in the magazine, as well as along side a whole bunch of other great featured images. If you happen to subscribe to the magazine, I hope you’ll keep an eye out for it.

You can see the image larger by clicking on the photo.