Woman Fisher

Buying a more capable camera

If you are using a point and shoot (P&S) camera by which I mean any camera that uses the LCD panel on the back as the primary method of focusing and composing, and are feeling constrained then this post is for you. Cameras that you might come across fall into several types:

Camera types:

• Point and Shoot
• Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR)
• Digital rangefinders (RF)
• Medium Format Digital (MF)

There are actually large format, viewfinder type digitals available but I assume no one reading this has a hundred thousand or so to buy a camera with. The prices of these cameras runs from $100 or less for P&S, $500 to $8000 for DSLR, $1000 to $7000 for Digital RF and somewhere over $15000 for a MF Digital body without a lens.There are still film cameras out in the wild and they can be found in each of the types above. And there are vendors that sell used cameras in good condition. You can pick up a DSLR for $300 or so from them.

My primary experience is with P&S and DSLR so I’m not going to talk about the rest of the types. I have owned a series of P&S cameras starting with a Canon A40 and ending at a Canon A95. Prior to owning those cameras I had owned a number of film SLR cameras, Exacta and Minolta bodies. I had a darkroom set up and did my own B&W prints and tinkered with a color system.

The problems with P&S cameras

I had stopped taking photos for well over a decade when I bought my first P&S. I enjoyed those cameras, but by the time I got to the A95 the charm started wearing off. What finally made me decide to make the move to a DSLR was a very frustrating series of shots I took out in the desert at Kodachrome State Park in Utah. My daughter and I spent an hour trying to get a good close up shot of a single flower in the middle of a desolate plain. I could not force the A95 to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. And since we live in Florida I don’t get the opportunity to go the Kodachrome State Park when I would like to.

The Canon A series of cameras is actually very capable for a P&S camera. It has manual controls and Aperture and Shutter priority modes. It theoretically has a manual focus mode but it was worthless. Basically it, just like every other P&S camera cuts the photographer off from full control of the photographic process.

Photographic control

The photographic process amounts to controlling the amount of light that reaches the camera film or sensor in our case. We control that by changing:

• Aperture
• Shutter Speed
• ISO

Aperture is the opening inside the lens, called a diaphragm, that lets light pass thru the lens. The more the diaphragm is open the more light gets to the sensor. Shutter speed is how long the shutter remains open to let light get to the sensor. And I like to think of ISO like the volume control knob on your stereo system. The more your turn that knob the louder the sound gets, but at some point the sound begins to get noisy with hissing and squeals. The more expensive your stereo is, the louder you can play it without distortion.

Briefly speaking point and shoot cameras have a limited aperture control. Often you will see them with a control range of f/2.5 to f/4 or so while a DSLR will generally run from f/2.8 to f/22. That depends on the lens and you may be confused by the f/stop terminology but just note how much wider it is on the DSLR right now.

P&S cameras will often have a limited shutter speed range, maybe from 1 second to 1/1000th a second. DSLR cameras are unlimited on the slow end but have a setting at 30 seconds and normally run up to at least 1/3000th of a second.

And P&S cameras have a very limited ISO range. Many are only usable at ISO 100 or 200 while DSLR cameras are currently usable up to ISO 3200. The P&S may have higher ISO settings shown but they are rarely usable since the images would be terribly noisy.

So that is enough for one post, I’ll continue this with more details on the next post.

Shadows

The Orphan Works Act.

An orphan work is one that has no known copyright owner, or if known the copyright owner cannot be found after a diligent search. There is no doubt that many works fall into this category for a several reasons:

• Many people never bothered to register their copyright before the 1982 change in the law
• Many people didn’t renew their copyright when it expired.
• Copyright law has been increasing the duration of copyright for the last half century. This has been done at the behest of film owners who worry about their early work falling into the public domain. Disney Studios is rumored to be a prime driver behind this. But the result has been to greatly increase the number of works which may have been copyrighted but who’s owners can no longer be found.
• Since 1982, copyright attaches to a work the instant it is created. But very few of these works are ever registered with the copyright office. So unless the work is somehow marked, the copyright owner is unknown.

The US Congress has been making multiple attempts to pass this legislation, pushed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other online companies that want to use images without paying anyone for them. Google has 5 million works that they would like to use.

So how does this affect the photographer?

It affect us since posting a work online that is not clearly marked by the name and contact information of the photographer could fall into the orphan works hole at some time in the future. So to prevent this add your email address to your works, I put one in the frame at the bottom of my posted shots.

Email addresses are not ideal, who knows if I’ll be using that same address 20 years from now. But for obvious reasons it isn’t a good idea to brand your physical address on web images. And I could move and change addresses. So the choices are limited.

There are plans for some sort of database of images and other works if the Act is passed. But it escapes me how such a database would be easily searchable for images. Perhaps some digital fingerprinting method. But any such method would have to be flexible enough to compensate for changes that would occur in an image after it is jpeg compressed. Perhaps several times. I cannot see how works that have been formally registered with the US Copyright Office could be searched. If you have a photo of a daisy that you want to use, how do you search the copyright files for that image? Sounds impossible to me at the current time.

Right now we are in a waiting pattern, waiting to see if the US Congress finally yields to the deep pocket powers behind this law. You can contact your representatives and urge them to vote against it. But protect yourself in the mean time.

This series started with this post

Suwanee waves

So Just what is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States(title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.§

Copyright is actually included as a right in the US Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The owner of a copyright is the only one who can legally:

• Reproduce the work
• Make Derivative Works
• Sell or otherwise distribute copies
• Display the work publicly

Who can obtain a Copyright to a particular work?

Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.§

That means the instant you press that shutter button the Copyright instantly becomes your property unless a few special circumstances are in effect. This has been true for any work created after March of 1989. The exemptions mainly involve working for someone else where your primary job is to take photographs or if you sign a contract before the images are created that gives someone else the right to them. You can license your rights to some of your work either in full or for certain limited usage. A Copyright lasts for the length of the authors life plus 70 years at this time.

I noted the reasons why this right is essentially unenforceable for the average person in the first post on this subject. You can get much greater protection by registering your copyright with the US Copyright Office. Doing this gives you:

• A public record of the copyright
• It is required before you can sue someone for infringement
• If you register within 90 days after publication of the work, you may recover legal fees and the higher damage levels mentioned in the DMCA post are in effect

The downside is that you have to do this every 90 days and it will cost you $45 every time you do it. $180/year, and again this means to me that it makes little sense unless you are making or expect to be making money from your work sometime in the future. You can do the registration either via mail or using the new planned online system. That may be slightly cheaper. The US Copyright Office has a lot of very readable information on this process and has answers for just about any question that you could think about asking. It is a very well done site and you should read some of their material for a better understanding of the process.

As we all have seen from some recent high profile shenanigans copyright law can get very complicated and this is one area where you seriously need a specialized attorney if you get involved in the legal system. They call themselves IP or Intellectual Property attorneys. For more info on that see the PhotoAttorney blog in the sidebar.

Fair Use

So just what is Fair Use? It is not a right, it is a legal defense that someone being sued for infringement may make to the judge. It basically allows people to use a portion of someones work for eductional or editorial use. But it cannot cause the owner of the copyright to lose an opportunity to generate income from his work. There are various legal tests that the judge will apply, but basically it is anything that a judge says it is.  Wikipedia has a very long article on this issue that you may want to read.

Next up is the Orphan Works act that at the time of this writing has not been passed yet. But it is something that we need to prepare for in advance since there are very powerful interests pushing for its passage.

This series started with this post

§ From the Copyright Office’s publications

Suwanee Dawn

The DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has certainly received a well deserved bad reputation. This comes from the ham handed use of it by Hollywood and the Recording Companies to persecute people for fairly minor transgressions. But certain aspects of it can help the photographer.

Photographers can use the DMCA in two ways to protect our images:

• First we should mark our work with a copyright notice either as a watermark, or as I do down in the frame of the image. That frame in my case is part of the image when it is posted on the web. For other reasons you should always mark the image with a way to contact you beside the copyright statement. I use one of my email addresses. This should be an email address that you are sure will be around for a long time since it would be difficult to go back and change hundreds of email addresses embedded in photos online.

• The second important use is the DMCA take-down notice which is what you would send to a website administrator when you find your work on their site without your permission. Site owners are mostly immune to copyright infringement suits if the work was placed on their site by one of their users without the owners direct knowledge. If, that is, they promptly respond to DCMA take-down notices. That is the reason why they act when they receive a notice without asking the user to explain or defend their use of the image. They do not want to endanger that immunity defense if it comes to that.

Carol Wright the author of the PhotoAttorney Blog has some details on the legal end of these issues:

Watermarks can be music

Take Down notices

If you use a blog reader I would certainly add the PhotoAttorney blog to your reading list.

Practicalities

Now the important thing to notice about that first link, is that the problem I mentioned in the first article on this subject, the limited amount of money you can recover from infringements, is dealt with of by the DMCA. If you mark your images with a explicit copyright notice, and someone removes that notice, then they can be liable to pay attorney fees (makes those lawyer happy and willing to work for you) and from $2500 to $25000 per violation, no matter what your damages may be. This will be up to a judge.

So adding a copyright notice costs nothing to do, and may end up getting you a nice chunk of change. I dislike watermarks posted on the image but I have to admit that they are probably more effective. Just keep them small and tasteful if you do use them, please. After all we post our work online for people to admire, and a giant watermark ruins that experience. Jim Goldstein has some thoughts about using watermarks.

Take down notices do not have to be elaborate, a simple notice that informs the owner or service provider of the website about a violation is all that is needed. Something like this:

Dear Sir:

I have noticed on (date here) that your site (or insert whatever the publication is) at (insert link/URL) and dated (insert date of publication here) includes a copy of my work: (describe the work or image) that I own the exclusive rights to and infringes my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Act. This was posted by: (name and other info about the person who posted the material if known). This work originally was published (insert the link/URL to the image). I have not authorized the use of this material.

Please contact me immediately.

Sincerely,

Your name and contact information.

Again let me insert the I am not a lawyer boilerplate. So take this info’s value for what you paid for it.

The next article will be on how to formally register your work with the US Copyright Office. that also adds a lot of protection, but isn’t free nor so simple to do as the above.

Suwanee River Cooter

Your First Line of Defense

The EXIF file which is attached to all of your photos right out of the camera is your first line of defense in the war against thieves. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File. This is a file that is invisibly attached to every photo that comes out of your camera, it was first created by the Japanese camera industry more than 10 years ago and the current version dates from 2002 and is version 2.2. This is called metadata, data about data.

The EXIF contains many fields but the most important to this discussion are the: Creator, Creator Address, Phone Number, Email Address and several other similar fields. Filling out these fields with your name, address, email address and other personal info, will brand the image as yours. There are many other fields in the EXIF file, your camera will automatically add information about the exposure, shutter speed and quite a few other items. And there are fields with info about where and when the photo was taken that you can fill out. Those are helpful as keywords when you are searching for a particular image. And Adobe Bridge automatically adds keywords to the EXIF file when you use them.

Now can the thief change this info? Yes they can. But that assumes that they know that it exists. From my observations of these people I’d say most of them are ignorant of any such knowledge. Most of them seem to be barely literate. I think that most people who know about EXIF files probably have plenty of their own images and are less likely to be engaged in stealing. Even if it is changed you still have your original copy that you can show is marked as yours.

How do you add the EXIF data

Now how do you add this information to your photos? If you are using Adobe Bridge you can assign metadata semi-automatically by using the Photodownloader applet to download the files from the flash card to your computer hard-drive. To create a template, open Bridge, go to the Tools menu and click on ‘Create Metadata Template’. Fill in the fields with your name and as much of the address as you feel comfortable using. I just use the City, State and Zip Code on mine and do not fill in the phone number. I do use the email address. You should use an email address as an Orphan Works protection device, more on that in another post.

Scroll down to the Copyright notice field and add your copyright info. This must be in a specific format:

* The Copyright symbol: © or the word spelled out as ‘copyright’ not (c)

* The year:  ©2009 (the year the photo was created)

* Your name:  ©2009 J Bryan Kramer (in my case you should put your name here)

* and supposedly adding this term will give you some extra protection in some other countries:

* ©2009 J Bryan Kramer all rights reserved

You can make the © symbol my holding down the ALT key while you type 0169 on the number pad, not the numbers at the top of the keyboard. Macs do by Option+g.

Fill in any other fields that you want. Then save the template with a name you like, I use Norm 2009 and change it every year when I update the year.

You can tell Photodownloader to assign a default template of exif data to all the files it processes. Here is a 3 minute YouTube Video by Ellen Anon on the how to do that:

Using Photodownloader Video

I assume that other editing programs have similar functionality but you will have to find the way to do that on your own. One warning about Photoshop, if you use Save-For-Web then photoshop will strip the EXIF data from the file. Undoing your work. So don’t use that. In CS4 you can reportedly turn off the action that strips EXIF data when you use Save-For-Web. You can use the batching function in Bridge to tag any files with template data if you missed doing that.

Canon users have another line of defense, you can embed your name in the camera firmware and it will brand every shot with that info.  You use the EOS Utilities that comes on the CDROM included with the camera, look at tab 4 on this site for instructions:

Embedding your name

This also protects your camera if it is stolen since you can show the police that your name is in the camera as the owners name. This is much harder for a thief to change since they would have to know that it is there and have the right software to change it. I have put out a call on some mailing lists to find out if Nikon or other camera brands have the same capability. If you know, then put it in a comment.

That finishes up this entry, next entry will cover how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be your friend too.

UPDATE:

I got some comments from Nikon users, apparently you can (at least on the D80 and up) embed a comment directly from the camera to an image file. I am not sure if this provides the same functionality as the Canon feature but the comment seems to be saved in the camera firmware.

Greek Shrine

Protecting your photos online

Is this a distant concern, do your really need to worry about people appropriating your work? Unfortunately the answer is that it happens every day. I hear reports all the time of people finding their work on other people’s websites. Indeed there are whole websites that not only post stolen images but provide tools to make it easier for their users to take images.

There is a tool, in beta at the time of this writing, which will search some of the web, for your images. It is called TinEye .

TinEye will scan for your image across the part of the web that it has so far indexed. The number of indexed sites seems to be limited right now but hopefully it will expand. The service scans for a digital fingerprint of the image not for the image title.

In the US and many other countries your photos are copyrighted the instant that you press the shutter button. And even though they are copyrighted, the images are essentially unprotected since there is no enforcement mechanism in place to protect your rights. Copyright violations are a civil matter in almost all cases. And being a civil matter; that means that it is up to you to protect your own rights by bringing a suit in court.

The problem is this. Most of the time people who steal your images will not be living anywhere near where you are. They will often be in a different state and sometimes will be in a different country. That means a trip down to your local small claims court won’t get you anything in your pocket or force them to stop using your image. And in the state that I live in, it can cost well over a $100 to file in small claims court. So your next step involves getting a lawyer to do the suing for you.

No surprise, but lawyers like to get paid for working. And unless you are going to pay one out of your own pocket, and that can easily amount to thousands of dollars, they want to see some profitable result at the end of the process. That would mean they need to see a big judgment ahead that they will split with you as payment for their efforts.

However with the type of copyright that attaches to your images when you press the shutter button, all you can expect to get from a court is your actual damages. You have to prove that you lost money by someone taking your image. That is fine if you are a well known photographer who gets $10,000 to take photos of some celebrity. But for the other 999 out of a 1000 photographers that means you would only recover a pittance, chicken feed and chump change. You could spend $1000 in legal costs and recover $25. Not so good.

There are a several things you can do to protect yourself. None is perfect but they can improve your chances of stopping theft. Or possibly you could even profit from the theft. I’ll cover those starting in the next post.

Let me post the obligatory I’m not a lawyer notice. I’m not one and you are always better of paying one to advise you. Poorer but better. Unless you hire Huey, Dewie, Cheatum and Howe.

UPDATE:

Someone mentioned in a comment that PicScout is available to search the web for your images. I took a look at their site at:

PicScout

However for photographers it seems to be limited to commercial sites only and costs $15/month for up to 500 photos. Their site makes it quite difficult to figure out exactly what they are offering.

Digimarc has been around for a long time, Photoshop users used to get a free plugin and short subscription to the service:

Digimarc

Digimarc seems to be more powerful than PicScout, but since I’m not quite sure what PicScout offers, that could be wrong. Digimarc embeds a invisible watermark on your images via a Photoshop plugin. They track where your image appears on the web and users can read that info via a utility. Again this is a paid and quite pricey service. Neither of these makes any sense to me, except for people who are making quite a bit of money from the sales of their work online. Probably you would have to be making thousands of dollars to see a return on these services.

Another update: I lost all the comments after upgrading Wordpress so the comment with the suggestion has vanished