Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

For the first time ever, I’ve started watching American Idol this year. And imagine my surprise when I see that Amy Davis is one of the final 24 contestants.

Just over a year ago, I spent a week on a small island near St. Thomas, doing a series of photo shoots. One of the models was Amy Davis. I remember thinking wow, beautiful and talented model…but then I heard her sing - and omigosh, I was at a loss for words. :-)

Anyway, Amy’s a sweetheart…and I’ve got literally hundreds of photos of her. So in the interest of helping her win, I’m going to post one previously unpublished photo here every week she stays in the competition. Vote for her, and you get another photo. :-)

Here’s the first one of Amy, wearing a NewsGator shirt, of course using NewsGator Go! on her Treo (this was shot as part of a shoot for a potential ad campaign which we never ran):

There are a couple more shots (swimwear, fashion) of her in my photography portfolio - go take a look if you’d like!

Sigh.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Picasa Web Albums, discussing their terms of service and explaining why I couldn’t use it. Basically, those terms said that Google could help themselves to your photos if they wish, and if they wanted to put them on a Google billboard in Times Square, that would be just fine with you, thanks.

Well, Facebook is also helping themselves to your content. From their terms of use:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This is just nuts. Basically, they’re welcome to take your stuff, make a copy, and use it for a multi-million dollar ad campaign if they want. Or, they could license YOUR photo to someone else to do the same.

Unbelievable.

If you’re thinking “hey, I don’t care” - read the part about you having the right to grant this license to Facebook. It’s possible you don’t - read my previous post about Picasa for details.

So other than my profile pic, which I suppose they can use for whatever they like, I’ve removed all of my photos from my Facebook profile. My profile is now pretty bare - not a lot of exciting stuff there. I’ll just point people to other places where I actually share some of the things I’ve done without worrying about some company helping themselves to whatever rights they want.

Facebook, you convince your partners to help you help yourself to my private information. You blatantly help yourself to whatever rights you want to everything I put on your site. What’s next? I shudder to imagine.

[via CBC News]

Wow. I’m pretty much the last to hear about this, but it’s truly hard to believe. Virgin Mobile has an advertising campaign out at the moment, which uses photos from Flickr (Creative Commons licensed), but doesn’t have model releases for the folks in the photos. Google it here.

Molly Holzschlag was one of the people depicted in the photos, in an arguably negative light. If I were her, I’d be pretty mad.

Truly amazing. This is certainly not editorial use - this is commercial use, which requires a model release. And depicting anyone in a negative light, or showing them endorsing a product, even in editorial uses, usually requires a model release also. The fact that someone on Flickr says a photo is ok for commercial use (via a CC license) really has no bearing on whether they have secured releases (both model and property as necessary). And while your average Joe might not realize this, the folks at an ad agency responsible for acquiring artwork should definitely know it.

Virgin, I’d think about shopping for a new ad agency if I were you…

JPG Magazine has a fashion theme for issue 12 this year…I just submitted a photo I took of the lovely Salena. It was a brisk 35 degrees F that night in Denver, so I figure she’s earned the cover. :-) If you have a minute, click here to vote for it!

Almost a year ago, I reviewed a few photo hosting sites.  After that, but quite a while ago, I got an invitation to try out Picasa Web Albums, and I just now got around to clicking on the link to try it out.  But I didn’t get far…here is an excerpt from their Terms of Service (emphasis mine):

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums,  and other Google services.  In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums. Google reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

Hmm…this is a problem for me.

I have some images of people with whom I have a model release, and some of those releases cover self-promotional use only.  So I can (and do) put these images on my web sites (available to the general public) for the purpose of promoting myself and my photography, but I can’t allow someone else to use it to promote themselves or their service.  I own the copyright to these images - but I don’t have the usage rights required to do what Google is talking about.  If one of those images wound up on a billboard in Times Square, promoting some Google service, I’d be potentially liable for a lot of usage fees.

As another (possibly more common) example, I have some images from the San Diego Wild Animal Park.  On the back of my entry ticket, it said none of my photos taken there could be used for commercial purposes without express written permission from the park - which of course I don’t have.  So I again don’t have the usage rights to grant Google the license they are looking for for these images - promoting Google services is clearly commercial use.

One more example - do you have a photo that happens to have a recognizable face in it?  You know, like a passer-by?  You will, in general, need a model release from that person before you can use that image for (non-editorial) commercial purposes.  Or before you can grant Google the license to use it in this manner.

Images of the Eiffel Tower, that are taken at night when the lights are on, apparently require permission from someone before they can be sold.  I can’t remember where I read that…but if you search on, say, istockphoto, you’ll notice there are no Eiffel Tower pics for sale with the lights on at night.  Again - you can take the pictures, and you can put them on your web site, but no commercial use.  So you can’t upload those either, because you can’t grant the license necessary.

IMHO, there is a difference between a service that lets me share and distribute my content to others (like many other photo sharing sites), and a service that helps themselves to a pretty much unlimited license to my content (eek).  I did a search before posting, and was surprised to only notice one other blog that had mentioned this…

In Google’s defense, this probably isn’t the spirit of the agreement…but when I read the words, this is my interpretation - so I’m going to have to pass on trying out the service for now.

Colors.  Who knew they could be so tricky.

One night, a week or so ago, I was making a print of this photo on my photo printer, a Canon iP6600D:

Simple enough, you’d think.  I even was using Canon’s specific ICC profiles, based on these instructions for Photoshop, for my specific printer and paper combination.

The colors weren’t even close.  The white was white, but the green background was very yellow-ish brown…to the point that it pretty much killed the picture.  I held the print up to the screen (I was using a Dell 2001FP display), and the print was much more yellow/brown than the nice green-ish color on the screen.

Hmm.  Maybe the printer profiles were off, I thought.  So I uploaded a copy to ritzpix.com, and the next day I picked up the print at a Wolf Camera store near my office, after asking them to turn off all of their auto-levels and color correction.  I took the picture home that night, and compared it to the screen and the other print…it, too, was very yellow-ish brown, nothing like the screen.  It was actually pretty close in color to the print I made on my own printer.

Well, it must be that my monitor needs to be calibrated, I thought.  No problem.  The next day after work, I stopped and picked up a ColorVision ColorPlus colorimeter for monitor calibration.  Got home that night, ran through the setup and calibration, looked the before/after on the screen (there is a button you can press at the end of the calibration to do this), and saw that there was indeed a difference…although it was subtle.

So then I made another print of the photo above.  Why, exactly, I wasn’t sure…but maybe there was some kind of interaction between the monitor and printer ICC profiles, right?  Well, I held the new print up to the screen, and it was pretty much the same old yellowish-brown, compared to the nice green on the screen.  Crap.

Two more calibrations, and 5 more prints, and still no love.  I did discover the “rendering intent” feature in Photoshop, which is a very nice tool to know (had to do some research, but I think I understand what it does now), and that affected the output colors quite a bit…but not enough to get it close to what I saw on the screen.  Sigh.

About now, it’s about midnight, and I’m ready to punt on the whole thing.  The 2001FP has independent RGB gain controls, and I’m thinking I can eyeball this thing better than the colorimeter can do.  So I download and print Smugmug’s calibration print.  Using that, and my own print of the photo above, I adjusted the gains on the monitor until it just about matched.  Woo-hoo!  Or so I thought.  The one thing I noticed after doing this is all of my windows were kind of reddish where they used to be white…kind of annoying for reading your email.  But at 1:00 in the morning, I no longer cared too much, and went to bed.

The next morning, I was quickly checking my email (yes, I know), and the reddish color everywhere was really pronounced - and really annoying.  Annoying enough that I reset the monitor back to its default settings, which were the same settings that I used when running the calibration the night before…so we were now back to the calibrated settings.  Ahh, the email window looked white again.  Whew!

Just for giggles, I opened Photoshop and pulled up the photo again.  Not sure why…just seemed like the thing to do at the time.  Ahh, nice and green.  I reached over and grabbed one of the prints I had made the night before, and held it up to the screen.  Man, this looks…

…good?

The colors matched almost perfectly.  WTF?

Turns out it was the light in the room.  Under daylight conditions, during the day, the colors on the print look almost exactly like the screen.  But at night, with my “regular” incandescent lighting, the prints look different.  WAY different.

Sheesh…there went 4 hours I’m never going to get back…but in the glass-is-half-full department, I won’t soon forget the effects of different-colored light.  And hey, turns out my monitor is calibrated pretty darn well now. :-)

Full-spectrum lighting, here I come!  Either that, or leave work earlier when it’s still daylight… ;-)

Looks like the new ACR is available, which includes support for D200 RAW files.  It’s not actually on the ACR site yet, but it’s on Adobe’s public FTP server:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photoshop/cameraraw/win/3.x/  (windows)

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photoshop/cameraraw/mac/3.x/ (mac)

Woo-hoo!  It was getting a little painful copying to a Mac, converting to DNG with Lightroom, back to windows, and processing using Bridge/ACR/CS2. :-)

[source: dpreview forums]

The other night, on the way home, an idea came to me…so I pulled up my development environment and decided to write some code.  I think my terrified development team is probably locking me out of the source control systems as we speak… ;-)

My thought was this.  I’m a visual person, and a lot of the feeds I subscribe to have images in the posts.  If I could see all of those images together, I could make some quick decisions about what I want to read now, vs. what I will read later.  And thus was born the image aggregator.

Take a look for yourself - click here, and use your NewsGator Online username/password.

If you’re one of those types who is completely caught up with all of your unread feeds, you won’t see anything.  But if you have unread stuff, you’ll see a compilation of all of the images in your unread posts.  If you click on one, that post will get marked as read in NG/Online, and you’ll get linked out to the post.

Here’s an example of what I see for my own account (click for larger version):

It lets me get an idea, at a glance, of what’s available to read.

This is obviously an EARLY prototype of something, which may or may not see the light of day…but I think it’s an interesting concept.  Any thoughts from you about it?  Useful or no?

Aside: this was all written using the public NewsGator Online API.

When I was out in Santa Monica a few weeks ago, there was a film crew working on the Promenade. These are pictures of the actor and actress that were doing the scene:

It could have been a movie, TV, or commercial…not sure. They appeared to be using film, rather than digital, if that gives anyone a hint. I’d love to know who they are - I’m afraid I might have a great story, and not know it! :-)