The Lighter Touch

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Lessons from "The Fall Guy, the Politician and the Photographer"

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Because most people don't have time to read through the 3 longish blogs that follow about the Orphan Works legislation in the UK's proposed Digital Economy Bill....

The Fall Guy - the end user of an image who somewhat innocently finds himself in hot water.

LESSON: Any so called Orphan is someone's copyright and most of those copyright holders will be overseas. There's every chance these copyright holders will want to disregard UK legislation that misappropriates what is theirs and act against innocent UK users of their images.

The Politician - the subject of an image who finds his orphan image being used in a way that would be embarrassing or hurtful to him

LESSON 1: Any image containing recognisable people or property should be absolutely excluded from being able to be used commercially as an orphan. Better still, all commercial use should be excluded. To be really safe, all use. Exclude photography from this legislation.

LESSON 2: Never rush through legislation, particularly when those rushing it through seem glibly unaware of the ramifications

The Photographer - the professional creator of many marvellous images who is in the digital age is taken for granted

LESSON 1: The UK legal system is already weighted against photographers getting fair compensation for the abuse of their intellectual property. Many dishonest people know that it pays to pilfer images.

LESSON 2: The Orphan Works proposals would make it totally time inefficient for a photographer to seek out compensation for Orphans used. If ever enacted, compensation should be at a multiple of the market rate to reflect that while many Orphan's will generate income for the government, few payments will have to be made to photographers.

CONCLUSION

What's interesting about this story is that everyone in a different way is a loser. Except the government. And time is never valued - except that of the lawyers.

Orphan Works - the Fall Guy, the Politician and the Photographer - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:37:00 +0000

Derek - The Fall Guy

Once upon a time the Times Online ran a piece on political makeovers which linked to a larger version - this image.

The larger image was 'borrowed' in 2004 by Terry who found it is a search on Google Images. Terry operated a local men's grooming website in the USA - he had no interest in who the guy in the photo was.

The guy in the photo was none other than Peter Mandelson (Official title The Rt Hon Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council) now (in 2010) sitting in the UK government's cabinet, a well know figure in the UK but not abroad. Terry also had no idea that Mandelson was one of the new breed of gay politicians who no longer hid details of his private life.

Flash forward to 2012..........

Derek, a 23 year old fashion graduate setting up his own business was desperate for an image for his website. Short of funds he could not afford to hire a model and photographer. He spent a couple of hours looking through the dollar an image 'microstock' stock websites searching on "handsome man moustache" and he saw no image that was right for him. He switched to Google Images and stumbled across Mandelson's photo that had been picked up by Google on Terry's website.

Perfect!

Derek wasn't interested in politics - he had a vague idea what Gordon Brown looked like & that Brown had surprisingly won the 2010 election but that was about it. He had been reading some designers' discussion boards on the web and some people there who were complaining about having to pay to use photos had heard of something called "Orphan Works".

He had read that Orphan Works was the new cheap way to get images that may otherwise cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds to use if acquired from legitimate sources.

He right clicked on the handsome man's image, looked at 'properties' and sure enough there was nothing there about any copyright holder. His first thought was 'perhaps there isn't one', but he wasn't that stupid. Off he went to the Orphan Works website and found out that the image would cost £30 at the size he wanted it for his website. This was far more than the dollar an image sites, but far less than the other sites where photos were far more expensive.

He discovered he had to do a 'diligent search' and the Orphan Works site provided some guidance. So off he went....

1. Google Images. He searched on "handsome man moustache" again - 157,000 results - and there it was, in the place he had already found it about 10 pages, 200 images in. But yes, this is where he got the image in the first place, Terry's site. He looked at another 20 pages, that's 600 images, thought to himself that's diligent enough and moved on to....

2. Getty Images - 81 images. Nothing. At least that was easy.

3. The dollar a photo 'micro' websites - 224 results, 330 images, 1566 images - he remembered he'd already looked there, and moved on.

4. Alamy.com - 328 images

He was getting a bit bored now and went on to try 5 more sites. He'd been diligent for 3 hours. He went back to the Orphan Works site, paid over his £30, ticked the "I've been diligent" box and took the image. He had read somewhere on an obscure page on the Orphan Works site that the image may have no 'model release' allowing commercial uses, but Derek thought to himself that any guy this dashing and handsome must be a male model and so must have allowed permission to use the image.

So Derek planted the image on the home page of his website for his new range of men's underwear aimed at the family man - his site's slogan was "Underwear to transform your sex life".

Three day's later he couldn't understand where the thousands of website hits were coming from. But no one was buying underwear. In fact the following week there were no less than 265,000 visitors. Wow, he thought, I've gone viral!

And then a letter from a big London law firm representing some guy called Lord Mandelson arrived on his doormat. And another from a US law firm babbling on a but statutory damages of $50,000 under US copyright law......

This is fictional. The lessons are real.

> The Politician
> The Photographer

Orphan Works - the Fall Guy, the Politician and the Photographer - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:34:00 +0000

Peter - The Politician

Mandelson was furious. The Intellectual Property Office was the government organisation that ran the Orphan Works website and they reported to him. All through the passage of the Digital Economy Bill the IPO had assured Mandelson that the worries of photographers were completely over the top. In enacting subsequent legislation Mandelson had taken them for their word, after all the stuff about 'embedded metadata' was really all too complicated and there was a real economy to rescue. He demanded to know how his photo could have been used in this way.

It was explained to him (gently) that not everyone knew who he was. People could be diligent about searching without being all knowing. Yes, searching on "Peter Mandelson" in line with IPO guidelines MAY have found the photographer's details but searching on "handsome man moustache" while arguably being sensible enough to be diligent (but in reality pretty stupid) plainly did not work.

Mandelson demanded to know whether the IPO had carried out controlled tests on real examples of "Orphan Works" to see whether the owner of the copyright of images stood a fair chance of being found, even say a 50% chance. Photographers had after all warned of the lack of any effective tools to do this. The IPO explained that the chances were nearer 0% of an image being found in a 'diligent search', the technology did not exist.

This started Mandelson worrying about other of the claims he remembered photographers making. He wanted to know about how successful photographers might be in locating an image on the Orphan Works register once it had been sold as an orphan.....

"Well", he was told, "there are 324,543 images already in the register so every photographer could expect to see some of their images there."
"So," he said, "how long might it take a photographer to look through all these images for one that may have been used?"
"Well, approximately 3 working days".
"And how much may they receive for their effort?"
"We decided on 50% of the fee we received sir"
"So in the case of my image, the photographer got £15"
"That's right sir"
"£15 for 3 days work for a photographer! That's about right."
"But photographers do have other facilities, sir. They can do a keyword search"
"You mean we keyword the images so that photographers can find them"
"Well, yes we keyword them but photographers don't find them - you see a photographer with 5000 different images would have to perform 5000 different searches using different terms to find a few actually used. After all they don't know which images have been used. That sort of search actually takes about a working week"
"So why keyword them"
"Well sir, image buyers who want an image of one subject usually have one search to make"
"So we are sort of running a photo library?"
"Yes minister"
"And does it make money?"
"Indeed minister. With more and more orphans, more and more people are giving up on traditional sources and coming to us to get their photos instead And so few photographers reclaim any money that we've been able to refurbish all the IPO's offices"
"So in fact it seems the scheme is working really well"
"Yes sir."
"Working well in every way except one. For me. HOW DID I FINISH UP BEING MADE A LAUGHING STOCK?"

This is fictional. The lessons are real.

> The Fall Guy
> The Photographer

Orphan Works - the Fall Guy, the Politician and the Photographer - Part 3 - The Photographer

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:30:00 +0000

Brian - the photographer

Somewhere in this story there is a real photographer. It would be nice to find him or her.

I've done a slightly more intelligent search on Getty Images editorial collection on Mandelson - 2437 results - Mandelson moustache - 0 results! Everything in colour and running five pages from the back and five from the front not a moustache anywhere to be seen. I tried Alamy - only 121 results - again no moustache.

Now that's not a diligent search. There is a real photographer out there but I'm going to have to create a fictional photographer and I'm going to call him Brian. And he's an American. Brian had for 5 years lived in the UK during the eighties and that was when he took Mandelson's photo. He was now represented by a large US based agency.

In 2012 Brian had been worried about the erosion of his income for years. He sensed that hundreds of his images were out there on the internet being used by people in many ways but there was no way to put a number on this and with billions of images on the internet and with rarely any 'metadata' telling search engines what they were about he know that searching was folly. When people copied and used his images they either purposely or accidentally stripped out this metadata.

Brian fully understood the economics for the casual image thief. He sensed that rather less than one in ten of all images stolen would come to the attention of the photographer. He knew that if pursued in the UK then the legal system worked in a way such that he only was able to recover the market value of that image after huge efforts in court. And the thieves always started from the viewpoint that such images were available for $1 on the 'micro' sites.

Brian reckoned that for the casual image thief with 10 images on a website, the off chance of one day having to pay market value for one image was a bargain. Orphan Works legislation had for him made no difference to this because like everything else it failed to place a proper value on his images (all were non-generic one offs) or his time. It failed to recognise that the statistics were stacked up against the photographer both in terms of a 'diligent' searcher's chances of finding him and his own chances of ever knowing that one of his images had been used as an orphan.

Under normal circumstances Brian would have no means to know that his image of Mandelson had been used without spending vast amounts of time on speculative searches - including the UK's Orphan Works Register. And if after all this time spent searching he found an orphan that was his then he had to go through a bureaucratic process to recover a fee. And because of the IPO's take on market value, the fee he received did not even properly allow Brian to recover the time costs of the form filling.

All he knew was that the UK government could take his intellectual property and sell it for a fee, taking the income which was rightfully his. The Orphan Works mechanism gave him no return for the time spent speculatively searching the register or even the real value of his image. And why should he have to think about all this anyway - it's another country!

Brian wondered how anyone could imagine that the Orphan Works legislation could help photographers even in the UK. Prior to the legislation the honest photo buyer would have at least have purchased a second best image from a library. Dishonest image users would not be influenced one iota and carry on as they always have, time spent in 'diligent' searching to be followed by a fee would hardly appeal to an image thief.

Brian understood the economics and statistics. It seemed evident to him that the whole pool of funds from the use of orphan images should be allocated fully to people who were able to claim copyright. But the reality was that the costs of the new bureaucracy would mean that the pool would be tiny.

The image was registered as copyright with the US copyright office. He and his agency would never have known about the use of Lord Mandelson's image had the story not gone viral. Brian occasionally discovered unauthorised uses of his images. And knowing that so few would be detected he followed up abuses vigorously using the strength of the US system.

A joint action was launched by Brian and his Agency to obtain compensation and statutory damages for the abuse of his copyright image. In the US such statutory damages could be $50,000 or more.....

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This is fictional. The lessons are real.

> The Fall Guy
> The Politician

Per image returns from Alamy slumping (or for me crashing!)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Following on from the last post, I've realised that the slow start to sales I've seen in 2010 (not talked about then because I thought it would turn around) is going to be set in place for a while yet. The reason? Not Alamy's decline this time but Alamy's system for ranking contributors' photos (Alamyrank) and I've noticed that just about every one of my images is now in the bottom rank, at the back end of searches. Shafted by an algorithm!

Perhaps other contributors have been feverishly slaving away improving the prioritisation of their keywords and have simply gone by me in the rankings while I've been sitting watching the money come in. With a re-ranking about every couple of months, on the showing so far my income may be one tenth of last year's unless I get back to where I was.

A month ago I made plans for increased effort on social networking and wrote about them here. The overhaul of my stock photo site is almost complete and I was preparing to substantially increase my efforts but now it seems that there's hard graft ahead sorting out Alamy. It may be 2 or 3 days work, which will probably take me 10 with all the other stuff going on, but there will be a substantial return, assuming I get it right.....

Per image returns from Alamy slumping

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:56:00 +0000

The stock photo portal Alamy have announced their trading results for the quarter to 31 December 2010, reported on in the British Journal of Photography. Their chief executive, James West, is pleased that the year on year decline in gross revenue is 13% against a background of an expected decline of about 15% to 20%, but it's worth looking behind the numbers, in particular one which Alamy do not publish, the revenue per image per annum.

I made a note of the 13.8m images online in October 2008 - today there are 18.03m stock photos up for licensing from the site. That's an almost 31 % increase in image numbers in just over a year. James West says nothing about what is expected for the current year but if sales stay flat (the final quarter's results being repeated throughout 2010) then Alamy will generate US$7.42m of sales.

Year.......Sales.......No. Images........Revenue per image p.a.

2009.......8.385m........15.6m............. US$0.54
2010........7.42m........18.03m.............US$0.41

I've done some back-of-the-envelope time averaging in there but these figures show an approximate 24% decline in revenue per image. With just over 40 cents going to Alamy for every image online, and at least 40% of that going as commission to Alamy, the return to the photographer is now about 24 cents per image per annum.

In Quarter 2 2008, Alamy sales peaked at US$2.937m. I then made a note of 12m images online. At the then Alamy commission of 35%, the return per image per annum to the photographer was about 64 cents per image per annum.

A decline from 64 cents to 24 cents per image per annum online in the space of about 2 years is a dramatic fall of 62.5%.

Alamy itself is still apparently profitable, costs being kept under control no doubt, but for the photographer who considers the time and costs invested against the likely return, this decline is substantial and I certainly have been submitting a lot fewer images in the last year or two.

My own return for 2009 on about 3,600 images was $1.20 per image, a sad decline from what was close to $3 per image in 2007. There must be an awful lot of photographers earning less than 24 cents per image per annum and that must mean an awful lot of disappointed people. But still they submit....

Dealing with a day's stock shoot (and a pricing diversion)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:05:00 +0000

Yesterday I went to Fulham to cover an area of London for which I have no stock photos - I finished up choosing 95 images which I've processed today and set up a Fulham stock photo collection on photoconnect which I'll be adding more photos to as I get time to upload them. The 95 images include some nice ones from Earls Court and a few from neighbouring Chelsea and I'll be dealing with those separately.

But beyond photoconnect - my own website which does really well on the search engines - what happens to the images? Firstly, I'll put them all on Flickr at high resolution as an online backup - that will be a long upload happening overnight. (Remember that these high resolution images cannot be accessed by Flickr pilferers!)

Next, I'll be selecting perhaps about 30, maybe 40, to go on Alamy. Why not all the images?

Well, some I know will not pass Alamy QC even though I can see they are perfectly good for most uses. If you supply images directly yourself then you don't have to be quite so anal about QC - if someone tells me that an image is wanted quarter page for a newsletter then almost anything will do and if I've got what somebody needs then I'm not going to withhold it because it would not make some external entity's QC test. If the client's happy that's fine by me.

Other images will be of marginal sales potential, even on Alamy. They are very quick to get onto Photoconnect but Alamy, well I judge they are just not worth the effort.

Finally there may be 4 or 5 suitable for iStock. I've been running a little experiment to really understand what microstock is about and one thing it's taught me is that it's really quite difficult to get suitable images for microstock in cities because of their rigid criteria for the absence of people, logos etc. And also quality control is rather tighter than Alamy and image loading is a pain, so although I'm now pretty confident on the what makes £'s on micros front it's not many images that makes the extra effort worthwhile.

[A stock photo pricing diversion - the fact that 90% of the images I get could never be acceptable to microstock agencies underlines the value of regular RM imagery. I'll return to this theme again and again in future posts but to just hint at what is happening in the market I'll run a search on 'Fulham' on iStock and on Alamy....

iStock - 5 results
Alamy - 1160 results (without mine!)

This effect can be seen in many, many subject areas. It's the total oversupply of RM images which pushes down the value of RM images, not microstock prices. Of course this does not apply in the case of the RF photo of the nice, smiling girl wearing a headset against a white background, but that's a nasty commercial image. For regular editorial stock it's the RM editorial agencies competing against each other that are to blame. Not microstock.

And so to return to Alamy. Because no other Agency has the range of images that Alamy has, it should not have to have its RM prices sucked down endlessly by microstock (for sure) or even by the RM collections of the Gettys of this world. Or at least this should not happen to the truly rare images that are in the collection. But Alamy is an an automated selling machine that cannot differentiate the one off from the mass. If as a photographer you know you've hit gold with an image then you don't take it to an agency with standardised pricing models. You deal with it some other way - if you can find the buyer..... ]

Anyway, no gold in yesterday's shoot, but hopefully enough to make the day worthwhile!

The image above is a random one I like (but will probably never sell) from Earls Court at the end of the day.

Social networking? A photographer make a plan.....

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:53:00 +0000

With the January blitz to get the accounts completed and tax returns filed over (I do the wife's as well!) there's a real feeling that this is the start of a new year. I always leave the tax until the last moment because January always is a quiet period for business - but this year it seems that February is quiet too. The Light Touch website has been reorganised and updated with my latest work; should I hit my usual quiet period standby - stock photography - or invest some time in marketing?

The latter it is - prompted by the people at Photoshelter putting together a guide "Social Media for Photographers" which allows someone like me who to various degrees has dabbled at social networking to join the dots and dive in and test the water properly. But will this activity achieve anything when it comes to marketing Scott the assignment photographer?

And where am I right now anyway?

Over at photoconnect.net is my stock photography site. Although it's clunky (I put it together myself) it's notably successful at ranking very well in all the search engines. Plonk the phrases "stock photography London", "stock photos Paris" "stock photos Florence" (and countless others) into the search box and photoconnect turns up at number one in the rankings. This is despite the fact that for the last 2 years or so I have rather neglected the site.

Can social networking take buyers of stock photography directly to photoconnect and further improve it's ranking in the search engines?

Here at Light Touch I have never put any real effort into pushing myself at Google. Too many competitors I have told myself. But the competitors for photoconnect are multinational behemoths who dominate the stock photo industry. Should I not be able to mix it with the little guys and do well for simple terms like "commercial photographer London"? Blogging will help, if I can write content that you want to read - and link to - but can social networking also help me market my photography services directly to people and businesses in and around London?

Let's look at the possible components of social networking, dealing first with those analysed in some depth by the photoshelter paper...

Blogging

This is it. As a photographer I should be informative, witty, controversial - make YOU want to read me, make YOU want to link to me. This is easy to write but desperately difficult to implement. WHO SHOULD YOU BE ANYWAY? Photographers can write stuff to interest other photographers (which I suspect you are) - but perhaps I should be writing for an existing or potential client base? I need to deal with the issue of whether I need to produce a much broader blog. Broader blogging means more time and effort invested. Is it worth it?

This article is not a final plan; it's going to ask questions. Perhaps the other social media outlets will allow me to bring existing and potential photography clients into the mix?

Twitter

I'm 'scotthortop' on Twitter, which asks "What's happening?" and I have 140 characters to let people know....

"So Yuri know who is on Alamy - http://tinyurl.com/yg8r2xr. Let me see, shall I pay £255 or £5 for a photo of that smiling face?"

I posted that a few seconds ago. It's not necessarily going to mean anything to you but for some it will cause some thinking about stock photography ethics and the state of the industry. However with only 7 followers right now I thoroughly expect nobody to relate to it at all!

Apparently Twitter is used by photographers to communicate with clients and prospective clients. I've used it a little and think I 'get' Twitter - sending out ("tweeting" - hate that expression) short snappy statements ("tweets") about what's going on is a way of unobtrusively connecting with all sorts of people. I'm not sure right now about how to gather 'followers' but photoshelter has just published a list of photographers using twitter so that seems a reasonable place to start.

I've just stumbled into 'tweetphoto' by commenting on an image by Chase Jarvis. I didn't expect the comment to be 'tweeted' to all my 'followers' but this has happened and I may have to be more professional with my comments in future! But certainly I can see some scope for using this as a tool to gain followers so getting images in front of potential new clients.

What am I going to post about? Commercial shoots, stock shoots, shooting for fun, microstock, photo industry, ethics, freedom to photograph on the streets; I might get a bit political with the election coming on. But I don't think I'll be tweeting about personal stuff, my sense right now is that sort of things is the domain of Facebook.....

Facebook

Here my username is scott.hortop and I'm meant to be answering the question "What's on your mind?". But Facebook is not a narrow tool as is Twitter and for many it's THE way of interacting socially on the web. I think that makes it an unusual place to make the sort of insightful professional comment that may go down well on Twitter. But I'm wiser for using it - in certain ways! For example I know that my daughter at university in Birmingham drank far too much Red Bull last night and did not sleep a wink.

I've been using Facebook for a while. As soon as I plugged I quickly found invitations to be a friend from people who I know or perhaps once knew and don't want to know again. To date I've only invited two people to be my 'friend' - perhaps that has to change?

A fundamental point which I've missed out on so far is to build a 'fan page' for my business. While only people I allow can become friends, anyone can become a 'fan' so people interested in my photography but with whom I have no personal connection can start to follow me. Alongside twitter it seems to be a good way of launching selective promotions that I would not want to broadcast on Light Touch itself.

How does one get in touch with these people who might become fans? Through Facebook groups it seems. And you can even create your own group.....

Linkedin

Like Facebook, I was dragged into Linkedin quite a while ago by an email request I received. With 4 contacts I'm even further behind than I am on Facebook and have even less of a clue as to what is going on. It seems a very DRY place to be, well this is social networking for professionals!

But I'm probably doing it a disservice - there are groups here too it seems, including "Photo Industry Professionals " and "Professional Photography". And a LinkedIn company page to push my business.

It seems that blog posts and Twitter postings can be fed into Linkedin - it must be worth finding out how they all interact.

Flickr

Here I am on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/scotthortop/ - I pay $25 a year for a 'professional' account and that is a bargain for what I get which above all else is the ability to backup, in minimal compression high resolution .jpg, any photo I wish.

What I like about Flickr is the huge control it gives me over access to photos. I can hide from everyone any or all my photos if I wish. Or share certain images with 'friends' or 'family' groups only. And even if I've uploaded a high resolution version for safekeeping I can ensure that only a 500px version is viewable by the public.

Many see the social element of Flickr as the giving and taking of comments on images. And indeed there are many images with lots of praise simply because the photographer has gone out of his way to praise many others. So I can connect with other photographers but I'm not quite sure where that aspect will get me.

Flickr can pull in IPTC info to create tags so the images get found in searches. Indeed, I've had contacts in respect of the limited number of stock photos on the site but no sales. In fact there's more interest here than on photoshelter despite rather fewer images for a shorter period of time.

Photoshelter

Worth a mention because they would like me to convert my basic $9.99 per month account into something costing there times that as a centrepiece for everything, including it seems social networking. And their paper is very helpful.

With photoshelter, everything is nicely presented but I'm still not convinced. Clunky old photoconnect seems to do the SEO business and that and Light Touch shall continue for now to be the main online presences. When photoshelter is a little less USA-centric especially providing a base for print sales to the UK and not just America (three options, we just want one!) then I might be sold.

So is this a plan? Not in detail, no, I need to learn more from using these social media. Not a plan maybe, but a statement of intent.

And there are no targets set, although if I don't get one new client directly recruited from the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn axis then I'll be very disappointed. Similarly if the number of unique new visitors to each of photoconnect and Light Touch from search engines does not double I'll think of these efforts as a failure. There, I have targets!

Don't buy photography, harvest from Flickr!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:59:00 +0000

After finding an image used out of context I've removed permission from Flickr for outside programs to be able to search their database in respect of my photography. It seemed harmless in getting exposure but if as a result photos get used inappropriately then that's a no-no. So it's goodbye to the 'API'.

That does not prevent humans from searching my images. I had a contact today from a major online travel guide to use an image from Cambridge. For free. But they would link to the image on Flickr....

Well, the news is that photographers don't earn a living by getting links to Flickr. A link to my site would be of some value and given the tiny scale of the image they use would not be too much of a sacrifice for me. It would help my Google ranking because they are themselves a well ranked site. But a Flickr link is a waste.

But the other killer is that they set out a license agreement that includes words "royalty free" to "use" on their website. Either their lawyers are being tricksy in including the words "royalty free", or incompetent. So no thanks.

In bath, for new year

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:41:00 +0000

IMG_0506
Originally uploaded by Scotty "H"

Sorry, the should read in Bath, or even more accurately in a Clarks shoe shop which is the sort of thing one does when it's a) chucking it down outside and b) Shirley has to take back a pair of shoes.

Both a) and b) seem to happen a lot.

Later we hope to go to the baths in Bath. I strongly suspect that I will not be able to take my camera.

I've posted a few pics to Flickr (follow the link in the pic) caught out in the rain but the weather is looking good for the first few days of the next decade so Scott the photographer should see some extensive photo action on the streets.

All the best for 2010 to anyone reading this!

Happy Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:04:00 +0000

20090202-_MG_0123
Originally uploaded by Scotty "H"

My Christmas image this year is one that I capture back in February when the snows hit my home town village in Surrey, here in the UK. It sold on Alamy a few weeks ago and was used double spread by a German magazine.

Best wishes to everyone.

Scott

Edward Davey MP; saving money on postage?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:35:00 +0000

I moved house in October, out of Kingston where Gerald Davey was my MP, into Worcester Park (haven't a clue, but probably a Tory).

My post is redirected. I received a letter from the Post Office stating that there's a letter waiting for me with underpaid postage. Thinking it might be something important I duly paid £1.30 to receive.... a letter from Gerald Davey. It had no postage at all on the envelope - but what was more interesting is the statement inside stating "Printed and delivered at no cost to the taxpayer".

Quite right about no cost to the taxpayer - I paid to have this junk mail delivered! And £1 over the odds. I went to his website on 1 December and wrote the nice balanced email....

"Edward,
I have just received your letter "produced and delivered at no cost to taxpayers". But this was after having to pay the Post Office £1.30 to find out who had sent me, my wife and daughter a letter with insufficient postage applied.
So should I have received it for free? Have the Post Office got this wrong?
I look forward to hearing from you
Scott"

Surprise! I've still to get a reply.....

Terror photographers use mobile phones - video evidence emerges!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:53:00 +0000

Further to my suggestion a couple of posts ago that terrorists do not carry around cameras with large lenses on tripods to carry out 'hostile reconnaissance' but are far more likely to use a mobile phone, it's good to see that the police already know this and have just published footage of a 'suspected terror cell' in action. I just hope that the same footage will now be used in police training.

See BBC article on terror cell photographers in action.

Aside from the size of the camera I would also suggest that the longer a photographer loiters with a camera in a location fiddling knobs, aligning tripod legs and generally doing things that seem a complete waste of time the more likely the person is likely to be a photographer. A terrorist would be someone who moves into position, whips out the camera phone, takes a quick shot and then moves off.

Hopefully such points are made in training because to the extent they are not, or not acted on in the field, it means that police (and just as worryingly) security people are getting distracted and simply missing the correct targets. One day it may cost lives.

The Hope and Anchor, Islington

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:41:00 +0000

The Hope and Anchor, Islington
Originally uploaded by Scotty "H"

Had a night out last night to see the band Kismetik, led by Gerard who I know through friends. It took me back to the late seventies and early eighties when I remember seeing Doctor Feelgood here in a memorable packed gig.

I was trying out my Canon G11 while my chum and fellow photographer David Luckins was trying out a nice new 50mm f1.8 on his Sony DSLR. I've loaded his and my best images to Flickr. Follow the link behind the image to see the gig photos on Flickr.

Christ Church, Greyfriars, London

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:59:00 +0000

Went out shooting on the streets today. I could not resist taking photos of this magnificent church (by Wren) but this ugly bank building was in the way.

Panic on the streets of London

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:45:00 +0000

Just got myself a little Canon G11 and I'm going to hit the streets of London tomorrow to test it out. It's going to be nice not having to lug the heavy DSLR gear around but will it produce images that will be acceptable to the various image libraries to which I contribute photos?

We'll find out.

But many of the images I get will fit firmly in the 'arty street photography' category and because I will not have a 'big camera' I'm unlikely to attract anybody's attention.

The Guardian are picking up a story today of the photographer Grant Smith being descended upon by no less than seven police officers in four vehicles after daring to take pictures of a church that happened to be adjacent to the London offices of Bank of America / Merrill Lynch. The story also has been dealt with in the online edition of the British Journal of Photography, here and here.

What never ceases to amaze me is that IF terrorists wanted images of this American bank then would they not choose to get them surreptitiously using LITTLE cameras or more likely MOBILE PHONES knowing that security staff incredibly only seem to pick on people with BIG cameras.

In fact they really need not even visit the street at all when there are already hundreds of photos of Bank of America London on sites like Flickr and Alamy!

So what really is in the head of the security people? It was the bank's security who called the police, wasting their time when the police could have been pursuing bank robbers or real terrorists even. My feeling is that security people are bored and want to push their weight around. And from his own account of events, Grant Smith was having none of that.