The Online Photographer

Legal Guide for Photographers

Ever wondered what your rights and obligations as a photographer are? Carolyn Wright, who has written for this site and who maintains the photoattorney.com website, lays out what you need to know plainly and simply. Her book is reasonably brief (who has the time to read a textbook the size of the phone book on this subject?) and avoids an excess of legal jargon.

Whether you're already selling either your work or your services, or are just thinking about it, the Photographer's Legal Guide should answer most or all of your questions.

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Mike

Featured Comment by Grant Kench: "Note that legal issues are jurisdictionally based. Whilst this publication may well be excellent for the U.S.A., much of it will not apply elsewhere, e.g. where I am in Tasmania."

Featured Comment by Jason: "I own a copy of this and as a photography/ legal resource, it is invaluable. While most people know about Bert Krages' .PDF file explaining photographer's rights, Carolyn's book answers a lot more of the common questions you may be inclined to ask on the business side. She also is a member of Naturescapes.net and an accomplished photographer in her own right. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in selling their work."

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

Barton Silverman, Dith Pran

By Douglas Martin, The New York Times

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians—a third of the population—were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation...

READ ON at nytimes.com

Video here

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Jim Metzger: "I had the immense pleasure of meeting Mr. Dith not once but twice.

"I was covering the 'Blessing of the Animals' at St. Johns Cathedral in N.Y.C. for the ASPCA. No real credentials, I was just a volunteer. As the animals exited the church at the end of the service, a hand reached down from the official photographers viewing platform and Dith Pran pulled me up to join the 'professionals.' As far as he was concerned, if you carried a camera, you deserved an opportunity to shoot with everyone else. The whole incident lasted just a few minutes; I was able to express my thanks and admiration at what he had endured and accomplished in his life.

"Several years later I was part of a large demonstration with the ACLU at N.Y. City Hall. Not photographing, just participating. Dith Pran was covering it for the New York Times. Amazingly he remembered me and stopped to talk about my photography career.

"What a humble and inspirational human being. I 'knew' him for just a few moments but he has left a deep and lasting impression on me.

"Pran, you are missed but not forgotten. I will try to do better."

More on Product Pricing in the Camera Industry

By Eamon Hickey

Since I have a bit of an insider background in the camera industry, I thought I'd pick up a few random threads from Mike's "What Will the Canon 5D Replacement Cost" post and the responses to it. But I'll get the bottom line out of the way right up front: I don't know either.

What do I mean by "a bit" of an insider background? I was a sales rep for Nikon Inc. (popularly known as Nikon USA) from mid-1994 to mid-1999 (and a Nikon tech rep before that as well as a camera store manager even further back). Sales reps in foreign subsidiaries do not attend product planning meetings in Japan, and upper management in the U.S., in their blindness, consistently failed to avail themselves of my wise counsel in their own planning sessions. But still, you learn things. Bosses talk over beers; friends get promoted into jobs with access to The Dark Secrets. (Since quitting Nikon, I've done a lot of writing about cameras and the camera business for various media outlets, and you pick up some scuttlebutt that way, too.)

Me, circa 1997, in my Nikon rep's costume sitting in a photo buyer's office just prior to begging for an order and then taking him out to abuse my expense account. (Photo taken with a Nikon Coolpix 300.)

-

First, I'm certain that Canon has had in mind a moderately firm target retail price for the 5D replacement (let's call it the 5D Mk II since that's depressingly likely to be its real name) since they first sat down at the drawing board...er...CAD workstation. You can't really design a camera without knowing what you want to charge for it since the projected price influences every choice you make about features, materials, performance, production methods and much else. Well, really, price target and product specification are inseparably linked; they exist as functions of each other.

On the other hand, I know for certain that the finalized price for each geographic market isn't determined until about 30 days before shipping in most cases. There can be some modest flexibility around the original target price to adjust for market conditions (mainly competition), which will have changed since you began to design the product lo' those many moons ago. (My experience is that sometimes the Japanese camera companies are quite well informed about future competition—when I worked at Nikon our product manager types sometimes could tell me almost exactly what Canon or Minolta or whoever were about to introduce—and other times they're largely in the dark, especially about what the other guy plans to charge for his new gadget, a really critical piece of information.) The regional distributor also has a little input on the final price; the Spanish distributor is the only person who really knows whether he needs to subtract 50 euros to compete in Madrid, or whether it's safe to add 50 euros and bank some extra margin.

A giant wrench in the cogs
In the U.S., there's a big wild card in these calculations, however, one that was mentioned by a commenter on Mike's post who was channeling Thom Hogan. The yen has gained 15–20% in value against the dollar in the last year. That means Canon USA pays Canon Japan 15–20% more for every product it imports; if an EOS 5D cost Canon USA, say, $1,600 a year ago, it costs them as much as $2,000 now. The dollar's troubles are threatening to be by far the biggest influence on the camera business over the next year or two. Certainly that is true in the U.S., but Europe may feel it, too, even though the Euro has been stable against the yen over the last year. The size and importance of the U.S. market means that if currency issues are driving prices up here, the camera companies often try to counteract that problem by lowering their manufacturing costs. Hello, plastic.

In any case, I can picture economists in every corporation in Japan sitting bleary-eyed and despondent in front of 40-page spreadsheets attempting to understand the U.S. economy's recent dramatic perturbations and trying to predict what the dollar will be worth over the next year or 18 months. And whatever prediction Canon's guy makes will be a very important factor in the 5D Mk II's price in the U.S. and possibly elsewhere, too.

Unforeseen revolution
I'll add to Mike's point on market research with my own experience. I joined Nikon in 1991 and well remember the utter, incredulous dismay within the company during the early 1990s as large numbers of professional photographers switched to Canon for autofocus. At that time, Nikon was paying a market research firm to periodically survey professional photographers about their needs and desires. (I'm sure Nikon still does this.) Consistently, the surveys done in the mid-to-late 1980s yielded a resounding NO to autofocus in a pro SLR. They hated the idea, and Nikon did not pursue AF technology all that aggressively. Well, what the pro photogs hated was the crummy autofocus that existed in 1987. When they saw the really good autofocus that Canon unveiled in 1990, they went for it like a slice of chocolate cake.
 
And then I clearly remember a day near Christmas in 1997 when an amazed Olympus sales rep whispered to me, after looking both ways for eavesdroppers, that he would probably sell $2 million worth of digital cameras that year, something like 10X the volume that Olympus had originally projected. To their utter surprise, they (along with Sony) had stumbled on the biggest revolution in photographic history. (For contrast, Nikon had its first digital cameras that year, two surpassingly goofy little point-and-shoots (shown above and at right) and I probably did $20,000 worth of volume with them.) There is no question that none of the camera companies, market research notwithstanding, had the slightest inkling of how fast digital cameras would overwhelm film and how huge the business would become.

Contra Mike, I don't think that Nikon is currently kicking itself for pricing the D3 too low. Nikon was in terrible shape in the photojournalist market and they needed a buzz-generating grand slam home run, even if they left some money on the table. Mindshare or buzz-share (might as well go whole hog on the marketing mumbo-jumbo!) was arguably more important than profit dollars in this case. The D3's low price ($3,000 less than the only other pro full-frame DSLR) helps create the notion that Nikon, simultaneously increasing performance and breaking price barriers, is now the pro digital train to be riding on.

And that brings me to Sony, which is in a similar position. To sell any decent number of units in the mid-to-upper end of the DSLR market, they have to displace two brands, Canon and Nikon, which together have completely dominated the mindshare, and consequently the spending, of serious 35mm-style photographers for almost 50 years. (Yes, yes, I've heard of Leica; my statement stands.) That will be no easy task, and Sony must certainly understand that. I'll be really surprised if the A900 isn't priced very aggressively—if, in other words, Sony doesn't sacrifice a lot of margin in hopes of carving out a meaningful foothold in the serious photographer segment. If Canon and Nikon are anticipating the same thing—and I bet they are—we will see some aggressive moves in the price/feature ratios of these presumed new cameras.

But again, currency exchange rates, wherever they end up going, could throw all these calculations off.

So rolling all those factors together and weighing the probabilities I come up with a price for the 5D Mk II of...still no idea.

Last word
On a last tangential note: a couple of commenters to Mike's post wondered about support for discontinued cameras. When I was at Nikon, the company policy was to continue providing spare parts for camera bodies for five years after discontinuation (and service for however long parts were available, which often ends up being longer than five years). For lenses, the spare parts commitment was for ten years after discontinuation. I'm not sure that's still true, and I don't know the specifics for other brands, but I'd be willing to bet a slice of chocolate cake that they are very similar.

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Eamon

Welcome to B&H

In response to numerous (and, um, somewhat persistent) reader requests, I'm pleased to welcome B&H Photo as a regular sponsor of T.O.P. As you might already know, B&H is the #1 retailer of imaging products in the world. Its Manhattan megastore is the area of a football field, and its extensive warehouses are stocked with a ready supply of almost any conceivable imaging product you might need, available for immediate shipment to any address in the world.

B&H shares its profits with us for anything you purchase through our site—always, of course, at no additional cost to you. All you have to do to support T.O.P. is to navigate to B&H through their ad on our site. We receive a small percentage, pennies on your dollar, but it adds up to significant income for this site and helps make it possible for T.O.P. to keep on truckin'. Everything you buy at B&H when you link to them from here is credited to us (the same is true of Amazon.com).

For those who might like to incorporate our ID into your permanent link so we're automatically credited for all your purchases, simply copy and paste the following URL into your links: www.bhphotovideo.com/?BI=2144&KBID=2882 . [UPDATE: Better hold off on this for now. I haven't gotten confirmation that this actually works. I'll keep you posted....]

I'm pleased to have B&H Photo on board as a sponsor. And, as always, I really appreciate the kindness, kudos, and material support offered constantly by you, our readers. Thank you!

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Mike J., Chief Bottle-Washer and Head Factotum of T.O.P.

Featured Comment by robert e: "So, then, every dollar I spend at my favorite photo gear and supplies store now helps keep my favorite blog going? This is trouble."

Thom Hogan's Nikon D300 Guide

Thom Hogan (of bythom.com) is now accepting pre-orders for his eagerly-awaited Complete Guide to the Nikon D300. Given that the D300 is already shaping up to be a landmark bestseller for Nikon, and that Thom is perhaps the best writer on all things Nikon—and the most experienced Nikon camera guidebook author—on the planet, it seems like a natural match to us. Whether you've already bought a D300 or are considering one, you'll want the Guide, and, well…why wait?

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Mike

Featured Comment by Joe: "I've got three previous Thom Hogan books and each one changed the way I use my Nikons."

What Will the Canon 5D Replacement Cost?

The Canon 5D is currently $2,200 at B&H. Are the new "5D Class" cameras going to be in that price range?

The answer is, I don't know. It would be interesting if we could get the real inside skinny on pricing; I suspect it's far more of a "black art" than people realize...

READ ON (long post)

[Disclaimer: I have never worked for a camera company and I don't have insider contacts, so I don't really know how cameras are priced. The article that follows the link is nothing but a pastiche of supposition, reason, off-the-record and off-the-cuff intelligence from industry folks, and some basic economics. Please take it in that spirit, and not as an authoritative "last-word on the subject" type of thing. Gracias!]

________________________

Mike

Featured Comment by mcananeya: "I managed to dig up the Thom Hogan posts on this subject. Start here and then follow his comments in the rest of the thread. Thom isn't the Wizard of Oz with a crystal ball, so his word isn't gospel, but a lot of what he has to say makes sense (to me at least)."

The Canon 5D Class of Camera

It seems clear from our size-comparison exercises below that the upcoming Sony "Flagship," a.k.a. A900, is intended to compete with the Canon 5D (12.7 megapixels, moderate overall size, full-frame). That "class" of camera can't really be considered a class yet, because, for better than two and a half years now, the Canon 5D has been the only camera in the class. And yet, I think it's likely that this not-quite-a-class class of camera is probably the next locus of activity and progress in the DSLR Universe.

I suppose you could define the class as "cameras of normal size and very high image quality but without professional-level speed." Pros pay dearly for very high frame-rates, large buffers, bleeding-edge shutters, and so on. But many photographers don't need all that—to shoot a landscape, or a flower, or a portrait doesn't require things like SOTA focus-tracking or minimal mirror blackout. Just reasonable portability (and relatively reasonable cost) along with high image quality.

Market share is only one way of looking at a camera's importance. Another way is to look at significance, by considering a product's importance to real photographers relative to its sales and profits. By this measure, for example, Leica rangefinders have always been far more important than their market share would imply, whereas, say, Minolta's various pro cameras in the waning decades of the last century were one example of cameras that were less important to photography than raw sales figures might indicate. (The Minolta 9xi and Maxxum 9 were brave tries at full-on pro camera bodies, but I never heard of very many pros using them.) The Canon 5D has been popular among serious photographers, and I think its importance in that regard outstrips its market share handily. It's been a significant product.

A significant camera: the Canon 5D, a camera that defines its own class.

By the time 2008 is over, we might well have full-frame, high-image-quality, moderately-sized "5D-class" cameras from several manufacturers. Nikon has a fairly obvious roadmap to get there: a "D3X," high-megapixel pro camera first, as soon as it won't poach sales from the hot-selling D3 (and maybe a little sooner), and then a 5D-competitor with the D3X's (or even the D3's) sensor in a smaller, slower, more reasonably-sized, and less expensive body. That's two generations hence, and there's no telling if Nikon will get there before the close of 2008. The Sony flagship / A900 will almost certainly be on the scene by then.

That leaves Canon. The 5D's 12.7 MP is no longer quite so special, since APS-C sensors have caught up with and in some cases surpassed the once-impressive magic number. The Sony A900 will almost double it. As to the second coming of the 5D, I'm not privvy to the schedule, but then, it seems no other prognosticator is either: like millenarians, some of them have divined deadlines that so far have come and gone without the desired apparitional event taking place. Still, it seems inevitable that Canon will at some point replace the 5D with a newer camera in the class the 5D invented and still defines.

It's just that the new camera will have competition. That will be a big difference. It seems likely to heat up this category considerably, finally, to the benefit of serious photographers worldwide.

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Colin Work: "I owned a Canon D30, which, though limited in many ways, produced the most beautiful images (at 100 ISO). But 3 MP was not enough, so I duly moved to a D60...10D, 20D, 1D Mk. II; but while each was a technological improvement, none captured the silky look of the D30. And then I bought a 5D, and I found that look again. My favorite DSLR despite (perhaps because of) its quirks and limitations. I also own a 1D Mk. III—it gets the job done, but the 5D makes me smile.

"I think the D30 and 5D prove, that for that special look, you must have big photosites. It is almost certain that the replacement will have more, and hence smaller, photosites. It will be better in many measurable ways, but I bet the images won't have that special 5D/D30 look to them.

"Sadly, being plastic and electronics, I doubt anyone will be shooting with a 20- (or even 10-) year-old 5D in the future as they might with a classic mechanical film camera. But as far as I'm concerned, the 5D is the first DSLR with 'soul.' "

Wanted: Mastah Potatochopper

I'm hoping there might be a Photoshop ninja out there who is actually competent to do this—I've tried, but I made a hash of it. I was wondering how we could tell how big the Sony A900 is just from the pictures, and it occurred to me that if one were to take the frontal picture of the transparent flagship camera at Masterchong (fifth picture down) and superimpose it on a frontal image of the A700 (or perhaps just their outlines), matching the lensmount rings in size, you could tell the relative sizes of the two cameras. Anybody up for this? Anybody got both the skills and the time to waste? I know this is camerasturbation, but I'm curious, for one.

I tried, but succeeded in making a ridiculous mess. (As I'm fond of saying, what I don't know about Photoshop could fill a book—and, in fact, does.)

_____________________

Mike

LINKS:

Here's Michael W.'s superimposed version

Terry Lawhon's side-by-side comparison

Keep in mind that the A700 is a mid-sized camera—about the size of the 40D, not as big as the D300 and certainly a good deal more compact than the "big dogs" like the 1D Mk. III and the D3. Bear in mind that the hands holding the A900 in masterchong's pictures look to be a woman's, which would make the camera look bigger, and that the frontal photo of the transparent A900 is taken just slightly from above rather than dead straight on. I dunno, looks to me like the A900 is going to be pretty close to the size of the Nikon D200/D300/Fuji S5. Of course it could also be "thicker," i.e., deeper.

There's a more straight-on picture of the transparent prototype here. (Thanks to Carsten K.)

If anybody else tried it, send 'em along. I'll post them. My email is in the right-hand column, where it says "email me." Thanks to Michael and Terry. —MJ

James K.'s outline version (click to see larger):

Antonis Ricos's shadowed version:

Andreas Weber (above): "The new straight-on view makes the fit about perfect; just look at the lensmounts."

Kevin McLoughlin (above): "I used the image of the A900 from dpreview which is more square on in view. Matching exactly the  lens plates and their screw holes indicates that the A900 is not that much bigger than the A700."

CODA: Thanks to everyone who participated and contributed here. I think we've done this up proud, so I probably won't be posting any more of these. But this has been very educational; I don't care for huge cameras, and it looks like the A900 is going to be well within my comfort zone. Good to know. Thanks again. —MJ

What Leicas Do

A couple of quick book links that I've been meaning to put up for a while now. (I'm getting really behind with posting book reviews, mine and others'. I have a whopping eight books in the review queue here at T.O.P. world headquarters, a.k.a. my study, and at least half that many written reviews awaiting posting. I'll try to make some progress on that soon.)

First of all, if you've been a photo- grapher for a while, or have spent a lot of time on online camera forums, you're probably aware of all the lore, legend, wild claims and strong talk that centers around Leicas. Just in case you've heard enough of this to wonder just what they're talking about, I really hope you can take a quick look at Sebastiao Salgado's Africa the next time you're at the bookstore. The reproduction quality in this book is stunning—its pages are close cousins to original prints, were they this size. Many of the pictures (maybe not all, but easily a majority of them) show what Leicas do and what all the fuss is about. Just so photographically beautiful. All I can say is...wow.

Sorry not to talk more about the pictures themselves, but I don't own this book—I just spent some quality time with the open copy at the bookstore.

Secondly, Robert Frank's The Americans is about to be republished again, for, I don't know, the fourth or fifth time. You definitely can't afford a first edition; if you can afford one, chances are you can't find one. I have the 1986 Pantheon reprint. One of the treasures of my overflowing bookcase. I won't go on and on about this book right here; suffice to say that, after half a century, it remains seminal, original, darkly lyrical, instructive, subversive, eloquent, heartbreaking, harsh, I hope no longer controversial—photography's Kind of Blue. Even if photography in this style is not your exact cup of tea, this book you should own. I shall remind you again in May.

____________________

Mike

ADDENDUM: Steidl, the publisher of the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Americans and of the Robert Frank Project (a comprehensive publishing and republishing of all his significant work), has a nice PDF about the project and the book. To get it, go here and follow the link. (Thanks to Ade for this tip.)

P.S.x3

A couple of updates—first, we got a nice note from Rajesh Thind, the filmmaker who made the video of himself being hassled in the streets by community wardens in the U.K. I've posted it as a "Featured Comment" to last Thursday's post. If you were following this topic you might want to check it out.

Also, just today, New York Times photographer David W. Dunlap wrote a piece about getting attacked on the street and having his camera smashed. Obviously, photographing criminal activity is a different sort of hazard than being thought a terrorist, but the story's in the general category of the dangers we face. Thanks to Michael Gottlieb for the link.

And while I'm mentioning comments, reader alkos linked a picture by James Nachtwey to the "Random Excellence: John Moore" post. Nachtwey's picture is like a bookend to Moore's; doubly thought-provoking. If you missed it, have a look.

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Rajesh, Michael, and alkos)

Featured Comment by John Camp: "Ah, man. This is what I was saying about Nachtwey a couple of weeks ago—the guy has a brilliant, blood-curdling eye for the aesthetics of tragedy. The John Moore photo is terribly touching, and is strong because it seems unrehearsed and kind of all over the place—the people watching in the background, the inclusion of disparate elements. It's powerful partly because it's so commonplace and universal: a woman grieving for her lost lover. Still, there's a sense to the photo that says life, does, and will go on.

"The Nachtwey photo is absolutely brutal and to the point: there's nothing in it that doesn't need to be there, and everything that is in it pounds home the point—even the dried up earth, the crappy-looking tombstones in disarray, the ghoul-like clothing of the grieving woman. She might be death herself, or dying herself; and her black-robed anonymity makes her a symbol for anybody who has lost someone in war.

"Moore's photo  was taken by a reporter who was there and had the ability to see; Nachtwey's was taken by an artist who happened to be reporting.

"Two pretty astonishing photographs. Makes you believe in the power of the camera, huh?"

OT: Easter Music

I celebrated Easter yesterday by listening to J. S. Bach's Mass in B-Minor, which Alberto Basso called "...the most astounding spiritual encounter between the worlds of Catholic glorification and the Lutheran cult of the cross."*  The performance was by the American Bach Soloists, in a recording of excellent sound quality.

The ABS in costume. I used to do musical-group promo pictures very similar to this one, but I never needed sweeps this big, thank Deus.

The outfit I downloaded it from, called Magnatune, is a new discovery to me, and it's fascinating. You can:

• Listen to entire recordings online (with a velvety female voice DJ'ing between tracks)
• Buy a physical CD through the site; or
• Download the music, in your choice of format and, hence, sound quality: MP3 (takes about 5 minutes), OGG, FLAC, iTunes-friendly AAC, or WAV (CD quality, takes about an hour).

No DRM (digital rights management, i.e., copy protection).

And get this: You decide what you want to pay for the download. There's a $5 minimum, and it goes up from there to "$8, typical" to "$12, generous" to "$18, we love you!"

Half of whatever you pay goes directly to the artists (which, in all cases, is probably equal to or better than the artists see from their conventional contracts).

And that's not all: they encourage you to share the download URL and your password with three of your friends, so they can download the same music you did...for free. All legal and above-board, no morally questionable IP theft happenin'. (You're on your honor not to give the password to more than three people.)

The site's selection is minuscule, and it's heavy on ambient and New Age, which I'm personally not particularly into. The classical section is probably the site's most extensive, and even that is pretty limited. That's mainly a philosophy, though: the highly edited/selected approach as opposed to the please-every-taste kitchen sink approach. So, okay.

Still, an interesting venture and one I'm glad to know about. Maybe you will be too. Anyway, it's kind of fun to browse their artists. 

_____________________

Mike

*Thanks, Wikipedia.

Who Reads 'Wired'?

El Yesi, Self-portrait

Top 10 Wired readers' self-portraits, as chosen by other readers. (Extra credit: I'll bet regular TOP readers can guess my favorite one. Not before choosing your favorite one, of course.)

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Kevin Bourque)

The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib

Nubar Alexanian, Specialist Sabrina Harman

In this week's New Yorker magazine, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris chronicle the most influential photographer you've never heard of, Sabrina Harman, and a hooded man standing on a box with his fingers attached to wires. The army sentenced her to prison for taking pictures. The complete article is online.

Edward Keating, Robert Frank and June Leaf in China

Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, they've put the entire text of Charlie LeDuff's profile of Robert Frank online.

(These are both, shall we say, "long-breathed" articles; hope you've got some time to read today.)

_____________________

Mike

Sony's Masterpiece

Masterchong has published a number of photos of Sony's upcoming flagship, now being called the A900, taken at Photo Imaging Expo in Japan. According to a Sony spokesman, the 25-megapixel A900, with full-frame sensor IS and A350-style independent Live View, will be introduced for real at IFA in August or photokina in September. (Note that your humble correspondent has no idea what IFA stands for, although I now know a lot of things it doesn't stand for.)

_____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Anil: "It seems that IFA is a very large consumer electronics show."

Remembrance Of Things—Part 1

By Ctein

It's spring, and this man's fancy turns to…mortality.

My very first column for The Online Photographer was about the death of Tee Corinne. Tee's estate commissioned me to organize her computer files. My task was to eliminate the chaos and duplication and make it accessible to future scholars at the University of Oregon. I had Tee's external hard drive, floppies, Zip disks, CDs, and DVDs. All told, there were about 70 GB of data in about 75,000 files: Tee's writings, correspondence and photographs.

Tee had used a variety of word processing programs, some quite ancient. Early stuff was named in the traditional "8.3" DOS fashion we had to work with in those dim, dark days. For example, a file might be named "INVISIBL.LNS," shorthand for " Invisible Lines." As you might expect, modern operating systems get flummoxed by this.

I reconfigured all the names and appended the file creation dates. MacLink Plus converted them en-masse from their original formats into DOC files, a format so widely used I can be sure programs capable of reading it will be available into the indefinite future.  INVISIBL.LNS became INVISIBL_LNS_05161994.DOC. Done!

The photos took 95% of the work. First I had to get all the files into my computer. CD and DVD reading and writing isn't foolproof. A single read of Tee's original disks didn't copy all the photos successfully. Adobe Bridge usually signaled when a  photo was broken by either refusing to display a thumbnail or displaying a low-quality thumbnail with a black border. Sadly, it wasn't foolproof.

To get 100% reliable results, I pointed Photoshop's Contact Sheet II function at the hard drive and told it, "Make me contact sheets of everything!" Every time it encountered a file that wasn't 100% kosher, it halted and let me know. Then I'd go back to Tee's original disks. In all but two cases (out of over 15,000 unique photographs), I could come up with a good version of the file. It took a long time for the system to crunch that many photos, but it didn't require constant attention.

What does it take to sum up an artist's life? More than one screen shot, for sure, but this is a record of the last half-decade of Tee's life. Each barely-visible dot, 144 to a sheet, is a unique photograph.

The contents of Tee's disks and hard drive overlapped but weren't identical. In addition, there were numerous duplicates where Tee copied a photograph to a particular project folder to work on. Finished work was sometimes duplicated in several places for different projects. Sometimes the file names were kept the same, sometimes not. In at least two cases, there were files that had identical names and identical file lengths in different folders that were entirely different photographs.

My only option was to look each and every photo...several times. Multiply that by around 25,000.

One single contact sheet from the 130 pictured above.

The first step I took was to identify the unique contents of the hard drive and the disks and merge them into new folder. I opened up two full-screen light table windows in Adobe Bridge, showing corresponding folders from the hard drive and the disks, and started comparing the thumbnails. Boy, I have never been so happy to have dual monitors with lotsa pixels!

It went faster than you might think. The contents of the two data sets were similar, and I could scan a whole screen quite quickly. Anything that was a dupe (same look, same name, same file size) got deleted from the disk folder. Once I'd finished purging the folder I copied the remaining disk files over to the corresponding folder for the hard drive. I preserved the unique disk contents as well, so future scholars could see which photos Tee had offloaded from her hard drive. Who knows; it might be of interest?

Now I was down to a mere 45 GB of data! It was time to weed out the superfluous, as I'll talk about next time.

____________________

Ctein

Happy Second Day of Spring

I've been considering writing a sort of picaresque novel about some of the more hapless aspects of my life, with a Caspar Milquetoast / Walter Mittyesque type of protagonist cast in the first person, but I fear that in fictionalized form the stories just wouldn't have the same impact. It's only because of the dead plain truth of some of the actual episodes in my life that they're so amusing.

For instance, I've been trying for a mail-carrier job with the Post Office for more than two years, and this winter I finally received a job offer from them…but the deadline for applying for the job was January 31st, and the packet with the job offer arrived in my mailbox on February 2nd. That's right—it was delayed in the mail.

I called, but they wouldn't accept a late application. True story.

So anyway, I've had a trip planned since midwinter to go out to Boston and Providence to visit relatives. First air travel I've planned in more than two years. Sure, I knew when I planned it that there was a chance of bad weather—emphasis on chance—Spring storms aren't uncommon here. But it had been looking pretty good. For better than a week and a half we'd had a good semblance of Spring underway—sunny days, temperatures rising to above freezing most days, most of our snow gradually disappearing. The day before yesterday was beautiful, with full sun all day, roads clear, only isolated lumps of snow left over here and there where the biggest drifts had been, temperatures in the mid to high thirties. Zander had been outside in a T-shirt.

So yesterday—the day we're to travel—what happens? A Spring blizzard started well after midnight and dumped 15 inches (38cm) of snow on us inside of 24 hours. Snow Emergency, Travel Advisory, airport closed for more than 12 hours. Flight canceled.

(On the little map, I live in Waukesha, just under the "16." For you non-Americans, the body of water is Lake Michigan in the Great Lakes. Snow map courtesy TMJ4 Milwaukee.)

I had taken the dog to the kennel early in the morning, and by mid-afternoon, by which time it was obvious we weren't going anywhere, the roads were so bad I couldn't drive the mile and a half to the kennel to get her. She had to spend the night there even though we were home, poor puppy.

Our total snowfall for this year: 99 inches (251 cm). And counting, no doubt.

Gavin and Zander in our back yard—and this is with 8 inches yet to come. There wouldn't have been a single flake of snow in this picture just the day before.

And the ironic part? Yesterday was March 21st, of course. First day of Spring! It just wouldn't be funny unless it were true.

Yeesh. Winter.

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Mike

Bag of Tricks

I have to apologize to people who've been reading my stuff for a long time and have already heard all of my stories at least once, but there was one time when I actually put one over on the police. I was asked to move along from a crime scene, and I blustered about how I was a member of the press and that the First Amendment gave me every right to take pictures, and the policeman backed down. Later, I looked it up, and it turned out he was right, not me—police do indeed have the right to clear a crime scene and move pedestrians along. So score one for our side.

Unfortunately it was a suicide, and I was so shaken by seeing the body and all the blood that I couldn't hold the camera steady. It was probably the only time I've gotten camera shake at 1/125th. No ice water in these veins.

Another excuse I often used to use when confronted was that I was a photo student out doing a class assignment. I'd extemporize, and I admit I liked hamming it up a bit.

"Oh, yeah, my teacher? Mr. Rodchenko? He said we were supposed to take eight pictures of shadows from interesting angles. So I'm just looking for interesting-looking shadows. They're supposed to have a 'strong graphic quality.' So the other day? I found this church railing. And it was casting a shadow on some steps. I thought it was a pretty graphic shadow. So anyway, that bridge over there? Well, once I saw a nice shadow from up there, and I was just trying to remember what time of year and what time of day that was...." Blah, blah, blah.

Yep, I admit it, I've responded to being accosted by trying to bore the person to death.

One time some guy yelled something at me and I yelled right back, "There's no film in the camera! I'm just playin' around." I don't know if that would work any more.

Elliott Erwitt sometimes uses a family member who pretends to pose six feet in front of him while he shoots right past them with a 200mm lens. Nobody questions you when you're taking a picture of loved one right there in front of their noses. They don't have to know you're actually taking pictures of scantily-clad young women in bikinis farther down the beach.

I hate to say this, but another thing that works is a smiley-face sticker on your camera. It's hard to feel threatened by a dork with a smiley-face on his camera. I'm not admitting to doing this myself.

Another trick I remember reading about was that Joel Meyerowitz would carry a copy of one of his books around in a paper bag. When people questioned why he was taking pictures, he'd pull out the book out of the bag and let them look at it. Once they could see what kind of thing he was up to (and that he was a serious enough photographer to have had a book published) they relaxed. That never seemed practical to me, but it occurred to me that in this day and age, with self-published, print-on-demand books so easy to make, a photographer could make up a reasonably impressive-looking book of fairly innocuous, arty photographs, and carry it around to show to people in order to disarm their objections. Like a wannabe Joel Meyerowitz....

Anybody got any other tricks they use to get out of awkward situations?

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by John Camp: "Your suicide story reminded me of an incident when I was a reporter. I was doing a series of medical features at the St. Paul, Mn., trauma center, when a medevac helicopter brought in a farmer. His tractor had rolled on him, pinning him. The wheels were still in gear and one began cutting through his body, his hips. He would have bled to death except that the friction actually cauterized the gigantic wound as it cut through him. (He died a couple days later of shock.) In any case, I'd been working with the surgeon and he invited me in to watch the salvage operation. I had a young intern photographer with me and told her to come in; she came in, took one look, and left--not only the hospital, but the job. She'd realized that PJ work was not for her; which is a good thing to realize at that point in your career.

"I've always thought that the main characteristic of a good PJ was the willingness to stick your face into anything. If you've got that, you can figure out the camera."

Featured Comment by xtoph: "I don't mean to sound all moralistic and stuff, but I don't think it is a great idea to lie about what you're up to, or what you're photographing. For one thing, there is already a kind of ambient assumption that photographers, especially creepy ones, lie, and doing so feeds the stereotype and makes it all the more difficult for the rest of us, since we are by default assumed to be creeps.

"Besides, I frankly don't think it is very useful, since 'tricks' like using a telephoto for 'candids' don't generally result in worthwhile photographs (anyone who'd like to point me to a counterexample is welcome to do so).

"I've photographed on the streets of a lot of big cities for some time, and I've photographed a wide variety of subjects, including myriad illegal activities, riots, fights, you name it. In my experience, the worst thing you can do is to be furtive or dishonest about how you work. On the contrary, working completely openly, at close range with a wide or standard lens, displaying a ready smile and confidence that you aren't doing anything wrong is the best 'trick' to keep from being hassled, and coincidentally to have a shot at taking interesting photos. In fact I've even talked would-be muggers out of stealing and into mugging for the camera (gave them proofs the next day too). of course besides the posed shots, you can still grab less self-conscious ones in the process.

"Also, with digital, lots of people are more comfortable if they see the photo you took, and can tell that it is above-board. I generally offer to delete the photo if they still have a problem, and on rare occasions I have; why not? Not many of them are masterpieces anyway."

Mike replies: Well, you ask for counterexamples, and I could probably list them all day, from Capa's great photograph of Leon Trotsky lecturing in Copenhagen (taken on the sly with a Leica he hid inside his coat), to Erwitt's pictures of beachgoers in Buenos Aires*, many snapped with a tele lens, at least some of the time while he was pretending to photograph something else. Roman Vishniac's principled recording of the doomed shtetls before the Holocaust had to be made very discreetly to avoid drawing the notice of the authorities. But I see your point and it's still a fair one.

Featured Comment by Bill Bresler: "I have a recurring situation that I now look forward to, even though I'm a grizzled old newspaper photographer. I was shooting a college graduation and tried to enter the main floor, generally reserved for grads, faculty and dignitaries. An older nun, built like a linebacker, was handling security. I smiled and showed her my press pass. She was unmoved and demanded my invitation. I explained that I was on assignment for my paper, blah, blah, blah, and not only that, was a part-time photo instructor at the very same college, so technically I was faculty. She wasn't buying it. Then a small kid stepped in front of me and tried to dart past Sister Nancy. "SAAAYYYYY! Where do you think you're going?" she bellowed. Seeing my chance as she grabbed the little felon I stepped around her and disappeared into the crowd.

"The following year I went through the same scenario, without the little kid for distraction. Facing her straight on, I faked a move to the left, she stepped in front of me, then I made a quick lunge to the right, and muscled past her.

"I'd better come up with a good plan for the next graduation ceremony. I'm pretty sure she'll be ready for me."

*Sorry. I meant Rio. —MJ

In Defense of Our Rights and Actions

As you've read in some of the comments to the video below, a number of people have experienced real problems with official persecution of acts of photographing in the U.K. Same thing here in the U.S. It's not a problem for you if you've never had problems, but I think the core of it is that you might get hassled and threatened now, sometimes by law enforcement personnel who might not even know what the laws are. We're simply less secure photographing in public than we used to be.

The problem for photographers as I see it is twofold. First, the public has gotten into its collective consciousness the harebrained notion that taking a picture is somehow "suspicious" behavior that might need to be reported to some authority (which then is obligated to respond), and second, the fact that it gives an excuse to belligerent people who are looking to create confrontations anyway. A friend privately told me of an experience he had of being confronted by the bouncer of a club/restaurant after taking a picture of the place from across a public street. What right has such a person (the bouncer) to make such an assault? None whatsoever, but that didn't protect my friend. Personally I got hassled when I was a photographer in D.C. a number of times, the worst incident while taking some pictures of a bunch of bike messengers who used to congregate on DuPont Circle after their shifts were over. Photographers getting hassled is nothing new; what's new is that the recent, allegedly "anti-terrorism" laws and attitudes are giving license to people with badges and in uniforms to engage in the same sort of hassling and confrontation that we've always been subject to--€”but that we used to not have to worry about from that particular sector. Since officials and law enforcement personnel have more power, including the power to clap you in cuffs and zap you with a Taser and detain you at the local jail, it's ratcheted our potential anxiety up to another level.

The bottom line is that taking pictures in public is not a hostile act. There has been no study that I've ever been able to find that reliably links the act of photographing with terrorist activity--I'm not aware of any case where a photographer who has been detained has turned out to be a terrorist, or, the other way around, a case where a terrorist was proven to have been out taking pictures in advance of some heinous act. There is just no link. Plus, there's the obvious problem of accurate correlation. Millions of people take pictures, so how do you distinguish picturetaking with malicious intent from just plain old picturetaking? The answer is, you can't. But it just "seems reasonable" to ordinary people to suppose that terrorists "must" case out their targets with cameras prior to bad acts.

This shibboleth has been taken up by the media, which reports picture-taking as a supposedly "contributing" fact when making some baseless report of suspicious activity that later turns out to have been nothing. Several years ago there was a case where two brothers and their cousin, all of Middle-Eastern extraction, were captured crossing the Mackinack Bridge in Michigan with a van containing more than a thousand cellphones. The news reports were hysterical, clearly implying a plot to blow up the bridge. One of the "facts" reported in support of this was that the men had "a number of photographs" of the bridge in their possession, taken while crossing the bridge.

I followed the case because I have a relative who was alarmed by it. I pointed out to her that these sorts of reports were common in the media, probably because the government was trying to make the public fear terrorists as a means of enlisting support for its "War on Terror," and that most if not all of the hysterical "terrorist plot" reports, if you take the trouble to follow them to their conclusions, turn out to be baseless. That part doesn't get reported, certainly with anything like the blanket coverage of the initial alarm. Anyway, I followed the case of the three "terrorists" who were dead certain to be plotting to blow up the bridge. It turned out they were three schmucks from Texas who were trying to capitalize on regional differences in cell phone prices. The pictures they took crossing the bridge were taken for the exact same reason almost everybody who crosses the bridge takes pictures--€”because it's an awe-inspiring structure (for quite a while it was the longest suspension bridge in the world) with spectacular views of the Straits. The three men with the cellphones took pictures of the bridge, it was true. What's also probably true is that almost everybody who crosses the bridge for the first time and has a camera handy takes pictures of it too! If you had to arrest everybody who took pictures while crossing the bridge you'd have to arrest half the people who come across. In any event, no evidence of malice on the part of the three Texans could be found, and charges against them were quietly dropped. But of course that didn't get reported in the news nearly as widely. (And the case is still being batted around the internet as "evidence" of  terrorism plots.)

The interesting aspect of this case, and the reason I mention it, is simply the fact that the news media in its initial flurry of alarm reported the fact about the pictures of the bridge in the mens' possession as if that were actual proof of bad intent. It wasn't--€”it couldn't have been, because, as was later proven, the men didn't have any bad intent--€”but that's the public perception, that terrorists take pictures, and that, therefore, someone having taken pictures amounts to circumstantial evidence against them.

It's this perception that photographers need to fight--€”the very idea that there's any connection in the first place between photographing and terrorism. There just isn't. It's a common notion, but a false one. Even if there was a connection, you couldn't distinguish the bad actors from all the innocent ones anyway. But the link itself is the misperception. That's what I think we need to continually try to assert in defense of our rights and actions.

_____________________

Mike

You Can't Picture This

By Rajesh Thind

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Mike (Thanks to David Wilcox)

Featured Comment by Paul Amyes: "Last year I visited the UK and was arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist and paedophile by two police officers. I was taking photos in the street of a popular tourist location in the South East of England. It was for me an incredibly frightening experience. I'm disabled and walk with the aid of a stick. I was approached by two officers who immediately started pushing me around and threatening to 'Tazer' me unless I co-operated. I was made to lie face down in the street while I was handcuffed and searched. My equipment was threatened with confiscation and destruction under the the 'Prevention of Terrorism Act.' It was only when I taken down the station and I asked to speak to the Australian Consulate that things started to change. After three hours of being held in a cell I was told I could go only if I agreed to not take the matter any further. If I wanted to make a complaint I was told that I could be held for a further 72 hours without charges. As I had a plane to catch that night I thought better of the whole situation and agreed not to make a complaint.

"Later in the year I went to China. I was allowed to photograph where and what I liked. I even had police officers and soldiers posing for me at Tiananmen Square. People regard China as a totalitarian police state, but its ironic that I was treated better there than I was in Britain.

"Now having seen that video and the the new posters put out by the Metropolitan Police about photographers it has certainly strengthened my resolve to never return to Britain."

Featured Comment by Rajesh Thind: "Hello all, I'm Rajesh Thind, the filmmaker who made the piece and I'd just like to say that I think it's great that there are so many people engaging so intelligently and thoughtfully here in this forum and others with the whole area of photography and filming in public, and more generally with the idea of defending the besieged principle of public space. The greatest threat that any of us face is the tyranny of the powerful and if we don't speak up for our rights, they tend to get taken away from us...

"And, to be clear, I did nothing to provoke the response in the film and it was genuinely pretty upsetting. I was just simply getting some GVs on the street and, being aware of the law, was making sure not to focus too much on any one person and thereby invade anyone's privacy. I don't like mine being invaded, and I try very hard to respect others'. As you can probably tell though, I'm not one to roll over too easily, but even then, it's rattling to even have to deal with this sort of behaviour from those people who are supposedly entrusted to protect us.

"I'd also like to make it clear that there are occasions when I can understand the police making enquiries about what I might be doing when out filming. For example, I was filming a short documentary for Channel 4 back last summer (2007) and we were travelling up and down the Edgware Road in London in the back of a black cab getting some Jim Jarmusch style shots (Okay, okay, I was aspiring to get some Jarmusch-style shots) of the street from the back of the car. About ten minutes after we'd finished in the cab, as we were walking back down the Edgware Road, two plainclothes policemen—pretty serious, tough looking types I must say, not your average Bobbys on the beat—approached us and asked us what we were doing. They very politely pointed out that we had driven past Paddington Green (High Security) Police Station—where most terrorist and high value suspects are routinely taken within London—at least twice and that we had been seen (most likely by the cameras they have peppering the area around that building) and therefore approached. We told them what we were doing, they took our names and numbers and that was the end of it. They handled it very politely, professionally, and well within the law and I had and have no complaints about how I was treated.

"What's important is a sense of proportion and perspective in my humble opinion. I made this piece because I get the feeling that those attitudes are precisely what we, and particularly those empowered to 'look over us', are well on the way to losing. And once we've done that, we've given up on the very way of life - supposedly marked by freedom, justice and liberty—that we're so vocal in claiming to defend (and, perversely, so violently willing to attempt to export).

"Anyway, thanks for taking notice of the piece:  the most useful compliment a documentary filmmaker can get is actually sparking off discussion around the issues at hand."

The Anti-War War Photographer

Philip Jones Griffiths, Soldier with Bullet-proof Shield, Northern Ireland, 1973

Philip Jones Griffiths, the passionate, pacifistic, anti-war war photographer, has died of cancer in London. A longtime photojournalist with a varied portfolio and many books to his credit, he is best known for his angry, polemical, but brilliant book Vietnam, Inc., which Stuart Franklin in his Magnum essay called "arguably the most articulate and compelling anti-war statement made by any photojournalist ever." (The book's over-the-top anti-U.S. captions are still controversial, however. In that context, as pointed out by the Times, it's worth remembering that his humanizing photographs of American soldiers also helped their image at a time when they were being demonized at home.) Unstinting in his documenting of the vile effects of war on human beings, his photographs are among the most difficult to look at of any photojournalist's, which limited his sales and probably also dampened the appreciation of the general public and photo hobbyists. He was 72.

Magnum encomium by Stuart Franklin
Aperture portfolio
International Herald-Tribune obituary
Agent Orange portfolio at the Digital Journalist
Photo Histories article by Graham Harrison

Graham Harrison, Philip Jones Griffiths

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Mike