Blog Posts About: photography

This video hits close to home. Like many of you, we depend on intellectual property laws. They are essential tools for helping creators build their careers and own the work they create.

Unfortunately, the meaning and intent of the laws can be difficult to understand. We made this video to help others understand the basics and why the laws matter.

Here are the highlights:

About This Video

This video follows the story of a creative and talented woman named Candice who plays music, invented a new instrument and created a new business. Using copyright, patent and trademark laws, she learned to how to protect and build a business from her creations. It teaches:

• Why intellectual property is different from physical property
• The risk of not establishing and protecting ownership
• Why copyright law matters in selling and managing your creative works
• Why patent law matters in protecting your inventions Why trademark law matters in protecting your brand

How to Use This Video

This video is designed to introduce and explain intellectual property laws in about three minutes. It's designed to get students and up to speed quickly regarding an essential part of creative life. 

Watch it now

I will bet you know people who need this video. It's designed to relate the basic ideas behind resolution and pixels in digital images.

• The basics of pixels in digital images
• Why a digital image with a small number of pixels can’t be enlarged
• What happens when a digital image is enlarged too much
• How megapixels and resolution affect print size

Watch it now.

Matthew Monteith is a New York-based artist who had an idea for a photo series that captures people explaining artworks to others. Part of his motivation, according to this article on Flavorwire, was a fascination with explanation itself.  What follows is my new favorite quote on the subject, by Monteith:

I am fascinated with the art of explanation, the moment when one individual, using their own knowledge of an object, both conceptual and historical takes on the task of animating that story and attempts to plant the seed of that idea into the minds of others. These ideas morph into new ideas and ultimately into new works.

I love it.  The explainer's goal is to plant the seed of an idea into the minds of others.  A few of Montheith's photos art explanation photos are below. You can find many more here.

All photos credit: Matthew Monteith

The delicious food, the amazingly nice people, the sites, the experience, Japan is one of our favorite places. Thankfully one of our friends moved there recently and has an extra bedroom (thanks Ken!).  Before the planning was done, 5 of us from Seattle decided to go. The photos below will give you a taste of our time there.

I took 2,900 photos in the 15 days we were gone. You can see a set of 135 photos on Flickr.

The photo below is one of my all time favorites.  We happened to be a Meiji Shrine in Tokyo just as a wedding party walked through with snow coming down really hard.  It seemed to snow everywhere we went.

One reason we went this time of year was for Yuki Matsuri, the annual snow festival in the northern city of Sapporo, Hokkaido.  The event attracts 2 million visitors who come for the giant snow and ice sculptures.  It was also very cool to spend an evening with Michael and Takako of Smashcut Media.

 The ice sculptures were amazing  - I call this one "see food."

The seaside town of Otaru, outside of Sapporo, has it's own snow festival that is all about hand-made snow lanterns and delicious sushi.

Sachi and I split from the group and went to the less-visited southern island of Shikoku. Sachi's Japanese speaking helps in getting off the beaten track.  In the central part of the island is the Oboke Gorge, which gave us a chance to stay in an Onsen Resort Ryokan called Kazura-bashi. 

 The water-level view of the Oboke Gorge.

The bag you see here is all Sachi brought for the whole trip.

We moved around a lot.  In fact, not counting subways in Tokyo, we rode 18 different trains, including one of my favorite modes of transport: the Shinkansen. 

Every single train was on time to a matter of seconds - amazing.


In Nikko, north of Tokyo, this monkey screamed, walked up to me and took a harmless swipe at my leg before retreating.  Scary for a bit.

All in all a wonderful vacation. I plan to have another post soon about visual thinking in Japan.  After that, we'll return to regularly scheduled programming.

2008 is shaping up to be a interesting year to try out new things when it comes to digital photos. From photo transfer technology, to wall hanging, to photo sharing services, here are a few things I'll be using in 2008.

Eye-Fi

I consider Eye-Fi a magical piece of photo technology. It makes it possible for me to upload photos to Flickr (or other services) and to my computer directly from my camera using my wi-fi network - no wires, no card readers.  Once it's installed, you just shoot a photo and within seconds the photo magically appears on the web and my computer.

Update:  I use Eye-fi on my home wi-fi network - when I arrive home,  the camera starts uploading as long as the camera is on. I set it to upload to Flickr as "private" and then change permissions as needed.

For SD memory cameras, you just replace your SD card with the 2gb Eye-Fi SD card and load the software on your computer.  Once it's set up, the Eye-Fi SD card makes it possible to transfer photos automatically.  If you don't have an SD camera, you can use the Eye-Fi card with a Compact Flash adapter too. I first heard about Eye-Fi from Anastasia of Juxtaprose and this year, it was a Christmas gift from my Mom. Thanks Santa!

FotoflÅ??t

Last year I gave Flickr's photo printing service a try and was impressed.  I get so used to seeing photos online that I forget about how they look on a wall. Just recently I came across fotoflÅ??t - which takes photos and wall mounting to a new level. 

Two things I love about fotoflÅ??t:

1.  Frameless design and photo protection.  They print your photos on high quality photographic paper and then fuse it to 1/8" thick acrylic. This makes them low reflection, low glare and high durability. I printed some of our travel panoramas.

2.  Magnetic wall mounts.  Each fotoflÅ??t comes with a wall mount that makes the photos modular.  Once the mounts are in place, you can have a number of fotoflÅ??t photos and switch them out in seconds.

Right now, fotoflÅ??t is working directly with Smug Mug, a photo sharing service.  In fact, in order to use fotoflÅ??t I had to upload my photos to Smug Mug first.  This may change soon.

SmugMug

Either way, it gave me a reason to try out SmugMug and I'm impressed so far.  SmugMug is a bit more professionally oriented (and expensive) than Flickr, and I'm not a pro, but here are a few things I dig about SmugMug.

Photos really do look good on SmugMug.  Maybe it's the black background or pixie dust, but I love how my photos look there.

Nice options.  I like the new Picnik integration on Flickr better, but SmugMug provides a few options for online photo editing. If you become a power user (59.95/yr), you can even upload videos to your account.

Build a store. If you become a Pro user (149.95/yr) you can make SmugMug a platform on your domain. This means that I could use SmugMug to create LeesPhotoStore.com and sell my photos.  They keep 15% and handle support and technical details.

The SmugMug attitude. I love their story of passion, family, being small and living a dream.

So these are a few products I plan to use this year.  Maybe you have more?

(My Flickr account)