Photographer Simon Norfolk  is speaking at Derby’s Quad gallery on 19 November 2009 at 6.30 pm. book now to avoid disappointment £3

With the global decline is media due to advertising budgets being cut, it is no surprise that many photographers are finding that commissions are becoming harder to get. This has meant that freelancers have started to look more at the photography stock as a way of earning additional income to fill the gap.

But selling stock is a bit of a mine field when you start as your images have to have keywords (tags) so search engines can find your images and this keywording is a skill in its own right; well it is if you want to sell the image.

You can obviously get some one to do it for you but this costs, it also takes time and in a recession you need to taking care of clients, finding assignments and not keywording hundreds of photos.

There is help though, if not in a scary way from Imense and there Annotator which can read the image and add the relevant keywords, so why is it scary? Well it is surprising to see that a computer/software can pick out how many people are in a picture, decide on their ethnicity read the background and the list goes on, this is a technology that will probably get better in the future and has obvious surveillance applications in addition to being a photographers tool.

Although I have not tried the system I did think it was a tad pricey as the top level package is the one that is needed and at the moment the pound is week against the dollar, so is costing a lot more than normal…result of the recession.

If you are a photographer wanting to do multimedia slideshow you are probably going to need to know how to get good sound and here is a simple 3 step video on how to do just that

And further for those who dablle with journalism the International Journalists.net have a Youtube site with training videos

Well it looks like the Police in New York are looking to the same draconian laws that snappers in the UK are in fear off according to the New York Post.

You may think that no one has been stopped yet under the new terrorism act and photography but that is not the case.

When I was covering the Put People First march in London (a few days before the G20 protests) I saw a a police sergeant and a snapper; the policeman was ordering him to delete the images on is camera, I tried to intervene and was threatened with arrest for obstructing an police officer. The snapper had just photographed some police waiting near their vans at Marble Arch.

In a previous post I referred to the slope of the bath tub which was an analogy for proving your photographic gear. Of course the wise will do heavy testing at all ISO and lighting conditions to work out how the sensor records details in the shadows as well as the highlights. They will also test their lenses for sharpness, flaws and find the optimum aperture for it and so the testing goes on.

So back to the bicycle wheel; This is another analogy that relates to the business side of photography or outside services that you use, like printing, webhosting etc.

My webhosts recently disappeared from the face of the world wide web, reasons unstated. This left me with my personal websites vanishing, my 5 domains pointing to nowhere and a drop in email service and all just into the credit crunch, so my survival rate with clients going to empty 404 pages and email bouncing back must have thought I had gone bust in the doom and gloom of yet another recession.

This left me with at least a couple of weeks solid mess to clean up at a time when I was just to busy.

It would be easy to lay blame at the host, but my friend and photography buddy was notified of the closure ages ago, (oh yes the sod gloated about it as well…big time) with tools to move websites and domains to cause as little disruption as possible.  Now for some time I have realised that I was not getting service notifications direct, for some years in fact and despite changing my email on there control panel, no joy. so this was a loose spoke in a wheel; as it happens it was not the first.

You see that spoke came undone because of another spoke, my ISP years ago was Wanadoo; who I had no problems with but for some reason, were taken over by Orange who decided they were not big enough  as a mobile phone company and could play at being an internet service provider. It was these who gave me problems with service; so much so I ended up requesting the MAC code (several times and without internet) and switched and bang goes my ISP email with Wanadoo. Cancelled as I told Orange where to stuff there awful service, and not in a polite terms either.

Now what I did not realise at the time was that my email for the webhost was now dead and although I changed it in the control panel there was no way to verify/authenticate the change so this was the first loose spoke, which led to the second loose spoke, before the wheel became broken.

In the past I have remedied an alternative services because of poor service on an online archival system. I ditched them after 6 months because their servers went down and the backup failed; it took weeks for them to restore service and it was at a time when I needed to get images to a client urgently.

Indecently, it was a right move as before Christmas they went under leaving hundreds of photographers and agencies stranded. In comparison my current archive people have not been down once, since 2005 (or as far as I know, before then when I joined) Yes I pay a little more, but it is at least one weight off my mind, and the service is one to one via a phone, with people who know a lot about the photography business, so the advice extends beyond the archive. If I need help with a difficult pricing job I can phone them for advice, their success is my success as they see it!

There are lessons here of course:

• If a company niggles away at you because of poor service, ditch them, it makes you out as being un-professional and one day will catch you out.
• The other is to use an online webmail like Google, Yahoo etc for your logins and system notifications, that way regardless of your ISP it will always be available.

Remember a loose spoke puts the rim out of line, and other spokes will become loose or break, so when you notice a loose spoke….fix it

Well the Canon G10 has been announced

with a 28 mm wide angle, 14.7 Megapixel, Digic 4 sensor (to name a few)

The best news is the  even greater reduction of noise due to the new Digic 4 sensor…check out the links below for the previews

http://gizmodo.com/5050924/canon-powershot-g10-147mp-flagship-sub+dslr-goes-wide+angle

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=17624#ModelFeaturesAct

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0809/08091702canon_g10.asp

I have to say I really enjoyed this post as it reminded me of when I was working as a sports photographer for a national press agency.

It is also strange to think that photographers use common soloutions to their problems, as I have been using the Pocket Phojo and a PDA for the last year to do remote transmitions, with the Nikon D2x or the Canon G9

(using the G9 by swapping the memory card or just using the USB cable to view the memory card while plugged into the camera; It does not automaticaly send from the G9, like it does from the D2x)

With the Pocket Phojo software on a PDA and Canon G9 it makes for a very compact reporting kit as the G9 can redord audio and video good enough for the web as well

Read the full article bellow to see how things have changed

The Sydney Morning Herald Blogs: Photographers

For newspaper photographers, the single greatest advantage of dumping film has been faster and easier delivery of pictures.

Before that, a photographer on an away-job might turn his hotel en-suite into a makeshift darkroom, or pay a local mini-lab to stay open after-hours, then transmit one or two prints back to Sydney in a tedious over-the-phone process making you very late for dinner.

Sports photographers needed to work for several hours after full-time to get their pictures back to the paper, while now they can generally get away with the last of the fans.

A decade on, things have progressed to the point where you can transmit your photographs (live) from a smart-phone in your pocket, all the while continuing to shoot the action you were sent there to cover. Read More >>

From the photosynth blog (the actual site is overwhelmed with hits at time of writing but you can read the blog here or view this video to see what it is all about and how photography is going 3D

There is two URL’s for photosynth http://photosynth.net and http://photosynth.com

There is a photography tutorial here as well as a how to video here

Photosynth Blog

We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.

good luck at getting through:)

Now this is what really annoys me, who has given the photographers, agencies and newspapers the authority to agree to this, this should have gone trough the unions for a decision if any.

So now we have “The police will be issuing guidelines to picture desks across all London papers soon.” but thousands of press photographers won’t get that guideline, so it should be down to the editors decision on what is needed in privacy as they are the ones in control if a picture is too horrific it is the editors decision not the photographer. What about other forces don’t they have firearms officers? Do the guidelines apply?

We just don’t have time to vet and consider if the image is offensive to readers or we may have breached some hidden point of privacy in an individual we would have to start asking them this right at the beginning in which case the pictures change dramatically from the candid approach that says its real and not set up or posed.

It is also interesting to note that Nigel Howard an Evening Standard Photographer said “there could still a problem when “citizen journalists” take
pictures of crime scenes using mobile phones, but he admitted there was
little either side could do about it.”

No there is little you can do about it and you don’t have the right to speak for them either Howard!

Now its all very well them saying one dads kid got jibbed at school but that can happen for anyone who appearers in the paper, what about parents committing sucide, or being a hippy a pagan, a priest, all of which is enough for a kid to get teased at school, thats waht school is like…sadley

Photographers agree to blur firearms officers’ faces – Press Gazette

A group of Fleet Street photographers has agreed to greater cooperation with firearms police officers with the Metropolitan Police, including pixelating faces to hide the marksmen’s identities.

About 12 newspaper, agency and freelance photographers met senior officers from CO19, the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Firearms Command, yesterday in a bid to foster better relations between police and press. Read More>>

Well you have all the gadgets and attachments for your G9, but then so do a lot of people so how do you make your G9 stand out from the crowd…with a one off designer strap from Luxury Beads.

These straps are also ideal for the ladies who want to make there camera a little less macho and more ‘girly’ as they see fit, there is even a Suicide Girls designs in the pipeline with skull beads and punky pinks. The straps are designed in strength for a point and shoot cameras but equally work on mobile phones (Cell Phone) and PDA’s

The straps come in two lengths one for wrist and the other a neck strap, that is mounted to one of the strap points on the camera. Each strap is unique and a one off, you can’t buy two of the same strap, so no worries of bumping into some one and being embarrassed you have copied some one else’s set up!

This particular strap consisted of seed beads, black agate, and a large glass focal bead, separated by Tibetan silver bead caps and tube beads. Attaching the camera was a small corded loop; these are replaceable in the event of wear (and needs to be checked on a regular bases) and was easy to fit to the G9, unlike some straps that seem to be incompatible or require a screwdriver to force the fitting.

The straps are strong and can take a lot of weight but I would not say they are heavy duty and are more for the social photographer than those covering riots or working at the extreme end of life. That said only time will tell if I am wrong on that one.

Price for the wrist straps are £11.95 and £19.95 for the long/neck straps in the UK and Luxury Beads will be shipping them abroad in the near future.