We had a lot of rain last week, here is a short video of the Covered Bridge after the rain.
Covered Bridge in Elizabethton
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Tag Archives: Photography
Northeast State Exhibit
If you are on the Northeast State campus this January, drop by the first floor of the Library and see my photo exhibit.
5th Annual World Wide Photowalk
Scott Kelby’s 5th Annual World Wide Photowalk is coming on Oct 13. It you are in east Tennessee, join me in Elizabethton at 4:00 PM for my walk. If you live in other areas, go to the World Wide Photowalk website, worldwidephotowalk.com and find a walk near you. All walks are free.
My walk starts at the Covered Bridge park at 4:00 PM. After shooting around the Covered Bridge and Monument, we will head downtown. Lost of old storefronts. The classic car show will start around 5:00 so there should be some nice cars and interesting characters to photograph.
After the walk, anyone that want to get together for dinner is welcome. I will suggest a place when I have a better idea of the number of people interested.
You don’t need a fancy camera. You camera phone is fine. This is a chance to meet new people and have a good time with photography. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Christmas Season 2010
It seems that even though I have the good intentions of posting more ofter, I don’t seem to get here.? Maybe more next year.
This post contains some video taken during the Christmas Season. It will probably not be of much interest to anyone but family.? That doesn’t matter, Here is the video.
The above video shows some fun we had with the kids ice skating and at the speedway in lights.
This video is of Christmas.
Lastly, an Animoto video created from pictures of the new babies in the Ward family.? Lelia is especially proud of her grand-nephews.
I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and will have a Happy New Year.
2010 Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photo Walk
Last Saturday (24 July) was the 2010 Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photo Walk.?? This was the third annual walk.? I walked with about 40 others in Jonesborough, TN.? It was a hot Saturday morning but I had a blast.? Last year I walked in Abingdon, VA.
The Lolipop Shop
This year there were over 1100 walks with more than 33,000 people walking.? A real day of documenting what was happening around the world.
Desks in a One Room School
I really enjoy photo walks.? It’s as much about meeting new people as it is about the photography.? I had some great conversations including one with a girl who is getting married in about a month.? We discussed her experience hiring a wedding photographer.? How knowing about photography made the experience different.? This may be the subject of a future post.
Keep the room warm
Did I come away with any great images, probably not.? Did I come away with images that I like, certainly.? BTW, let me know if you want to buy any.
Lighting the Scene
After looking at my images, and thinking about Jonesborough, I processed several images with an old style.
The Old School
The above image makes me thing of the long walk to school.
Bird Nest
What a way to make a nest for birds.
Been Here a While
Hang Around
Lighten Up
I hear the Train
In the Window
I would really like to encourage everyone to go on a photo walk.? It’s lots of fun and you can learn something from your fellow photographers.? Thanks to Scott Kelby for organizing the walk and to Richard Siggins for organizing the local walk.? Below is the group photo taken by Richard.
I’m ready for next year.
Copyright vs Orphaned Works
Copyright vs Orphaned Works
I am a photographer and occasional writer so I am concerned with copyright. I use various copyrights with different works ranging from ?all rights reserved? to a creative commons license.
Congress is working on orphaned works legislation to make it easier for people to use material still under copyright when the owner cannot be found. This is a good idea but they will get it wrong. Of course, what have they gotten right lately?
I believe in copyright. The constitution allows the government to issue copyrights and patents for a limited amount of time. The time is not specified and has changed over the years. Patent times have been decreasing in some areas while copyrights have increased. Mostly to protect the mouse. Yes, copyrights have increased as Mickey Mouse nears the limit of its copyright. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Many people feel copyright should last forever and allow descendants to benefit. If property can be handed down from generation to generation, why not copyright.
Now for the problem. To use copyrighted material, you need permission and may need to pay royalties or fees. That’s fair. What if you want to use a work and cannot find the copyright owner? You could use the material and hope for the best but if caught, the penalty can be large.
It is often difficult is not impossible to track down copyright holders. Many have died without leaving anyone to inherit the work. Other times, multiple persons hold the rights. This is especially true with movies. The music and soundtracks may be held by persons other than the studios. Everyone needs to be contacted for permission.
What about written work. In the 1930′s and 40′s there were dime novels and anthologies of short stories. Many of the publishers are no longer in business. Who was the author, the listed author may be Jeff Smith. How many Jeff Smiths are around? What if that was a pseudonym? It could have been a staff writer doing work for hire. I hope you see the problem.
Some will say: What’s the problem, just don’t use the work. Fair enough, but by some accounts that I’ve read, over 50% of movies ever produced do not have a complete copy in existence. Over 90% of silent movies have been lost. Why would a someone try to restore and sell the remaining copies if they could be sued and loose large sums of money? Of course, if there is no incentive to the studios to restore those properties, more will be lost. This illustrates some of the difficulty that we are facing.
The best argument against the orphan works act is it takes the teeth out of copyright. Someone uses a copyrighted work, gets caught and argues that they could not find the copyright holder. How do we judge weather a good faith effort was made to find the owner. My electronic copies of my photos have contact info embedded in the EXIF data. I can bee found. Please someone ask to use my work. I will happily license their use. Of course, someone could change that data and say they got the photos from somewhere else and that is how they found the photos.
For this reason, the orphaned works act should deal with the age of a work. The newer the work, the harder to use the act. Be sure to allow for sufficient damages for violations of the act. With the all of the stock photography sights selling images for very low prices, how do we determine that a Scott Bourne of Steve Simmon photo is work hundreds or thousands of dollars (they are) while mine may only be worth $10. I think mine should be worth more of course.
Being fair with the legislation will be difficult if not impossible. I don’t think that Congress can do it right. I don’t think judges and juries understand the value of some of these works.
I would love to see a solution that would save many of the old movies and out of print stories and books. With electronic publishing and print on demand books, we can open a whole new world of material.
Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photo Walk 2009
Getting started on the walk
Saturday was the 2009 World Wide Photo Walk. This is the second annual photo walk sponsored by Scott Kelby. This year there were 32,000 photographers that participated with over 1000 walks around the world. This was my first photo walk but will not be my last. I was part of the Abingdon VA walk. We started at the post office and walked around town. The walk took us to the farmers market, Martha Washington Inn, Barter Theater and downtown. We then drove over to the entrance to the Creeper Trail. We finished with a great lunch at the Senior Citizens Center.
Baseball bats for sale at the Farmers Market
Lots of fun. Got to meet some wonderful people and spend four hour getting to know them. We talked photography and had a good time. I enjoyed watching the other photographers work. Seeing their styles and approaches to subjects. Hopefully I picked up some good pointers. I shot over 300 pictures, a few were even good. I would probably have shot twice as many but spent a lot of time observing. I made a lot of mistakes in my pictures by not paying enough attention to what I was doing.
Are you hungry?
Hopefully I will get to participate next year or maybe even host a walk. I think Elizabethton TN would make a good walk. I hope you enjoy some of the pictures posted here or see them all at my flickr site. I will also be adding a gallery here later this week.
The fire dept was doing some training.
The sky reflecting from the clock
One man's junk
Photographic Workflow – Part 1
Photographic Workflow ? Part 1
What is the best workflow for photographers? I don’t know. Everyone is different and will have different needs. I have developed a workflow that works for me. First, the software that I use.
- Canon EOS Utility ? Import files
- RenameMaster – Freeware utility to rename files
- Holux Logger Utilitiy ? Import geodata
- Geosetter ? Match gps data with photos
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ? Catalog and basic edition, printing and posting
- Adobe Photoshop – Advanced editing
I’ll discuss each software as I go through my workflow. My first step is to take the photographs. Did I really need to say that? Without photos, everything else is unnecessary.
After returning from a shoot, I will import the photos into the computer. I can do that in one of two ways. I can connect the camera via a USB cable to the computer or insert the memory card into the card reader. When I started, I used the USB cable. This works OK if I only have a few pictures. If I have a lot of shots, or they are on multiple memory cards, that is not efficient. Now I only use the card reader.
Folder Structure
I will copy the pictures to a folder on my computer. This allow me to copy all the memory cards at once and do any additional processing later. Once the photos are on the computer, I will start the EOS utility. I could use Lightroom at this point but I have a folder structure that the EOS utility will automatically create that I have been unable to duplicate in Lightroom. I organize my photos by year. Within the year, a folder for each month and within that folder, one for each day. The EOS utility can automatically create that folder structure for me. Another thing the EOS utility does is rename the file to show my basic naming structure. You have the ability to customize the naming structure with the EOS utility as well as in Lightroom. The file will have a name in the format YYYY_MM_DD_XXXX. The year, month and day are from the EXIF data. XXXX is the image number created by the camera.
I initially had the EOS utility sequentially number the files but if I put the memory cards in the computer in a different order than taken, the sequence would match the order they were imported. I didn’t like this method.
Now that the photos are in the folders that they will live in, I will start Rename Master and append a subject to the end of the file name. This will be something like cub_scouts or Watauga_lake. Rename Master is a freeware utility to bulk rename files.
My next step is geocoding the photos. Geocoding allows me to attach latitude and longitude data to each photo. I can manually geocode the pictures but I usually use my GPS data logger. I will import the track data that was gathered while on the shoot using the utility supplied with the GPS.
Once the track log has been imported, I run Geosetter (http://geosetter.de) which is a freeware utility that will allow both manual geocoding or automatically geocode the pictures by reading the track log. I shoot mainly in camera raw so the GPS data is attached to a XMP sidecar file for each photo.
I am finally ready to import the photos into Lightroom. Lightroom is a photo cataloging program. It also allows basic editing, printing, slideshows, and creating web galleries. For more information about Lightroom, go to Adobe.com.
I will import the photos into Lightroom. During the import Lightroom import, copyright data will be added as well as basic tagging if all photos are the same subject. 
Once imported, I will do any additional tagging of the photos. This will include identifying subjects withing pictures. I will go through the photos and tag and if necessary, apply basic adjustment
such as exposure and white balance. Photos that are obviously above average that I may want to do other things with will be starred. I will give them three stars to start with. Obvious rejects are also rejected.
I will now upload the photos to my Flickr account using a Lightroom plugin. I will leave the details of this for another post. I have now completed my basic workflow.
If I need to do additional processing of any photos, I will use the additional tools in Lightroom and if necessary, go to Photoshop. I can do 90-95% of what I need in Lightroom.
I will talk about the Lightroom of my workflow in part 2.
Natural Tunnel State Park
Sunday we went to Natural Tunnel State Park in Virginia.? We had a good time and the boys enjoyed riding the chair lift.? I am using some of the pictures to test integrating web galleries into WordPress.
Click on the image above to view the gallery.? Let me know what you think.
Cub Scout Day Camp
Last week I was at Cub Scout Day Camp. I spent the week running around with the boys, helping when needed and taking pictures of the week. Monday thru Thursday, I alternated between Dan and John. Two days with each. I did miss John’s bulls eye in archery. That was a Dan day. I saw Dan’s best day shooting BB’s.
John Shooting at Cub Scout Day Camp
The week was non stop. The boys got to build bird houses and feeders, learn about fire safety, flag handling, nature, fishing, basketball, volley ball and plenty of play time. Friday we got to sleep late since we were having the family night and camping.
The week made me remember some of my time in Scouting. It has been a long time since I was a scout, longer than I like to think. I have fond memories of scouting and hope the boys will remember their time as scouts. Even if they don’t remember this week, I took enough pictures to remind them.
If you want to see more pictures of Cub Scout Day Camp follow the link to the Flickr page.