Paul Grubb?

Does anyone know a photographer who lives north of Lockerbie named Paul Grubb? He's a photographer on Flickr and I can't figure out how to contact him. I'd like to make some comments on the B&W conversion of this photograph of his (which is perfectly fine as he has it, no insult intended at all) for teaching purposes here. I would only reproduce a detail (a portion of the image, that is). I would rather not do it without his permission.

I've spent several hours attempting to contact him. I've found his Facebook page (a message from a non-"friend" is likely to go unanswered, I know from experience); his Instagram account; his Flickr photostream; and his website—nothing I can see provides an email address or any means of contact.

Which raises another question—what good is social media for photographers if it doesn't provide any means of contact? Perhaps this particular person just doesn't want to be contacted, I don't know.

I'm not very good with social media, obviously. Maybe one of you is better at it.

As I said before, technically I have the right under the Fair Use doctrine of the Copyright Act to reproduce work in order to comment on it or critique it. But I'm loathe to do that to a fellow photographer without his or her consent. It might be legal, but it doesn't seem polite.

I hope this illustrates the relative impossibility of doing critiques of found work on a regular basis here on TOP. The whole enterprise would just slow to a crawl if I had to do all the work to secure permissions to use examples.

Paul Grubb describes himself as a "Sony a6500 bore and keen walker :)  ." He's done some very nice work, mainly in color.

[UPDATE: I sent Paul a note via Flickr Mail. The problem might have been that after I signed up to join Flickr, somehow the path took me back to Flickr in my un-logged-in state, and even thought I thought I was signed in I still didn't see any way to make contact. Every mistake that happens on a computer or the Internet is your fault, though, so, my fault. —MJ]

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Raboin: "Every photographer should spend the hour or two that it takes to link together all their online presences. Last week, I was contacted by two national TV news networks to use an aerial photo I took of one of the large California wildfires. They found me through Twitter and then followed the link back to my website that has all my contact info. Of course they wanted my work for free so I told them to bug off, but it was fun anyways."

Comments

[Glenn Allenspach]

Send him a Flickr mail. I assume you have a Flickr account, but if not, you should. One of its advantages is that you can send a message to another user from within the flickerverse. When the user checks in, a little icon tells that user they have an incoming message.

[PacNW]

"technically I have the right under the Fair Use doctrine of the Copyright Act"

You sure? That's USA-only law. That person is in the UK, and your site is accessible globally. I wonder if that makes it more complicated. I don't know.

[IANAL, but I believe copyright law is largely international. The enforcement in the courts might differ between countries, though. It's not really a legal issue--I'm just not comfortable reproducing pictures for direct critique without permission. The important thing for this site is to be respectful of photographers, not just the letter of the law. --Mike]

[John Krill]

all you have to do is click on his name on the page you are linking to and then click the mail icon that is next to the FOLLOW icon.

[Jim Millen]

I'm guessing you might not have a Flickr account Mike? You can contact another member if logged in :-)

I've just dropped Paul a message pointing him to this blog, hopefully he'll respond.

[T Hill]

Send him a message through Instagram. You can do that using the "..." menu, but I think you have to do that on a phone, not a laptop.

[Dave Wilson]

If you're a flickr member, click on his user name, which takes you to his stream. To the right of his user name is a mail icon: click that and flickr mail opens up. But I'm sure you've tried that...

[René K.]

Hi
Flickr mail should work (you'll need to have a Flickr account though)

Regards

[Martin]

If he's on Instagram, you can message him through that. That will pop up on his phone as a notification which a Flickr message might not.

[Tom Burke]

Ah, York. A great place but very, very difficult to take pictures of - so busy, so crowded. Even that 16mm lens on the Sony isn't really wide enough in the Shambles. I've tried so often...

I know exactly where the other pictures (of York) were taken - I go there quite frequently. York Minster is hard to get a shot of from far away, because it's surrounded by so much clutter; and when you stand in front of it at the west end, you've got rid of the clutter but it is so big and you are so close to it - well, it's the kind of situation that an old View camera with movements is perfect for, but a camera without them struggles in.

My personal feeling is that the best view in York is the interior of York station - a very grand Victorian structure, and still in use for exactly the purpose it was built for.

[Peter Barnes]

Could you use your own fine photographs for demonstration purposes Mike?

[KeithB]

There is a great, though a bit dated book about programming called "The Elements of Programming Style" by Kernigham and Plauger.

They proceed to take examples from programming textbooks, find the bugs and deficiency's and comment on them, generally re-writing the code to be clearer (and correct!). Along they way they do add some pretty snarky comments. ("People who are worried about efficiency might also notice that the function is evaluated twice as often as need be. Since the answers are wrong, however, this seems unimportant")

They mention that they got permission to do this, though one wonders how many folks did *not* give their permission.

[Richard Parkin]

He's on Facebook too
https://www.facebook.com/paul.grubb.524

[Jim Bullard]

I would love to link all my online accounts as
David Raboin recommened but IMO Flickr is a disaster. I wish I had never gotten into it. After I joined they linked it to Yahoo so that (theoretically) I could sign in via Yahoo. I was never able to sign in consistently after that because of "conflicts" between the accounts. I spent many hours and pulled out much hair trying to fix the problem through their merry-go-round of help and FAQs to no avail. I decided to simply delete the account.

A year of so ago I managed, via what could only have been a minor miracle, to reach an actual human at Yahoo who promised to delete the account for me but he/she said that by company policy it would take 90 days. I just checked, it is still there, I still can't get in, the "help" merry-go-round still goes round without ever getting anywhere. I hear that AT&T bought Yahoo/Flickr. Maybe I should contact them. Arrrgh!

[Thomas Wiegold]

Sorry to disappoint you, but copyright law is anything but international. Among other things, the "fair use" known in Anglo-Saxon law sphere is not applicable in continental Europe. Unless a picture is explicitly set under Creative Commons License or Public Domain, there's no legal way to use it without the author's consent.

[Paul Grubb]

Hi All

I have made contact with Mike (via Flickrmail in the end) :)

Cheers ... Paul

[Kerry]

Not sure if the remark: "Every mistake that happens on a computer or the Internet is your fault, though, so, my fault." is intended to be taken seriously or as sarcasm, but unfortunately, this is the way most people react to bad design.

If the user interface fails, it is the fault of the engineer/programmer, not the user.

Over the past few years it seemingly has become acceptable and commonplace to ignore established human user interface design wisdom to inflict arbitrary changes and inconsistencies that render using computers harder and more confusing. The worst trend is hiding the controls to pretend that what is increasingly complex and difficult to use will superficially appear to be "simple."

[David Vernon]

Mike - I left a comment on the image with a link back to your article - so maybe he will contact YOU. I always seem to go a few days without noticing I have flickr mail...

[Jeremy Cherfas]

I'm glad to see some photographers are interested in unifying their various online presences. This is a core precept of the ideas behind the indieweb. Check out http://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Journalism as a starting point, and, indeed the whole of that wiki for tips.

Owning your material and the conversations around it is really important, and indieweb makes that more possible than ever.