The cover of my winter 2011 newsletter
For a couple of years now I’ve been sending out a monthly newsletter to readers of this blog. Many photographers do the same and it’s easy for newsletters to get overlooked among the masses of email people get every day. It thus becomes a challenge to stand out and attract attention. Ultimately, the hope is that people will open mine, read it, visit my website and chooses to license a few images. The reality for most people producing such things is that most newsletters begin to look the same. There are variations of course, but within the limitations of email inboxes – and who wants to receive a multi-megabyte email – one is largely limited in what can be sent.
That dilemma is one faced by all photographers who are producing work that is going to be seen by other people. How do you stand out in that crowd? And with those questions in my mind, the new newsletter was born.
Preview of the newsletter.
Instead of producing a small monthly newsletter, I’ve moved to producing a larger, seasonal newsletter. This first one, Winter 2011, is a 19 page PDF that features a wide range of subjects. Included within are new, unpublished images, a photo essay, an interview with the CEO of Phottix, an on-assignment section that looks at some recent NGO work, reviews of an underwater casing and of David duChemin’s latest book, tearsheets and a few images from some recent corporate assignments I’ve done.
You’re encouraged to share this around with your friends and networks. If you haven’t signed up, do so with the form below so that you’ll be the first to receive future editions.
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Chinese Buddhist nuns at an anti-nuclear protest. Thousands took to the streets in the Taiwanese capital Taipei for the 430 Sunflower No Nuclear Action parade in Taipei on Apr. 30.
In the wake of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, activists and concerned citizens in Taiwan have been increasingly calling for an end to Taiwan’s nuclear power program. The island is currently home to three nuclear power plants with a fourth is under construction due to come on line in 2012. Over the past couple of months debate has been ongoing in Taiwan in regard to nuclear issues. For those opposed to nuclear power, this culminated in a series of demonstrations around the island on Saturday April 30th with the largest taking place in Taipei where an estimated 10 000 people took to the streets.
Thousands took to the streets in the Taiwanese capital Taipei for the 430 Sunflower No Nuclear Action parade in Taipei on Apr. 30.
The 430 Sunflower No Nuke Action was organized by a coalition of 40 environmental and civic groups under the theme “smile at the sun, keep away from nuclear disasters”. With sunflowers chosen to represent sustainability, the demonstration attracted people from all walks of life. From parents with young children to university students to Chinese Buddhist nuns, the parade was held in a largely carnival like atmosphere, with music provided by bands and DJs on trucks throughout the length of the route.
Unlike a recent, smaller protest in March, the 430 action was largely free of politicians and political parties. The March event saw some criticism and accusations of hypocrisy leveled at Taiwan’s politicians who took part and they largely listened, staying away from Saturday’s action. Those that did take part – I spoke with a former environment minister and former health minister – did so as private citizens or members of civic and environmental groups not as representatives of political parties.
The march was held in an overwhelmingly peaceful environment, with none of the hostility and occasional violence that’s often a fixture at demonstrations in Taiwan. Police were on hand to direct traffic but that was the only role they played. It’s a credit to the organizers and to the maturing Taiwanese democracy that events of this nature can be held in calm, peaceful surroundings.
Children were amongst the thousands that took to the streets in the Taiwanese capital Taipei for the 430 Sunflower No Nuclear Action parade in Taipei on Apr. 30.
Below you can see a slideshow featuring the full gallery of images from the event. All images are available for licensing and you are welcome to embed the slideshow in your own blogs or share it via Facebook, Twitter and any other social media you participate in.
On an unrelated note, during this action I thoroughly tested out the Black Rapid RS-Sport for the first time after having received a review sample from them last week. I will post a full review of the strap in a couple of days so look out for that. Finally, if you haven’t already got it, the free downloadable desktop calendar for May is available now in a choice of 8 different sizes. There’s also a special offer allowing you to get the image (without the dates) as a limited edition fine art print. Follow this link for more information and to download the calendar.
Farmer with conical hat walking between rice fields.
The International Guild of Visual Peacemakers – IGVP – officially launched to the public on Monday morning.
About a week ago, Matt Brandon wrote a post entitled “Tom Little, IGVP And The Need For Peace”. In it he briefly discussed why he is a part of the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers and made mention of one of IGVP‘s goals. Reading this got me thinking about the reasons why I too am a part of IGVP. I was fortunate enough to be invited to join as a beta-tester and so got the opportunity to see behind the scenes before it was officially launched.
IGVP is a community of visual communicators devoted to peacemaking and breaking down stereotypes. Globally and historically, conflict has often come about due to differences in ethnicity, religion and cultural identities., and a lot of that can be boiled down to misunderstandings and ignorance. Ignorance not in a negative sense, but simply a lack of knowledge and awareness. As long as people look to the differences between cultures, races, ethnicity’s and religions, mistrust, fear and conflict are natural responses. Conversely, seeing the similarities that exist can help instill compassion and peace.
Back in 1998, I returned from my first series of extended travel through Asia. As a person who has held values of peace and equality since childhood, all I saw during that journey were the similarities between different peoples. At day’s end, families and friends would gather over a meal, sharing stories of their day in a loving environment. Festivals, religious events and cultural celebrations would see a coming together of communities. Parents would work hard and sacrifice plenty in order to try to give their children as many opportunities as possible. At the essence of it all was a desire for peace, happiness, harmony and love, wishes that are universal in extent.
It would have been easy to focus on the differences instead. For most of the world, religion plays a very important role in life. For what it’s worth, I’m not religious and was raised in an environment without it, so even something like Christianity which is the predominant religion in the west is relatively unfamiliar to me. Yet coming from this athiest background, it was easy for me to see that all expressions of religion, no matter what God(s) was invoked, is a search for peace and comfort. The deity may be different and the rituals differ but to my eyes, the intentions and hopes are the same.
Over the years, I’ve had two separate stints working for major NGO’s in a full time fundraising capacity. In 1998, I worked for Greenpeace Australia and in 2002 for Amnesty International. On both occasions, something that was said in passing during that time has stuck with me. While at Greenpeace, one of the campaigners told me that Greenpeace’s most important job was “bearing witness”. Recording and documenting environmental abuses and bringing it to the attention of the general public and their governments. At Amnesty, raising awareness was the key. Showing the public evidence of human rights violations throughout the world gives them the opportunity to make a contribution that helps saves lives.
Those two concepts, of bearing witness and raising awareness, are ones that have become deeply ingrained in me. By being able to visit, live in and photograph other, often misunderstood, cultures and subcultures, I’m given the responsibility to share this with the world. I see this as one of the areas where IGVP can really benefit humanity.
As a photographer, particularly one in the travel and cultural fields, IGVP gives me the chance to work with and interact with other visual communicators who share the same or similar values. If you recognize any of these characteristics in yourself or share these values, I urge you to join IGVP today.
As a little extra incentive for you to join, I’m going to give something away. The guys at BlackRapid sent me a couple of their famed R-Straps to give as prizes on my blog. I’ve saved one of them, the RS-DR1 double strap to give to someone who joins IGVP. There are a couple of conditions first.
1) Join IGVP as a Standard or Premium member. This competition is not open to members with free accounts only.
2) Create a peacemaker profile on the IGVP site. Upload some content, add a bio, create a photo story.
3) In the comments section here, tell me why you’re joining IGVP? What does visual peacemaking mean to you? As well, leave a link to your IGVP profile. You can get an idea of what it could look like by taking a look at my profile here.
EDIT : The competition is now closed. You can still leave a comment but it won’t get counted towards the RS-DR1.
The winner of the Black Rapid RS-DR1 will be chosen based on both the comment here and the completeness of your IGVP profile. You have until midnight GMT Friday to get it done.
For an extra chance at winning, sport an IGVP banner on your own personal blog. Leave a link to that in the comments as well. The banner looks like the one below.
That was the 229th Daily PhotoTip. If this post was useful to you, why don’t you subscribe to my feed, leave a comment and share it with your friends. You can also get access to exclusive content and special offers by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up today. Thank you.
]]>Carrie of Taiwan Photographers and My Several Worlds joins us here this evening for a guest post concerning the upcoming Taiwan SPCA Event. It’s on this Sunday in Xindian, Taipei, so read on after the jump to see what Carrie has to say.
I’m really pleased to announce that Craig Ferguson Images and Taiwan Photographers will be hosting a lot more combined photography events over the next year. Our goal is to create a number of fun-filled photo events that will not only get you out shooting, but will also challenge you. For that matter, we are hosting our first photography event together and we are doing it for the Taiwan SPCA.
When: January 24, 2010. 3:00-6:00
Where to meet: Xindian MRT station. From there, we will head to the park next to the river in Bitan. There is also a café in the area that can be used as a base.
Our goal: To provide the SPCA with photographs for their web site and for future fundraising events. This is a strictly pro-bono shoot. We hope that those of you who have blogs will write about the event or post your photos along with a link to the SPCA. We would like to generate as much exposure for them as possible.
Details: The SPCA will be bringing six dogs. There will also be a number of volunteers on hand.
It is important to remember that we are working with animals. For this reason, we will be shooting in small groups of three. Please be respectful and wait for your turn to shoot.
Groups: We will be imposing a time limit on each group so everyone gets an equal chance to participate. Each group will be shooting in a slightly different location.
Group 1 will be photographing the correct way to walk a dog. This will go with the “how to walk a dog” note on the SPCA Facebook fan page
Group 2 will be taking photos of the SPCA staff and doggie gear.
Group 3 will be taking photos of the adopters, volunteers, and supporters.
Group 4 will be taking photos of models wearing SPCA gear and posing with animals.
Group 5 will also be taking photos of models wearing SPCA gear and posing with animals in a slightly different location.
Photographers are asked to submit their two favorite photos to our group pool on Flickr. The top ten images will be featured on Taiwan Photographers. The top three photos and the winner will be announced on Craig Ferguson Images.
Flickr group pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/taiwanspcaphotowalk/
Administrators:
Craig Ferguson
Carrie Kellenberger
Sean McCormack
Photographers:
Josh Ellis
Yi Chen
Magdalena Frackowiak
Tobie Openshaw
Pierre Huang
Darren Melrose
Carlos Arturo Pascual
Vicky Lo
Solon Lai
St John Craig Dunn
Carolyn Cornett Brewer
Sangeeth Aiyappa
Victoria Chen
Anita Suarez
Brent Franke
Nick Rostron
Matt Lewis
Have you ever wanted to have photography lessons in Taipei, Taiwan?
Do you travel to or live in or near Taipei and want to learn photography in English? There is no photography school in Taipei that teaches in English but I have started private and group lessons, for people of all skill levels.
Read on after the jump for more information.
A Photography Group in Beitou, Taiwan
About The Classes
Many people come to Taiwan, find themselves with a healthy disposable income and go out and buy a new digital SLR. The question then becomes “How do I use it”?
You may be someone who already knows something about photography and wants to move your hobby to a greater level.
You may be ready and eager to dive into the world of post-processing with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, or unsure of how to approach digital asset management.
You may be traveling here for a trade show and have a few spare hours and a desire to capture some good shots.
Or you may be thinking about trying to earn some money from the camera and be confused about copyright, releases and image rights.
Whatever your needs, I hope I will be able to help. I currently teach a mixture of beginners and more seasoned hobbyist photographers, each with their own list of things they want to learn more about. Studentsd quickly feel not only more comfortable with their camera and more able to get the best from it, but also slightly more switched on to the world around them.
I teach all levels of photographer. For beginners it would be initially going over what you grasp about the basics of exposure – aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Understanding light, shadow, tone, contrast, dynamic range; these things are key to be able to get yourself to a point where you can feel in total control of the camera, rather then feeling like the camera is controlling you. This is the first objective.
Then we try to work on subjects that you like shooting and how you can get better at them. I generally do this through little projects and by us shooting together during the lessons. After that I might introduce an area of photography, in terms of subject, that you may never of thought about pursuing; macro, nature, people, still-life and so forth.
There are some technical and creative aspects to every lesson.
For the more advanced student, we may focus a new area, or your own self-perceived weak points.
Courses can be individually tailored to suit your needs or the needs of your group. No two individual students or groups are ever likely to require the same instruction.
Costs
Here’s a guide to costs. Final cost is dependent on what you require from the course, but these should give you an approximation.
One-to-one tuition: starting from NTD$1000 / hour
Group lessons: between NTD$2500 – 3500 / hour, each, depending on the number in the group.
Full day workshops are also available. Costs on request.
Location
Classes take place at a mutually convenient location in the greater Taipei area. I am also willing to travel to other towns and cities in Taiwan for half and full day workshops.
Within Taipei, we will sometimes meet in a cafe or restaurant for discussion first, or sometimes meet directly on location where we plan to shoot.
Whatever your needs, I hope to be able to provide it. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
]]>Help Portrait is a movement of photographers who are using their time, equipment and expertise to give back to those who are less fortunate this holiday season. This will be a global event and I’ll be setting up a local version here in Taipei on Saturday December 12th.
This is the call to photographers, make-up artists, stylists, social workers, people with equipment, people with time and anyone who is interested. At this stage, I’m seeking expressions of interest from anyone who wants to be involved. Here’s a short video from photographer Jeremy Cowart who explains more about it.
If you have any ideas that will help us on the day here in Taipei, please let me know. Any and all suggestions are welcome. We’re looking for groups to shoot for, venues, donors and so forth.
More general information can be found at http://www.help-portrait.com and on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/help_portrait
Feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested. Thank you.
]]>With the World Copyright Summit having just ended and new Orphan Works legislation proposed in the US, anything that can help content producers better protect and manage their copyrights is welcome. In the next couple of months a new online copyright management system called myows will be launching. I conducted a pre-launch interview with Max Guedy, designer of myows to find out more about it. Read on after the jump.
What is myows?
myows is the world’s first all-in-one copyright registration and management service.
It’s an online app that lets users date stamp and store their original works (their “OWs”), any kind of file from photos to text, designs to music.
We provide proof that our user was in possession of a particular file on a given date.
And if your work has been borrowed, stolen or copied without your consent, you can open and build a new copyright infringement case.
We’ll guide you painlessly through the correct legal steps one-by-one to have the copy removed.
We’ll even provide you with legal document templates as and when you need them, such as licensing contracts, cease and desist letters, or DMCA take-down notices.
myows also includes a copryright-focused blog, forum, legal resources and an advice column from our in-house IP lawyer Steve.
How does it work?
We are proud to have simplified a laborious process into 3 steps:
1- You upload your work to your myows account, preferably before displaying it online. We then create a certificate that guarantees the exact time of your upload.
2- If you find copies of your work click on “open new case”.
3- We provide you with the help you need to have the copies of your work removed.
That way, you can stay focused on your work and your copyright infringement case will be taken care of in the most professional and level-headed way, which, judging by reading the comments in this article http://rising.blackstar.com/how-i-scared-the-wits-out-of-a-copyright-infringer-and-why-you-should-too.html is the way to go!
Who is it directed at?
It’s directed at creatives, both professionals and non…
Photographers, painters, musos, designers, coders, writers, poets, bloggers to name a few.
Anybody who produces original content/work and who would like to protect their works against blatant theft.
A lot of people don’t even know that they automatically have copyrights on all of their creative works, so there’s an education component happening here too!
How can you do it for free?
Software scales infinitely well – so now that we’ve developed it, it doesn’t cost us anything to share it.
All that the service now requires is a lot of storage space which isn’t that expensive.
We will be displaying ads on what we hope will be a heavily-visited site, and offer “premium myows accounts” with extra features, storage space and no ads.
We also have a few more top-secret revenue ideas that will be revealed as we grow.
But to put it bluntly, we’ve engineered myows to be very cost-efficient to run.
Finally, the 4 people behind myows already run successful businesses which takes away the pressure of drawing salaries out of a new venture.
How does it differ from the US Library of Congress copyright office that is usually used by working professionals?
Good question! Please note that I started working on myows before the USCO launched it’s eCo website, and the approach is very different.
myows is free, which means we can reach and be used by more people. We’re user-friendly and provide your certificate instantly ( i’ve heard the USCO currently takes 18months to deliver certificates ). I encourage you to read this review from photoattorney about how to use the eCo interface http://twitter.com/myows/status/2030955291
. In short, the eCo interface has been criticized for its lack of user friendliness.
myows is also unique in the sense that we provide a total copyright management system. We save our users time by speeding up the process of removing copies, while building a case you can present in court. eCo provides no such service – it’s just a registration tool.
The only downside is that you can’t sue for damages in the US unless you’ve filed your copyright with US copyright office. We believe however that the majority of copyright theft cases don’t get as far as a damages suit: what most users are looking for is for the stolen content to be taken down or a licensing fee to be paid, and this is where we fit in.
To quote this page http://www.photoattorney.com/2009/05/help-ive-found-infringement.html
:
“When a photo is not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to the infringement (or within three months of the first publication of the photo), a copyright owner may recover only “actual damages” for the infringement (pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 504 (b)), instead of statutory damages. Courts usually calculate actual damages based on your normal license fees and/or industry standard licensing fees. One source for standard license fees is a software program called Fotoquote. You also may recover the profits the infringer made from the infringement if they aren’t too speculative.”
Even if you file your work with USCO, it is still a good idea to upload to myows as we provide case management services that the USCO’s website doesn’t.
How does it differ from something like Fairshare that tracks Creative Commons works?
It’s quite a different offering on the whole so I don’t really know where to begin. We don’t track copies, other services already do that well. We provide proof that you had the work at a given date and help you deal with the copies you find through other services like tineye, copyscape or fairshare.
When will myows be opened to the public?
We’ll open our BETA on the 1st July – Then a public launch early August.
That concludes the interview. I’d like to thank Max and the team at myows for their time in answering these questions. Myows certainly looks to be a useful service for anyone that’s involved in creating content in any form, not just for photographers. For more information about myows, you can sign up for notifications at their website or follow them on Twitter @myows.
Please share this with your friends and contacts and retweet often. Thank you.
]]>Things are moving back to normal. Well over 110 000 page views in 24 hours was too much for the server to handle. The site is back to normal now. Stay tuned for Five For Friday tomorrow and then another tutorial next week.
]]>I plan to start a new feature in the coming weeks. It will be a weekly critique where I’ll take a user-submitted image and critique it. That could be anything from suggestions for how to improve it to reasons why I like (or dislike) it. At times I will run the image through Photoshop and do some editing to highlight certain aspects or improvements.
If you’re interested in having your image critiqued, please email your images to submissions. Images must be a minimum of 800px on the longest side, but preference will be given to those that are 1600 or greater. Please ensure that they are saved as jpg files.
Submission of content grants Craig Ferguson Images the following worldwide, royalty-free and non exclusive license as applicable. Copyright remains with the original photographer.
- with respect to content you submit or make available for inclusion, the license to use, distribute, modify, reproduce, adapt and display for the purposes the content was made available. This license continues for as long as you elect to keep the content on Craig Ferguson Images. Request for removal can be emailed to the above email address and they will be dealt with within 30 days.
]]>Happy New Year.
2009 is shaping up to be a great year here at Craig Ferguson Images. Lots of cool stuff in the works, more giveaways, more competitions, more fun. So stay tuned and check back often.
