National Geographic Traveler Here I Come!

Don't you just love titles that sound all exciting? I just entered a PDN & National Geographic Traveler-sponsored photo contest. Up til now I've entered very few contests, one reason being the rights that certain contests are requesting. More on that later. Here is the link: World in Focus Wish me luck!

The level of talent here is top-notch and as with any contest you can't go in expecting to win anything. The odds of winning are higher than not entering however. Which is the attitude I'm taking. As cool as it would be to have a gallery showing in New York and have an image in a National Geographic publication, spending 10 days in Tahiti on someone else's dime sounds like paradise to me. I couldn't care less about winning equipment.

Last year's winners include MacDuff Everton a well-published photographer known for his panoramics. In the student category I noticed several winners from the Academy of Art University, where I earned my MFA a year and a half ago. It's nice to know that the Academy is improving the quality of their work apparently as my advertising / design friends and I thought the photography work displayed at the Spring Show was quite weak when we attended the school.

As for contests, ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT. You will notice some contests will ask for you to basically sign away your rights to your images in return for a credit pretty much. They will word the rules and regulations differently so keep an eye out for things like that. Anything that says royalty-free or unlimited use should tip you off.

A lot of contests exist solely as a way to acquire images for other uses that benefit them without having to adequately compensate the photographers. They know that many unknowing photographers would easily give up their rights to images for anything that sounds remotely interesting. Sorry to say that photography has value and you should value yours as such. Anything less is selling yourself short as well as de-valueing the industry. There's been a lot of interesting discussion on Gary Crabbe's blog about issues like this so you might want to check it out: Enlightened Views

Another type of pseudo-contest is offering a small gift certificate in return for royalty-free use of your photo in the company's advertising. Now, I have ordered some products from Photographer's Edge which does this sort of thing but I wouldn't submit my photos for consideration in their catalog because they request for royalty-free, unlimited use of your photo in their promotional material in return for a $25 or $50 Photographer's Edge gift certificate. That is peanuts and pocket lint compared to the rights-managed marketplace. What that means is that if another client comes along in the future and requests to use that image for their advertising material they might ask you if it's ever been licensed for that purpose, where it was licensed and is it floating around as royalty-free. If you can't answer any of those questions and say yes to the royalty-free then they'd likely look elsewhere. If you've ever licensed an image as royalty-free then later decide to get serious about making money by marketing it as rights-managed then it could open yourself up to serious financial legal trouble not to mention damage your reputation. Simply put, royalty-free cheapens the value of your photography not to mention the perception of your work.

As for the last contest I entered, it was last year's contest for the Sacramento Bee newspaper's travel section. If I recall, it was limited to displaying it on the contest site and one-time use publishing it as the newspaper travel photo of the year. I was okay with that because I knew specifically what it would be used for and limited only to that usage. I didn't win but that's okay. Nothing gained, nothing lost. You never know, perhaps one of their editors could have saw something then toss you a bone. I certainly woudln't mind working as a newspaper photojournalist. Getting paid to shoot assignments would be awesome. You probably wouldn't appreciate it though unless you've worked a 9 til when you drop office job before.

Shelved.

For the past 4 weeks I've been unable to walk because of torn ligaments in my left foot. I was injured during a baseball game three days after I returned from Daniel's wedding trip and have been on crutches ever since. In the past week, I could finally put my foot down without increasing swelling so things are looking brighter day by day. I even attempted walking again a day or two ago with much pain I might add.

My former roommate Brandon Hill is getting married to his fiance, Kristin this coming Saturday in Kansas City so if I'm physically well enough to walk then I might just make an appearance. I doubt I'd be in photography-ready condition, but if I can go the foot can't possibly get any worse by taking a few pictures at least right? The odds of me traveling in the next week are very slim, so I'd like to wish the both of them the best of luck in either case. They're good people and very devoted to their Christian religion.

This time off from photography has allowed me to catch up on processing pictures from the recent trip and get some of them up on my website. I've also had a lot of time to think about all the great places I want to visit that I've never been to. Here is my list:

Quebec (City)
Montreal
Niagara Falls
Memphis (Graceland, National Civil Rights Museum, Beale Street)
Lake Superior Shore
Oregon
Alaska
Hawaii
Glacier National Park
Redwood National Park
Santa Fe and Taos
Venice, Rome, and Vatican City, Italy
Klamath Basin during Pacific Flyway wintering season.
Bosque del Apache NWR
Sandhills of Nebraska
Lake Tahoe (Probably one of the few people to have lived in Northern California and not been there)

Digital Manipulation - "How much is too far?"

This was a recent question posted on the Naturephotographers.net forum. There's generally two sides that fight over this constantly. One group of photographers feel that photography should not be altered in any shape or form and somehow that is bad for other photographers should do they choose to do so. The other group feels that since it's an art, they shouldn't have to go out of our way to explain how and why they choose to clone a distracting branch or telephone pole out of the scene for example. Some people go as far as saying that there should be rules regarding ethical treatment of photos. Now that is where I draw the line.

Personally, I clone dust spots and the occasional sun flare from my images but rarely if ever clone things like phone poles and branches from my work. Do I care to know if other photographers clone branches or crop their images? No. If the argument is that what is taken at the time of capture should be displayed as such, where does that leave cropping? Should I have to disclose whether or not I cropped an image? What gives anyone the right to tell me how I should present my work?

What comes out of the lens isn't an accurate depiction of reality to begin with. Most lenses have optical defects such as barrel distortion, chromatic aberration, pincushioning, light fall-off while shooting wide open, lack of sharpness in the corners, etc... If I were to correct for any of those lens defects, that alone makes my images manipulated. If I weren't to correct for those problems then people would ask why does the horizon look curved? Why is there that purple outline around your trees? Why does it look like you have vignetting?

There's a well-known professional stock photographer named Darwin Wiggett who does do things like double exposures for moons, or even add them into scenes in which they weren't originally in at the time of capture. His photography is some of the most beautiful photography in the business and he doesn't proclaim to portray every scene in it's literal sense. So why should the integrity of work like his be called into question? He's not a journalist, he's an artist. Some of his images look obviously manipulated so I don't see why someone should feel deceived. Can you feel deceived for liking an image? There's other very famous photographers who fit into this category as well: Art Wolfe, Tim Fitzharris, and Ansel Adams among others.

My opinion is to let the viewer decide for themself whether they want to purchase the art or not and spend more energy working on your own vision rather than worry about what others do. Perhaps your photography might start growing and evolving once you start working on yourself. There's art snobs out there who still claim that photography is a pseudo-art at best. It's pretty hard to convince them otherwise if photographers are still arguing about "ethics". Sounds foolish if you ask me. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they've had exhibits that have involved the use of bodily fluids. Yet somehow cloning a piece of bird shit from an otherwise pristine scene, or adding a moon is taboo. Go figure.

Did the wedding ring really look like this in reality? No, the entire ring was sharp.



Is this image an accurate depiction of what I saw with my eyes? No. The sun had gone down 30 minutes before and it was pitch black outside except for a park spotlight being shined on the waterfall. In order to have an exposure, the camera had to absorb light that isn't visible to the human eye. Oh nooo! I'm sooo stressed out that other photographers might think I've gone too far.