Categories
Uncategorized

BarCampMilwaukee5 Creative Commons Photo Studio Set-up

BarCampMilwaukee5 Creative Commons Photo Studio Set-up

This is the set-up we used, documented. Sam Dodge and I put this together at BarCampMilwaukee5 to take people’s portraits… for free! And that’s free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in freedom! We let the subject of the photo use the image for ANYTHING they want, and in return, we get to publish it under a Creative Commons license, which also creates this record of people who came to BarCamp. It’s the second time we’ve done this, and this time, we actually planned ahead… well, a little bit.

(See a larger version of the image on Flickr)

Categories
Uncategorized

Ron Prodoehl (Kid)

Ron Prodoehl

Here’s a photo of my dad as a kid. It was taken June 10, 1945 at Lincoln Studio in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The studio is long gone. My mom gave me this photo, and I felt like sharing it, so here it is.

Categories
Uncategorized

Photojojo Loves You!

PhotojojoI love Photojojo… They love making photography fun. They also love making you love them, and how do they do that?

Here’s their mission, placed prominently on their site:

We believe in doing one thing, and doing it very, very well

We find the best photo shiz anywhere

I’ve seen companies do the “love us” thing… The idea is to make your customers fall in love with you. Do whatever it takes to make them love everything about you. Deliver outstanding service, in fact, over-deliver outstanding service, go above and beyond, make them happy, get them excited, make sure that if they tell anyone else about you (and they will) that they are presenting you in a positive light. And you can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. Actions do speak louder than words.

Photojojo was a sponsor of PhotoCampMilwaukee back in 2009. They totally got it, and were more than happy to help us make that event happen.

Photojojo’s store is filled with stuff that isn’t high-end gear for serious photographers. It’s mostly simple things to make photography fun. (But there are some pretty useful items there as well.)

Even the little things about Photojojo are all about fun. For instance, their contact form doesn’t have some lame Captcha that forces you to decode a distorted string of numbers and letters… it looks like this:

Photojojo Contact Form

Yeah, fun stuff! It’s kind of what they’re all about… if you love photography, check out Photojojo… they love it too.

Categories
Uncategorized

Creative Commons Expert

The thing about posting things on the web is that you’re publishing to a world-wide audience of everyone you know, and everyone you don’t know, and if you happen to include in your slides a photo of someone, there’s a chance that someone who knows that person will see it, and they will probably mention it to that person…

Tweet

nickhacks alerted me that he saw one of my photos… I asked if the presentation he saw it in was available online somewhere, as I wanted to see it as well.

Tweet

He gave me a link, which wasn’t the actual presentation, but gave me enough info to find presentations by the speaker…

SlideShare

And there it is. Slide 108. A photo I created, and published on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike License. It’s a pretty liberal license. It allows people to copy, share, and adapt the work, but it does require that you attribute the work to the creator… you know, give credit to the person who created it. It’s really simple. I even have a nice explanation on my Flickr profile page. So for instance, if you used my photo in a presentation, you might list the attribution part on a “credits” page at the end. This is pretty common in presentations nowadays…

SlideShare

Skip to the end of this specific presentation and the last page presents credits. The only attribution I could find was a blanket “all from whom I borrowed material” which was a little disappointing. But even more disappointing is that right there, on the last slide, on the bottom, is a Creative Commons logo, which licenses the slides under the “Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike” license… the very same license my photo was released under.

Did this person provide attribution when using my photo? Not that I could find. Is the photo being used for commercial purposes? Determining Noncommercial use is the most frustrating part of Creative Commons licensing. The presentation the photo is used in is not being sold, and is freely available (under the same license, even!) but does this presentation highlight the presenter as an “expert” in their field (even though it claims not to) which in turn may result in the furthering of this person’s career? Is that “commercial” use in any way? Probably not, but without a lawyer, I’m never quite sure about this… Sadly, it’s probably something only the courts could decide. (At least the Share Alike requirement was met.)

So now the question is… What do I do?

Categories
Uncategorized

Cadillac

Cadillac

download the large one

I started with this photo of a Cadillac we took at Z2 Photo, and did a bit of drawing on it. (The photo, not the car!) I’ve started to dig into the different ways the pressure sensitive properties of the Wacom tablet can be used with brushes in Photoshop, so you can see some of that here. I think…