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The year is almost over. It’s not though. I love Christmas and usually do a fair amount of shooting in december, but around thanksgiving I start thinking about next year…. Becasue this year is almost over. Though it’s not over yet. Almost. Not quite. Will be shortly.
I’ve been looking at random photos in my “2009″ folder, as I look back through the year I’m happy to say I was able to do a lot of things I wanted to do, go places, shoot things. I’m happy to say that overall, my photos have gotten better. But it seems my todo list left for next year is longer rather than shorter. Next year, I believe, if I take off the months of February, April, May, July, August, September and October… I may be able to shoot everything on my list, but something tells me that isn’t going to happen. Prioritization is in order. There are things, projects, that I want to try, new places I want to go, techniques that need tried and honed. It’s rather exciting really…
We’ve got a trip to Salmon at Christmas to see the family. Salmon is one of the most beautiful places in the world, so the camera is always handy, it’ll be a great no pressure photo trip and with that, 2009 will be over, done.
I’ve yet to plan anything major for 2010. Aside from a workshop myself and two friends, Johnny and David are organizing on January 16th, but beyond that it’s a blank page.
Speaking of blank pages, I am going to re-examine my website… I’m asking it to do so much, that I end up not doing enough with it. I hope to roll out some structure changes around the first of the year that will make it easier for me to share my work as well as my tech and personal content without doing three separate websites. I’m constantly getting email and face to face comments (or even by proxy) about the photos I choose to post here and I realize I need to post more. So many of my photos I want to post just sit on my hard drive waiting for a blog post I can associate with them. I cant guarantee anything, but I’m gonna try my best to post the photos and let them speak for themselves without thinking I’ve got to comment everything. Though, google sure prefers I write about them
I logged into flickr tonight to check on my groups and found a post with information pointing to another rights grabbing photo contest.
This one put on by Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance of Idaho. The contest “Reasons to Love Idaho” requires to you trade your copyright for the chance of winning a Ipod.
“You must own the copyrights to any photos that you submit. Winners turn over copyright ownership of their winning photos to Farm Bureau Insurance Company.” -FAQ
“Granting of Copyright and Acknowledgment of Right to Submit. A Contestant has the right to submit one or more photos for display in the Photo Gallery. By submitting a photo to the Photo Gallery, Contestant grants to FBM a perpetual non-exclusive, royalty-free and irrevocable right to place that photo in the Photo Gallery and to use, reproduce, copy, publish, display, distribute, adapt, modify or otherwise exploit that photo and to incorporate it in other works and to sell, license, or otherwise commercially utilize that photo.” -RULES
They could only make it worse by requiring you to sign up for a new account before they give you the ipod. I won’t give the contest the benifit of a link. If you want to read the rules yourself visit reasonstoloveidaho dot com.
No pro, or self respecting hobbyist will touch a contest like this, please share this info and ALWAYS READ CONTEST RULES. for more information, please check out my first post about bad photo contests.
Just a real quick post: Saw a note a few minutes ago about a photo contest being run by the Idaho Statesman in cooperation with Idaho Camera. First, both of these companies are reputable and I’d have no problem doing business with them in most cases. I don’t usually do photo contests, but since I run a “Outdoor Idaho Photography” group on flickr I clicked the link to check it out for a possible announcement on our forum. And right there in plain sight is the reason I don’t do photo contest and why you should ALWAYS read the rules.
“Photographs and Articles submitted to the Idaho Statesmen and Idaho Camera shall become the property of Idaho Statesmen and Idaho Camera and may be reproduced and distributed in print, electronic, or other form for perpetuity.” source
If that doesn’t give you chills, you don’t value your work enough. For what it’s worth, that’s essentially all of the fine print, there is no link or reference to a “complete set of rules” or such. I realize that publications have to have a copyright release as part of their submission guidelines so they can print your photo in the paper or display it as a winner on their website. Some contests handle this gracefully, and I’ll participate. But many, if not most, grant themselves the right to sell prints and some, as in this case, claim to own the work. Perhaps, just perhaps, that’s not what they intended but rarely do court cases revolve on intent instead of what was written in the contract.
There are plenty of resources on the internet regarding photo contest and what to look for in the fine print of your local contests. It’s accepted they won’t send you back the print you sent in, and there will be language to that effect, that’s standard. You should expect to see language saying that you the photographer grant the company license or permission to print the photo as part of the photo contest. Read closely and be sure you can live with the “license” or “permission” you are granting. Stay far away from “own,” “become property,” “exclusive” and “perpetuity.” Always make that there is wording to the effect of: “the original photographer retains the copyright” For more information on photo contests and why many of them are bad, really, really, bad. Search google, there are plenty of rights grab stories out there. For further information about contests and photographers rights as well as examples of good and bad contests; visit: pro-imaging.org/content/view/164/161/
I’ve been meaning to post this for a bit now. But we all know how things seem to come up, it’d been a crazy week and then came the holiday weekend. I had to put down the computer and step away from the internet for the last four days; it was nice.
Last week Joy and I went to the first annual Boise Curb Cup. I’m not sure there’s a good way to describe it, but imagine 130 different, some really different and all very random street performers gathering for a two hour competition. We didn’t hear about the event until the day before, one of my wife’s friends was going to be among the performers. But we were able to rearrange our schedule to see it.
Looking at a list of 130 entries and knowing that we had two hours that meant less than a minute per individual or group. That’s not counting getting stuck in a crowd, crossing streets etc. Yeah. not gonna happen. So somewhat randomly and based on name alone I circled 10 groups that I wanted to see, Joy added two that weren’t already on my list, together we marked a few more as 2nds. Read the rest of this entry »
Some of the crazy places I’ve been, crazy things I’ve done… for photography.
I’m not a big fan of “Zoo Shots” but hate people calling it wildlife photography. Spending time at the Zoo is a great way to spend a day and take some pictures in a no pressure environment. I’ve been meaning to go to the Zoo here in Boise for some time. But what I hate is seeing a photo by a wildlife photog and thinking, wow, how in the world… Then learning that it was on a ranch where the photog had paid several hundred dollars for a few hours of guaranteed time shooting this animal. And what I hate more is I didn’t come up with the idea to pin in a bunch of animals, call it a game ranch and let photogs come in by the van load to pay me to see them. I don’t have a problem with the shots themselves, I’ve seen some good photos from zoos and game ranches, but it’s not WILDlife. My problem is when a wildlife photographer fails to mention that he paid money to photograph the animal in a controlled environment.
I used to live next to the Smokeys, now live near Yellowstone & The Tetons and enjoy going up to Glacier. I love shooting wildlife in the National Parks but still don’t get the same excitement photographing an animal in a park as I do out in the sticks. It still takes skill and persistence to get good photos and see the best wildlife in a national park (unless we’re talking Mountain Goats at Glacier). I don’t know, maybe it’s all the other people, more likely just the large majority of people who go to a big box retail store buy an expensive camera, go to Yellowstone take a few pictures and call themselves a photographer. Read the rest of this entry »
