Can I have a critique please?

[ebi]

Have you ever looked at Imgur? It’s copyright infringement upon copyright infringement. Furthermore, you’ve asked for critique and I would say that this most likely falls under fair use. You seem to want to make an issue out of this and I can tell you, from experience, that your energy is misguided. You should focus more on taking better photos as it is unlikely that anyone is going to find any value in 250K jpg on imgur. If there ever was a sign of being a fauxtog, it would be worrying about copyright infringement this early in the game.

[ebi]

@brownie, that is entirely untrue. Copyright is inherent the moment the shutter is released and it doesn’t matter how much the image is changed, the image is still the property of the copyright owner. There are certain provisions in which images can be distributed for free but not sold. Educational and other fair use purposes notwithstanding. It is probably best to include a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license on your images. This basically says that you can share but not alter my images as long as you attribute the original work to me. Anything beyond that and you’ll have to seek additional licensing. I personally prefer this license over All Rights Reserved because I understand the reality that if I put images on the internet, some of them will eventually be taken and used in one way or another and I would prefer that you followed these guidelines. I also realized that fighting infringements was not only not worth my time but futile. Unless of course, someone profited from my photos, in which case, I’ve got a lawyer for that.

And like I said, it’s good to know the copyright laws and your options for copyrighting your work, but beyond that, trying to fight it is useless. Better to realize that dissemination of your images through social media is the absolute least you can hope for these days.

[ebi]

i’ll add one more thing. This is also the reason I recommend maintaining a concise portfolio online. Flickr is a great image sharing site, but ultimately the more photos you put up, the more you’ve got to keep track of. If you save the very best for your portfolio and keep those images relatively small (screen size or smaller), you can avoid the headaches of trying to deal with copyright.

[cameraclicker]

Aevey & Brownie, if you go through enough of the old threads you will find excerpts from American and Canadian statutes.  You can also use Google to locate the full legislation if you desire.  It is a bit of reading…

The really, really condensed version is that copyright exists to protect your original work from someone taking it as theirs and making money with it.  It also protects your work from being used to create a derivative piece and making money from that, so you don’t lose copyright because it was edited.  However, critique , education and parody are all part of Fair Use, which is an exclusion to copyright, and the copyright holder’s permission is not required.

Aevey, Imgur are covering themselves by having a TOS section, however, it sounds like they only act when pushed and in the case of Fair Use, the uploader is covered by “or otherwise have sufficient intellectual property rights to upload”,  since no permission is required.

If you are in the USA and copyright is a big deal to you, you should spend a few dollars and consult a lawyer, or if your school has a law school, consult several of the better senior students to get their opinions.  As a practical matter, if you go to court, the person or entity you are suing may counter file that your case has no merit and request costs, which would mean that if they win, you could be on the hook for their travel, time and lawyers fees.  If you win, you may or may not get costs and the award is usually based on the money you proved you lost, or the other party was able to make, due to the infringement.  It might be worthwhile going to court if your photo was used in an ad by a major corporation, it would certainly be worth using court as a bargaining chip in that case.  If you have photos that are that good, you should be registering them with the Copyright Office.  Going to court is expensive so you want to make sure you have all your ducks lined up before hand.

[fstopper89]

Oh dear ebi… Yes, I know what I’m doing. Any advice I’ve offered is what I know to work. Sorry if it hasn’t worked for you. I have utilized a blanket to block and/or filter super direct sunlight and it works wonders. Would you really want a bright, harsh line on someone in a photo? Also, the backlighting does cause haze or better defined, lower contrast. Yes, some of that was done in editing. Your edit was terribly off.

[Brownie]

Gotcha, thanks for the lesson.

[ebi]

@browneyedgirl – we call it flare in the real world, but whatevs. That was not flare. That was an attempt to make it look like flare. Had it been flare, I wouldn’t have been able to make such a very quick and easy curves adjustment to make it the right contrast. also looking at the angle of the sun in relation to the angle of the camera and with her being so low, there is no light getting into her lens.

The sun in this scenario is not direct. It is backlight. So it creates an edge on the girl. And if you use something to black that out, you are also most likely blocking off the rest of the light resulting in no light and an even flat image. Highlight/hairlight/sidelight is not a bad thing. But it has to be controlled, especially for print b/c if there is no information then the printer won’t lay down ink making the photograph look really bad in print. You would, of course want to scrim off direct sunlight or change the scenario, in the situation where the light is direct. but this is not that. You may want to consider playing around with not completely blocking the light but shading it with a scrim jim and 1-2 stop diffusion. way lighter and easier to hold than a blanket.

http://fjwestcott.com/product-category/westcott/reflectors-and-scrims/scrim-jim/

On further evaluation of Aevey’s photos, I think the effect she might have added was an improper use of the high pass filter in photoshop – at least in a few of the images. I use it for sharpening and sometimes softening images in conjunction with other actions. It would be great if she came back and had a little bit of an open dialogue with us about her process, but evidently she prefers to focus on copyright nonsense – reason #5958303 that fauxtographers don’t seem to get better.

[Thomas]

I just remembered why I haven’t commented on these forums in a while. Some of you really do make photographers look like a pretentious bunch of pricks!

That said;  My main observation of the cornfield images is that the blacks on the camera in her hand & the guys jeans have LOADS of noise. It’s making me wonder if flash was even used in these shots and that the shadows weren’t just brought up in lightroom with an adjustment brush. I use a fair bit of OCF in my work and these just don’t seem quite right to me. That’s not to say it’s done wrongly, I’m just not sure what to make of it… The reflections on the projector table don’t look like reflections of a flash to me. It seems like it’s the same reason there is a spot of light on the girls leg, it’s just the sun coming through the corn and hitting edges…I don’t know, just observations.

[cameraclicker]

Thomas, the projector in a corn field sure looks like on camera flash.  The back of his hand is burned out, her hair is very bright, the spot on her leg matches the hand.  Top of the projector is much brighter than the side.  There is a shadow on the grass at her feet which seems to be from the projector.  The sun is behind them.  There are bright spots centred on the table leg and the top one is only an inch or  two from the top.  Where is that light coming from, if not from a flash?

[Thomas]

@ Cameraclicker   –  I see what you mean now, reflections on the centre of the leg of the stand facing the camera. I was looking along the top edge of the stand just under the projector where there are scattered highlights. Definitely ON camera flash, I was assuming it would be off camera if anything which was confusing me a little. In that case…

@Aevey – Try to get that flash off camera ASAP, you will enjoy it I promise.

 

EDIT – The blacks still have a lot of noise though, that I can’t figure out. other than PP

 

[ebi]

@Thomas,

Observing the metadata reveals all. If you look at the shot before it (and it’s metadata), you’ll see that all the settings were exactly the same. She was also shooting AV whilst using an on camera flash. The metadata confirms that a flash was fired. So on camera flash, probably not set properly on the closeup image produces a look that on camera flash does. The further back shot has the same exact settings, was way too dark and she pushed it in post, which is why the blacks got all noisy. then she opened the blacks to create that flarey look. She processed in light room, so I’m guessing she used recovery to do that. It’s also a 7D and those are noisy as fuck!

[fstopper89]

ebi, the main issue I have with your posts/responses are the way you say things. You can give a thorough critique, even a harsh one, without the nastiness. Things are more productive that way. Snide remarks like “we call it flare in the real world” imply that I, for calling it haze and low-contrast, am not living in the real world. Flare in fact is the light pattern that occurs when light is reflected off of the glass in the lens, creating that rainbow-ish thing. That’s lens flare. The effect the backlit sun can have on an image is causing it to be low-contrast and have a haze over it. Capiche? Maybe in different photography schools/forums/etc. it’s called different things- but the term still stands correct. Like prime vs. fixed lenses. Same thing, different term.

All I’m saying is to play fair, at least use common courtesy. You’re extremely pompous across all these forums. It clouds your advice from really being sound. This photographer is trying to learn when using a technique and setting she maybe wasn’t used to using- she did say she was in school. By the way, her Flickr page has some excellent work. She’s not a fauxtographer.

[Thomas]

@ BEG – Excellent response.

[Sharra]

@BEG I do agree that ebi seems to have a “holier than thou” attitude towards photography. The harsh negativity, profanity and immaturity leave little to be desired. It’s easy to trash talk without anything to back it up, so, ebi, if you’re reading this, please post a link to your business site so that we can all see how things should be done and what equipment is needed to get it right. Who knows, I may learn something from your techniques and be inspired to try some of what I see. But until I (and the rest of us) can see something that backs up the “all talk and no action”, I’ll leave it at that and take the “whatever” approach to your future posts. I’m fully expecting a backlash from you, but that does little except reinforce my point. Please feel free to prove me wrong! I haven’t been on here in God knows how long, so I missed your link if you mentioned it elsewhere. But I have to agree with Thomas in another forum post that the YANAP site has gone sorely downhill since its inception. It’s a shame really…

However, BEG, I have to say that I think you’ve been guilty of being pompous as well. A case in point is the valley girl “ewwww, gag me with a spoon” approach on the first page of what has become YANAP’s most popular thread, which you started. I’m not going to get into a war of words over it, nor am I going to point out other posts where I thought you possessed an air of superiority over your peers of any level or experience, so if you feel, too, that you need to say something, please do so tactfully.

I think the poster I have the most respect for here on YANAP is CameraClicker, a fellow Canadian.

[ebi]

ugh, my equipment, portfolio and anything else about me is so unimportant at this moment. I am not pompous. I am profane and occasionally get a little immature. I can’t help it…there is so much mediocrity it hurts.

I’ll just make this clear from here on out. I have no interest in showing my portfolio. My only interest is in finding good and bad work and commenting on it in my own way. I don’t want a critique. My work is critiqued every day that I work. I do not have a “business site”. I have a fucking portfolio of work both published and personal. That is all you need to know. You can choose to accept that and move on or ignore it b/c you don’t like the truth. I think it’s pretty clear that once you get past my attitude I know what the fuck I’m talking about. I’m also working on being nicer.

I am however, quickly losing patience with the large number of people on here who cannot take criticism at all and this insane notion that you have to be nice while critiquing. I may soon be happy to leave this place of my own volition unless others start learning to be a little more critical because all of this nice, polite talk is boring the living fuck out of me and, more importantly, doing a huge disservice to those who come here looking for help.

If your work is shit, I’m not going to pretend I don’t smell it.

[Author]

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