What is Creative Commons?

There's a great article posted on a blog today about creative commons.

Take a look at the little girl in the above picture. Then think about these questions.

1. Who owns the photo?
2. Who can use the photo?
3. Does Blogger (Google) have any interest in this photo?
4. What are the stipulations for use of this photo?
5. What would you have to do to protect the photo from others using it?

These are many questions that come to mind when you post a photo on blogger or on Flickr.

Flickr states: "Respect the copyright of others. This means don't steal photographs that other people have taken and pass them off as your own. (That’s what favorites are for.)"

What this implies is that you're free to link to other's photos but not free to borrow them if without linking back to his/her site/posting. But does this mean you should ask the person who took the photograph if you can use it? I say, absolutely!

Creative Commons sets guidelines for photographers to use with regard to the photos they post on the Internet.

"Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"

In other words they let you change the automatic* stipulation that any photographs you post are all-rights-reserved photos to other stipulations that you can choose from, "like some rights reserved."

*According to templetons.com, "all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not." This is known as the Berne Copyright Convention.

Moral of the Story: Read the fine print. Don't go posting on a site that lets them have your rights. And don't take others' photographs without asking!

Is Photography Dead? Consider the Process

Mamie Van Duren's blur erases her age. Photo by Matt Bamberg

Two shows are highlighted in Newsweek's recent article, "Is Photography Dead"

The show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 and the show at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Depth of Field" are two shows the show how photography has evolved since its inception.

Peter Plagens, the writer of the piece states that a "mimetic new medium" was formed in 1839 when a print was made from a negative. In other words he describes photography during that period as realism--real subjects and objects that the lens captures.

He then goes on to talk about the changes in photography that occurred when everyone started taking pictures with their Kodak Instamatic and Brownie cameras.

Last he moves to the postmodern days of Photoshop, image manipulation that's easy and, well...fake.

Basically Plagen's asserts with reservation that photography is an "easy" medium in which to work. You take a picture with your digital camera, and, if you frame it right, you might get posted on the Internet.

I think a point can be made that there is a difference between a photograph and a snapshot. One is planned from finding the right time, place of the shot to adjusting camera settings to framing and shooting. The other is a picture taken casually without much thought.

Plagens focuses on post-processing (using Photoshop) as the beginning of the end of photography.

It would be better to say that photography's last step (using Photoshop) is a small part of what a photographer does and when it is done it's no simple task.

The Gondolier

You've probably seen pictures of a gondola.

But have you ever taken a good look at the gondolier, the gondola's driver?

A gondola, if you don't know is a boat that gets you around the city of Venice.

The laws in Venice state that you have to have been born there to row a gondola.

The gondolier faces the bow and pushes with one oar.

Long ago, there used to be thousands of gondoliers rowing their gondolas, but today there are only a few hundred, and most of them serve the tourists.

Catch the Train in LA

You can catch a train up the coast or inland from the center of Los Angeles at Union Station.

Train travel in the United States is fragmented at best. While we don't have an extensive train network as vast as that of Europe, we do have one that suits the needs of the larger cities.

One doesn't think of Los Angeles as a place where one takes a train, but many people do as routes extend out like a spider from the city's Union Station.

Union Station opened in 1939 when at that time it carried 7000 passengers a day.

Today 26,000 ride the trains to and from the Inland Empire and up and down the coast.

You can catch the Los Angeles Metro to many places around the city, including Hollywood from Union Station.

Tokyo Rush Hour

Art Deco Signage in San Francisco

One of the century’s most innovative and popular designs, Art Deco was a style that spread across the globe in the 1920s and 30s and contained the same forward-looking architectural aspirations of the earlier Art Nouveau period (1890s to 1910s).

As time progressed less became more so that the ornamentation that lined the perimeters of signs disappeared from signs in the 50s and 60s.

Today in San Francisco, many of the Art Deco signs remain. I believe the city has the best collection of these signs in the world.

The Dot Building

The South of France is filled with architecture from the 60s and 70s. On a walk from the Old Town in Aix de Provence (town of about 100,000 with architecture from the 5th to the 18th centuries); to the outskirts of the city, there's a weird and wild building, which I like to call the dot building.

It was built in traditional mid-century modern style--long lines of concrete steel, glass, zig-zagging roof lines, outlined in some serious black and white.

The building is home to the Foundation Vasarely. It was designed by Victor Vasarely, who's considered the Father of Op Art.

If you're going the way of Provence, this building should not be missed.