Damian might want to swap his Sigma 500mm for something more inconspicuous. It seems law enforcement around the world are on the lookout for anyone taking photographs.
Many would assume the men are tourists taking in the city’s sights, but law enforcement officials say they could be terrorists staking out possible targets.
The scenarios were described at an anti-terrorism town hall meeting last week hosted by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. The meeting, held at Cordova’s First Assembly of God Church, was one of four public meetings that occurred in conjunction with Operation Sudden Impact, a new local anti-terrorism initiative.
“You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing,” said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.
Is it just me or is this asking for trouble? Rather than working on reports of actual suspicious activity (setting off alarms is mentioned later, surely that is a bigger sign?), they will be inundated with calls about families snapping vacation shots?
More worrying, with the “war on fluids”, can you imagine what might happen if you are spotted with a DSLR and are supping from a liquid container greater than 20ml?
Street photography is safe and legal in a public, outdoor space in the UK, right? Right? Um … check out this tale of brave and intelligent security guarding on Flickr
Two security guards from the nearby shopping center THE MALL came running over, we were surrounded by six hostile and aggressive security guards. They then said photographing shops was illegal and this was private land. I was angry at being grabbed by this man so i pushed him away, one of the men wearing a BARGAIN MADNESS shirt twisted my arm violently behind my back, i winced in pain and could hardly breathe in agony. A policewomen was radioed and came over to question the two suspects ( the total detaining us had risen to seven, a large crowd had now gathered)
I for one am proud of our brave security goons officers for their ignorance vigilance in abusing protecting our citizens from the horrors of photography.
Read the full horror on the flickr page, and see what one of these asshat security dudes looks like.
/Film has an article on some clever reality-Star Wars mashup photographs that look really cool, in an extremely geeky way!
French photographer Cedric Delsaux has created a series of photos where he puts Star Wars characters and vehicles and transplants them into modern day urban locations.
I quite like the idea of Jabba and Mr Fett stalking around abandoned warehouses and concrete car parks. Great concept and nicely implemented.
According to TechCrunch a version of Picasa for Apple Macs will be coming along later:
I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.
This is great news, one of the applications I miss from the PC is Picasa. I had really gotten into the workflow and nothing I have found since works the same way. While iPhoto and Aperture are well loved by many, and I have Photoshop Elements which kinda does the job, Picasa was what I had gotten used to.
And it is free, which shouldn’t be overlooked!
You might say I am looking forward to this. Let’s hope they do a good job integrating into the mac experience rather than just port over a subset of the functionality.
Viewfinder is a project from the University of Southern California that promises to allow you to see your pictures in context within a 3D Google Earth scene. It’s not ready to try out but the demos are very impressive.
Here is what they say about it:
“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth
That doesn’t really make much sense until you watch the video and then it becomes much more exciting!
The eagle-eyed readers at DSLR User have spotted a possible slip of the keys as Olympus may have outed the E-520 by accident!
“So that you don’t need to carry a heavy tripod or invest extra money into every single stabilised lens, Olympus integrated a built-in image stabiliser into the camera body of the E-3, E-510 and E-520. It stabilises up to 5 EV steps (up to 4 EV steps with the E-510 and E-520), making it the most effective solution on the market.”
The site has been changed but a cached version of the page can be seen by clicking here
The 10 mp touting E-3 is a friendly little critter.
Most of the shooting options rely on the front and rear dials to control. These control aperture and shutter speed - until you press a modifier button and then they control other shooting options. These are pretty easy to get to grips with without doing the non-blokey thing of actually reading the instructions!
Olympus is continuing to show the worth of the ‘Live-View’ system for those photographers who may not have been convinced by the compact-like ability to compose images on an LCD screen. But then, they would wouldn’t they as they were the pioneering force of this in the DSLR market………..
The E-3’s screen is the smallest manufacturers can get away nowadays at 2.5″ (64mm) but it can get all twisty-turny like that of a camcorder.
The LCD previews depth-of-field, exposure and image stabilisation settings so you know what you see is what you’re going to get.
You can get your sticky mits on the Olympus E-3 for under a grand right now (just the body). Slap a 14-54mm lens on it and add another £500.
An issue that often confounds photographers is the amount of compensation they should pay a model upon the sale of a stock photograph. It’s a situation that arises when you want to shoot a spec shot, but, you don’t have the financial resources to pay for the model’s time.
Most models, especially friends, are happy to work with you in exchange for prints. Adding the incentive of sharing some of the profit from the stock sale of the image is good business and usually makes it easier to get a signature on a model release. It also enhances your reputation, and, puts you in a better position to solicit more modeling favors in the future.
The best and easiest way to calculate fair compensation for a model who poses in spec image for you is the 25/10 rule. For every 2500.00 dollars you make with the image, allocate ten percent to your model. So if you have an image that yields a 750.00 stock sale, keep all the money for yourself. But, as soon as that image accumulates 2500.00 in total sales, write your model a check for 250.00.
The same rule applies at the high end as well. If you sell an image for 11,000.00 write your model a check for 1,000.00 which takes into account the first four occurrences of 2500.00 - but does not include the additional 1000.00 which is considered part of the 5th iteration of the 2500.00 mark.
Every time that I present a check to a model I get a million thanks. Even if the amount is only 250.00, the models truly appreciate the consideration. But more than anything else, having a reputation as a photographer that takes care of their talent is worth a hundred times more than the ten percent check you write.
Now, what usually happens when you want to take a bunch of snaps in quick succession is you have to drop from RAW to JPEG.
JPEGs lose quite a bit of info and tends to be a bit like an audiophile listening to a Costco stereo!
Microsoft’s JPEG XR (it used to be called HD Photo) have Canon and Casio agreeing that this might be a middle-ground solution; praps more for the cheaper DSLRs.
It has a wider colour palette and can show finer gradations than regular JPEG and it’s also got a better compression algorithm. This means that even with the extra info it wont suck all the power out of the camera.
Granted - if you’re wanting professional high-def, RAW is always going to win. For the rest of us it might help out when we need it.
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