Wired is showing a gallery of crop circles in a feature. Some of the designs are really cool.

I say “designs” because a few years back I worked for an agency where we hired some guys to create one for us. All illusions of this being an extra terrestrial phenomenon were shattered there and then. Even more so when so-called experts declared to all that it was real, couldn’t possibly be a fake and that it was exhibiting strange electro magnetic properties!

Here is a quote from my old boss

3 great guys worked for 5 hours on this, or was it geomagnetic water flow like the researchers said? My internet firm port80 commissioned this 250ft diameter formation back in 1999. I still love it.

Remember, the truth is out there … just maybe not what you hope the truth is!

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amateur and professional photographers all over the country are being stopped and harassed with no legal basis. As digital cameras proliferate wildly, so do attempts to restrict what you can shoot and how you can use the picture. And not all attempts to quash photography have to do with national security concerns. Some invoke copyright and trademark protection, others the privacy both of celebrities and ordinary people. But you can fight back. Knowing your rights and restrictions as a photographer is a good first step. When cases reach the point of legal proceedings, they’re usually settled in the photographer’s favor, according to lawyers who have represented photographers in court. However, sometimes your own understanding of the law isn’t enough. According to his suit, when Jim McKinniss told the police officers that he was on public property and thought it was legal to photograph, “One of the officers asked if [I] had heard about September 11 and asserted that, since the terrorist attacks…it was illegal to photograph bridges, airports, and refineries.”

This is a crock. There’s no law in California or anywhere else in the U.S. that prohibits shooting such places from a public locale. You can even photograph inside airports, if you don’t point your camera at security checkpoints.

“These laws just don’t exist,” explains McKinniss’s attorney, Robert Myers, who took his case pro bono. “A law that attempts to prohibit photography from places open to the general public would be unconstitutional.”

The piece features some great, quite scary, stories plus some tips on how to handle the situation if it ever happens to you.

Technorati Tags: photography, law, tips, news

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the Charlotte Observer has sacked a staff photographer for altering the colour of an image to, as he states, “to restore the actual color of the sky”. He said the color was lost when he underexposed the photo to offset the glare of the sun.

OK this is plainly ridiculous, the “truth” of the story was restored by this superficial change, who cares what colour the sky was though really? So either way, an over reaction right? How about this one …

The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper acknowledged Friday that it manipulated two photos to make it appear that two Cuban police officers were ignoring prostitutes gesturing to a tourist.

In this one the image was intentionally created to show a false impression of Police neglect of the prostitute problem. As far as I can tell this photographer was not sacked.

Technorati Tags: photography, news, law, ethics, media

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Tourist Remover

Remove moving objects such as tourists or passing cars from your photos. Take multiple photos from the same scene and the «Tourist Remover» blends them into a composite photo without any interfering elements.

I wonder if this can remove noise too? That’s how they clean up movies by differencing two frames right? I am going to have to give this a go when I finally manage to get out of the house to a populated area …

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Wow, that means I have had my Canon 350D just over a year, I will have to do a retrospective …

• active since 367 days
• Photos: 1500
• average upload rate per day: 4.09
• first photo uploaded on 15.07.2005

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Getting Snappy Makes You Happy

Looking through photo albums makes you happier than chocolate, music, TV or even your favourite tipple, according to research revealed today by Orange.

The results show that the mood of those viewing photographs was consistently lifted by 11% during mood measuring tests whilst the groups who tried to eat, listen, watch, or drink their way to happiness registered a mere 1% increase.

The study, carried out for Orange by Peter Naish, Doctor of Psychology at The Open University compared the moods of people using four typical cheer-up treats with those browsing their favourite snaps.

The tests demonstrate that looking through personal photo albums produces an improvement across all measurements including a person’s sense of relaxation, brightness, calmness and alertness and even their sense of being valued and popular – resulting in a higher happiness score overall.

In contrast, the pick-me-ups people commonly rely on were only successful in helping them relax: Wine by 14%, chocolate by 8%. Photo albums were proven to be a far more effective way of unwinding, with subjects recording an average relaxation score of 22% – substantially higher. So before reaching for the bottle after a hard day consider that apart from relaxation, wine and chocolate offer little additional benefits. In fact, the wine drinkers actually rated themselves as feeling 6% less satisfied after their drink. Only those that flicked through photographs showed a consistent positive shift across all measures of mood.

This research was released to promote their new photo service so I wouldn’t cancel that therapy appointment just yet, ha, but I do agree with the findings. For a really nice relaxing browse through Flickr I recommend the Slickr Screensaver.

In fact as well as looking through photographs I find taking them quite relaxing too. Well, when things are going well, heh.

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Red eye is caused by the light being bounced off the blood vessels at the back of the eye. There are red-eye prevention techniques that have a pre-photo flash to get the iris to constrict and reduce the red-eye effect. It turns out though as you get older the muscles that constrict the iris are weaker and don’t do as good job. So basically the more red-eye that appears, the older you are. Its probably not that simple in practice, read more about it here at the Discovery website.

For me I still think I will continue to try to get rid of it!

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Scoopt: Entirely anecdotal evidence of the dark side of citizen snapping

The burger king on praed street had a fire on saturday morning.

3 people had their phones out, and were filming it, before anyone called the fire brigade, or told the people inside to get out.

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