SWCAMBORNE

Lillian was looking for some family pictures yesterday and came across my report cards from 1955 when I was about 8.

The lesson of history may be that neatness only counts to small minded teachers.

The germane comments from Mr Marriott in January are:

However I slipped as the year progressed:

Last July the Iranian Revolutionary Guard released a picture of a missile test.  It turned out the picture had been photo shopped (new verb alert) to show more missiles than there really were.  There are lots of other examples of large changes to pictures that have been discovered there may be many more that changed minds but weren’t truthful.  What can be done?  Probably nothing.  Pixels can be made to lie.  This was also true with paint.  Gods and patrons were often more beautiful in their portraits than the facts.

How much airbrushing or adjusting color is allowed before a photograph is no longer a photograph and has become a “digital creation” or a “digital distortion”?

These are the 10 best photos I took in 2008.  I’ve put then in a slide show on Flickr.  “The Nubble has been judged by me to be my best:

Look at all ten on FLickr and tell me what you think.  If you have trouble opening them from the link let me know and I can post them all to the blog.

For those of you keeping score.  I took about 5500 digital pictures in 2008 and kept about 4000 of them on my computer.  I uploaded about 1000 to Flickr to share as albums or to illustrate blog stories.

I use the camera as a fair witness, for snapshots, to remember facts and to try to take memorable pictures.  These are the winners in the memorable pictures category.

Of the top photos of 2008 about half were cropped and a few were color corrected.  With computers and software it is now very easy to digitally adjust photos. This results in better photos but less truth.   I’ll write more about photos as evidence in my next post.

The pleasure of shouting “It’s your fault” is the strongest emotion any human can enjoy.

Guiseppi di Lampedusa

in The Leopard

1960

Pixels are free and digital cameras are everywhere.  I had a quixotic thought that there might be a pixel shortage after all of the cell phone photos taken at the Obama inauguration but no shortage has been announced.

It has always been hard to make money as a photographer.  In the digital age it is even harder.  Cameras are everywhere and the sheer number of pictures taken must be following some kind of an inverse Moore’s Law.  At the same time it is almost impossible to keep ownership of work distributed on the internet and the number of print outlets that pay for photographs is plummeting.

But don’t despair this is almost the same problem that confronted the music industry a decade ago with piracy from sites like Napster.  Then Itunes came along and lowered the price to a point where it wasn’t worth stealing anymore.  I propose that roughly the same thing will happen in the photography world.  Flickr or a site like it will allow people to buy images for a few cents each and pay for them using Paypal.  The pictures will be well sorted and easily resized to fit the users needs and will have a watermark that says the source information.

Can photographers make money if pictures sell for a few cents?  Yes if the market is thousands of pictures instead of a few at a hundred dollars each.  Are there other solutions?

The problem of people stealing creative works has existed since there was creativity.  Dickens wrote his stories as serials and published a chapter a week to keep them from being pirated.  Gilbert and Sullivans musical The Pirates of Penzance was about Americans stealing their songs without paying royalties.  Enforcement works best if there are large targets.  For the music industry the solution seems to be lowering the price until stealing is not worth it.  I predict the same for the photography business.

Next I’ll show you copies of my favorite photos from 2008 and talk about the photoshop effect.

In 2007 when Nurit and I were hiking on Hadrian’s Wall we travelled for some time with a couple from the Netherlands.  They were about our age and hiking with the same company Mickeldore Travel.

Hadrian’s Wall by Anton Staartjes 2007

Anyway it turned out that Anton is a professional photographer.  We became Christmas card pals and this year he upgraded to a very good website which shows off his considerable photography skills very well.  It is worth a look for two reasons the photography is excellent and the layout of the site is creative and intuitive.   Click here for Anton Staartjes I’m also adding him to my blog roll.

Tomorrow I’m going to post my thoughts on the future of photography in the digital age.

Okay the computer “been reported”

The big question is will it go on its “permanent record.”

 It has been a while since I posted something. My father asked me to fill in while he is diving with the Codger Divers next month, so I thought I better get a bit of practice.  I am one of the people who checks this site along with many others daily and I thought I might link to some of my favorite finds this week.  

Bad Street names.  A little R rated, but a lot hilarious.

MentalFloss always is humorous and educational.  Now if only I could come up with something useless sell. 

Let me know if you know any other humorous finds

An excellent run of pictures from a beautiful city. London will host the Olympic Games in 2012 and is starting to think like a prom queen.

My London Photo 1 with Rebecca and Jessie

Thanks to Scott H. of Colorado for this link.

The title is self explanatory.  Here is the first entry:

An unmatched set in Espanola

Mobile homes are an underrepresented group in the annual calendar sales catagory. This one reminds me of “The Roundabouts of Derby” calendar I received from my brother Tom B. in England a few years ago.  Unfortunately it and any reference to it on the web are still missing.