Carolyn Wright DMCA’d
I’m very pro-creator’s rights, but copyright law in the US is amazingly broken. Case in point: due to a single DMCA takedown notice, photographer Carolyn Wright’s entire website vividwildlife.com was just shut down by Go Daddy.
You might recognize Carolyn Wright’s name from her other website: photoattorney.com, i.e., the best resource on the internet for photographers looking to understand copyright law. She’s not only a professional photographer, but a practicing lawyer who specializes in the legal needs of photographers. I’m gonna go ahead and give her the benefit of the doubt here. Details on the takedown are on the site.
Yes, absolutely content creators need legal tools to defend their content. And of course there have been cases of wanna-be photographers who steal the work of others to pad out their website and stock agency portfolios — we need a sane copyright enforcement policy in the US, that’s not in question. But imagine being able to send a single letter to a property owner claiming that you believe one of the businesses they lease space to is infringing on your copyright and expecting them to shut down every one of that business’s storefronts until they’ve proved you wrong, in court if necessary. The DMCA absolutely requires an ISP, who is in effect a digital landlord, to do exactly that. There are smart, sane ways to manage copyright and fair use on the internet: the DMCA’s takedown provisions do not provide them.
Anyway, best of luck to whoever’s behind that DMCA request. I suspect it’s not going to get very far.
Got bracket, got snow…
So I got the parts for my new macro bracket. It looks good: very secure, very nicely balanced, and I can put the flash where I want to. In fact, it works so well I was able to use the articulating arm without a plate, which really helps with weight and balance. Should be able to use it with a hand strap as well, though the arm is so solid that I can use it to hold on to.
Unfortunately I have no pictures with it yet, because we just got dumped with snow and winter rain. I saw some flies the other day, though, so here’s hoping the bees will be out this weekend.
Getting ready for spring
It hasn’t affected my excitement over getting a pretty decent macro, but I did identify the moth in my previous post as a Tineola bisselliella, i.e., the kind that eats wool. Yes, I found it in my bedroom. And yes, I do have some mysterious holes in a wool sweater or two. Oye.
The parts for my new bracket should come today or tomorrow. I ordered them straight from the manufacturer, so we’re not exactly talking Amazon delivery times here. It’s hard to be patient, because I have really high hopes for this bracket. In this design, the flash is mounted to the plate by an articulated arm with 1/4-20 threads on each end. The cost was higher than I’ve put into a single design before ($60 shipped), but I expect it to deal with two major flaws I’ve been frustrated by: flash wobble and limited positioning.
The first is a problem because as I walk around, the flash itself becomes unstable, and it puts a lot of strain on everything. Earlier designs would use a thumb screw that goes through the plate, which starts to slip pretty quickly; and they relied on a cheap creep-prone solutions to mount the shoe. My Vivitar flash’s hotshoe cracked because of this, and the screw mount on my shorter off-camera cord ripped right out of the shoe. This arm on this design connects directly to the plate and hotshoe.
It’s also going to be a lot longer than a cheap ballhead, with more points of articulation. I’ll have more range and control over where to place the flash, so not everything will need to be lit high, camera-left. I’m a little worried about the balance of the rig, but I’ll find a way to make it work once it’s in hand.
This year’s macro bracket
I just ordered the parts for this year’s macro bracket. I’ve never been a hundred percent thrilled with what I’ve made in the past, since I’ve never hit on the right balance of stability and adjustability. (That is, most of them were a little bit of one and none of the other.) This year I’ve decided to spend a little bit more and hopefully end up with a design that doesn’t need to be rebuilt every year. I should have all the parts together in a week or two, and I’ll put it all together then.
Buried @ Universal Hub
Neat, one of my Flickr photos was noticed by Universal Hub.
Checking a few things
Still not quite back to 100% here, but the deep fundamental stuff of the blog is in place — HTML5, CSS3, pretty neat stuff. I really like some of the new philosophies they’ve come to.
Anyway, I want to check a few things, like image posting.
Also, I’m pretty sure Feedburner isn’t tracking this blog. If this pops up in your RSS feed, could you let me know?
Back up and running (nearly)
I’ve just finished the basic restructuring of my blog, moving the one from Blogger to WordPress and starting to integrate it with my Smugmug gallery. I’m not done with the design; at the moment you’ll see some very ugly text style choices especially, but the finishing touches won’t take too long. The main nuts and bolts stuff involved restructuring my subdomain hierarchy — www.michaelhampson.com is now a landing page, my Smugmug is at gallery.michaelhampson.com, and the blog is still at blog.michaelhampson.com — and figuring out how to get Smugmug to use WordPress’s CSS.
It’s all fascinating stuff, and very nearly sorted out. Normal content will resume very shortly.
Very quick update
Apologies for not continuing my product photography series in a timely fashion — I’m working on moving the backend of the blog over to WordPress, and there are a few technical things to clear up before I can do that. Namely this involves having a unified theme through the blog and gallery halves of the website. I’ve also spent about half of the last month visiting family out of state.
Getting this all in order will take a day or two longer, and then I’ll have the next post in my product photo series up posthaste.
Etsy
News flash: I’ve set up a storefront at Etsy, here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/michaelhampson
Right now I have several prints from my Fake Landscapes series for sale. I plan to offer others soon, probably along the lines of books, thin wraps, and metal prints rather than paper. If there’s anything specific you’re interested in seeing there, let me know.
Fake Landscapes: The Book
I am thrilled to announce the release of Fake Landscapes, my first photo book. The book is a collection of macro images of fruits and vegetables, lit and shot to resemble strange terrains. No digital manipulation was used, only the very basic tweaks that any photo gets. Only lighting, perspective, and other in-camera trickery turn these potatos and avocados into scenes of various landscapes throughout the day.
Fake Landscapes is available for $35 (plus shipping) through AdoramaPix. This book looks great and feels great, and holding it my hands makes me really proud of the work inside. I wanted to publish these images in a format that I really felt they deserved, and really, they look awesome here. The pages are thick, with brilliant colors and sharp lines (the book is printed on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper), the covers are sturdy, and the binding is strong.
You can browse through a low-resolution copy of the entire book through the ordering page, but here are a few sample images:
If these look interesting, please consider purchasing a copy — it’s a beautiful photo book, and you’re supporting my work as an independent artist. And you can check out my work through my fake landscape gallery for larger viewing or prints.
Fake Landscapes: $35 plus shipping
Stepping It Up
The past week or two have been pretty big for me, in some ways. Up until now, I’ve been working part time in a field I enjoy (providing animal husbandry for marine life), and treating photography as an occasionally income-generating hobby that I could take more seriously than I could if I were fully employed. At the end of last year, I was told that my job and several others were all being consolidated into a single full-time position, and that at some point soon I’d either be hired for that or be out of work.
Fast forward to April: I did not get that position. In the meantime, I haven’t really found any other work to replace it with. This field is tiny. Jobs in it are rare and highly competitive even in a good economy, and I’d have to be open to moving just about anywhere — which I’m not. Or I could find an office job, giving all my best efforts to an organization that, if I’m lucky, I kinda like (I’ve tried this in the past, with very mixed success).
So, I have a background working with animals, and as an interpretive naturalist. I know how to teach myself about the natural world and find what’s most interesting or important about something to teach others. I have a good grasp of the technical and artistic fundamentals of photography and how to apply them to nature…
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is the best opportunity I’ll have to turn photography into a fulfilling career. If taking a normal 9-to-5 job would mean sacrificing what I’m most passionate about and most interested in doing for the sake of a regular paycheck, then I honestly think it would be a mistake that I’d look back on and regret. Even worse, it would be cowardly. Or maybe not — I’m not afraid of hard work, of failure, or of having to learn the marketing and business skills this will take. But I am afraid of spending my life doing work where my only real personal interest is a paycheck and a 401k.
I still have my part-time job going, though it’s liable to dry up on short notice. It covers rent and bills, but not much else. Hopefully this will last long enough to get some revenue coming in, and for me to really fine-tune my strategy. I have a rough plan of what I want to do, and of the start-up costs it’s going to take.
So that’s my big news. If you’re in the Boston area, have need of a photographer, and want to help me get in motion, get in touch (I’ll write a post later describing what I offer in more detail). And stay tuned, because I’ll be announcing my first photo book for sale in the next day or two :)
Plans for Summer 2010
I have my macro rig nearly how I want it. I’ve got the 430EX II on a cheap straight bracket, with an off-camera TTL cord and a DIY diffuser. I’ve got a replacement TTL cord coming in the mail (the current one damaged my Vivitar, leading to the 430EX II), and as soon as that comes, I’ll put up some pictures of the whole thing.
I’ve already been out shooting, and have been pretty happy with the results. There are plenty of miner bees out and about, and I already met one of my goals for the year: shooting a miner bee, or a sweat bee, at the entrance to her nest. I’ve seen one or two metallic sweat bees, several carpenter bees, and one cuckoo bee. Hopefully it’ll really warm up soon and more will start coming out.
Shooting a miner bee in the nest was one goal. I have a few others, in terms of subject matter and productivity.
- More bees in nests, on branches, mating and in other behaviors besides foraging.
- There’s a mid-sized bluish-black bee I’ve seen a few times, but never have gotten close to.
- More wasps. There are tons of them around, and I don’t have much to show of them.
- Beetles, too.
- I want to re-do my series of ants farming aphids from last summer. I feel like I got several great moments captured poorly.
- I’d like to rent the 180mm Macro and shoot Karner blue butterflies in the Albany Pine Bush.
- Same with a good wide-angle, for landscapes there.
- Build up my collection of rights-managed nature stock on Alamy. I want to have at least 200 good images there by the end of the summer. I’ve gotten 26 accepted in the last two weeks, so I’m on a good track for that.
- Put out a book of bee photos. I’d like to focus on my favorites, the green metallic halictids, but I haven’t decided how specific I want to get. It would be a combination of images and text.
Ad switching
I’ve decided to remove Adsense from the site. It was simply too intrusive, and often completely misunderstood the content of a post. The last straw was the original title of my earlier post of a green metallic bee; they’re also called sweat bees, so the site was plastered with ads for sweat disorder treatments. Not only would I not expect anyone to come to this site for that kind of information, I personally wouldn’t return to a photography site advertising that… I know I could probably take the time to filter out all but photography-related ads, but in the end it wasn’t worth it for me.
My secondary goal of this website is still to offset a portion of my photography costs, so I’ve replaced the old ads with Amazon links. If you purchase something through the links on this site, I’ll earn a small referral fee. On the sidebar is a list of items I personally would use and recommend (and most of them are used to create the content on this site), and there’s a general Amazon search box as well. From time to time I may include a referral link to a piece of gear I review or at least talk about here. I’ll never do this for anything I personally wouldn’t buy or recommend — the purpose of the ads is to support the site, not the other way around.
It’s been a week!
I haven’t posted anything new in a while, I know. Partly this is because of work suddenly becoming quite busy, but mainly I haven’t shot anything new in a week or two. I’ve just upgraded to the Canon EOS 40D — literally, I just took the first shots about a half hour ago, and I still haven’t gotten everything configured how I want it — and since I’m planning to sell the Rebel XT, I’ve backed off on using it.
I got it refurbished from Adorama and except for the box it came in and the 43 clicks on the shutter, it’s good as new. I’ll shoot with it for a while before I post my thoughts — I doubt I’ll do an in-depth review, since there are already a billion reviews of the 40D out there, and it’s not the latest model anyway. But I can tell you this much: if you’re looking to upgrade from the Rebel/xxxD line but are on a limited budget, a refurbished 40D body is only $750…
I am returned
I am back from my trip, with 2 gigs of photos to sort through — having already culled the obvious ones while shooting — so I’ll have some new work online very soon. I did some birdfeeder ambush photography, where I set up my tripod about ten feet from my mom’s feeder and waited for birds. As it turns out, the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM is an excellent, useful lens for many things, but bird photography is not really one of them. But it’s my longest lens, except for the 28-105mm, which isn’t really as sharp. (I do need to sit down and really compare them at 100mm though — the Macro loses some if its sharpness as you focus closer to infinity, and while I’m sure it’s still the winner, I wonder by how much.)
Most excitingly, I ordered a Canon 40D. This will be a big step up from the Rebel XT I’m shooting with now — better high ISO performance, better construction and ergonomics, Live View, increased dynamic range, and better autofocus are all going to be extremely useful. Adorama, and B&H; for that matter, are both closed for Passover, so I have to wait a week or two, but I don’t mind. I wasn’t expecting to be able to afford the upgrade for a year or two, so I can definitely wait a week.
I was considering the 50D as well, but decided against it for two main reasons. First, it’d be another $300, and as much as I’d wish otherwise, that put it out of my price range. Second, I wasn’t convinced from the various reviews I’ve read and sample images I’ve seen that it’s worth the extra money. I expect it will take a long time before I’m looking to do things that the 40D can’t do, but I was not, ultimately, convinced that it would be any longer with the 50D.
My images are done transferring off the camera, so I am off to review and start some post-processing. We shall see what comes of it.
Article on evaluating lens
There’s a great article on This Week in Photography about evaluating lenses. Scott Bourne talks about 15 different factors to keep in mind when choosing a new lens. All good things to keep in mind.
Off-camera flash
The most cost-effective piece of equipment any photographer can buy is a flash unit that can be triggered off-camera. Learning to use one effectively will do wonders for the quality of your photography, and Strobist is the place to learn it. (I mean, besides “wherever you use your camera”. Obviously.) One of the main sponsors of the website, Midwest Photo, has just released the LumoPro LP120, a new flash that looks to be an excellent piece of gear.
The LP120 is completely manual — you have to think about how you’re using it and how you’re making your exposure. But this is really not as hard as it sounds, and Strobist makes it pretty simple to learn. In exchange for being a little further up the learning curve than a TTL speedlight, it’s a fraction of the price without sacrificing any of the control. It has many options for connecting to your camera, six power levels, the head zooms and swivels, and it has a two-year warranty backing it up.
I’ve shopped at Midwest Photo before and have been quite happy, and they’re actively involved in the discussions at Strobist and on Flickr. It’s great to see this kind of win-win situation, where we get good, inexpensive equipment, and a company worth doing business with makes a profit. I wish I could justify picking up an LP120, but I just got a Vivitar 285HV not too long ago. It, or the next generation, will definitely be the next flash I pick up though.
Comment troubles and Strobist
For some reason, Blogger isn’t letting me comment on my own posts. Curious. But I do appreciate the ones I’ve gotten so far.
And for some actual photo content, check out the latest post on Strobist, about a photo shoot done in the Large Hadron Collider. Strobist has done more than practically any other resource to improve my photography in the past year, and every post is required reading, but this one involved Physics, so go read!
Hello!
Welcome to my brand spanking new photo blog.
But Michael, you say, you already have a blog and a Flickr. So what’s the point of this?
Well, mainly, my goal with Natural Philosopher is to talk about my interest in science. I could talk about photography there, but frankly, since I’ve found I’m rather reluctant to talk about what I do in a public forum, it would turn into a de facto photo blog. A separate photo blog will also let me tweak the design to show off my photos a little better.
I do expect there to be some crosstalk between the two. I like nature photography. I do macro work of leaves and shells and things. I expect there’s a way to post on both blogs at once, or otherwise link between the two.
So I have some ideas about how I want to use this space. I have plans. My ambitious goal, which I will tell you in the hopes that you will shame me into keeping to it, is to have a new post every day, even if it’s just a picture.
I’ll start that in just a bit.