Not cool!

 

This is not cool!

On Instagram many profiles do this thing where you can get featured if you tag them when posting yourself. It’s a nice and easy way to get visibility, if they feature your image as is that is. Yesterday one such feature occured, but when doing like this profile did is actually copyright infringement. Although he/she tagged me the image had been cropped in such a way that my logo was removed and also the image went from sharp to fuzzy.

When done like this it reflects poorly on me as photographer, when my image is reposted it should be unaltered and not made a lesser image that won’t show the quality of my work. Below both versions have been included so you can see the difference. and, it is copyright infringement which makes it illegal when reposting!

Incidently, this particular image is available as print and novelty items at Printler, Spreadshirt, Redbubble and Pixels/Fine Art America. how likely are you to make a purchase if an image of poor quality is what you have seen before from my work?

Needless to say this particular Instagrammer won’t be getting any more support from me and I am actually considering filing charges. It’s sad really that people are so clueless when it comes to copyright.

This is not the first time I have been going down this road on the blogs, here at the backup mirror there are a couple of posts to read. Infringement and Credits are two of them, one with what not to do and one on how to do it.

Student

 All of a sudden I had gotten me a student of photography when I gave my fiancé one of my old cameras to play with. As it turns out she had never even held a system camera prior to this and I must confess I am somewhat impressed by how quickly she’s learned the basics. The very first time she had a session she accompanied me to a shoot at a local eating contest and my initial thought afterwards was that I needed to have a discussion with her regarding focus. Not so much the focus of the camera but more regarding what her focus was at as I found a load of shots of me on the job when uploading her images to the computer.

Anywho, from time to time I’ll be sharing some of her images here.

Tansy

Fall is upon us, but some flowers are still very much blooming. Tansies are lighting up the fields like thousands of little suns.

This image is mirrored from http://metalphoto.blog/tansy/

New Horizons

The day has come when I move on towards new horizons, the blog is moving from Nouw to a domain of it's own hosted elsewhere where it is possible to include widget snippets with tracking codes so I can compete with bloggers/influencers on other platforms. Don't forget to update your bookmarks!

New URL: http://metalphoto.blog/

It's still very much a hard helmet area, there's a lot to get in place, but it is an active new home. It would mean the world to me if you follow me there and continue to visit and comment.

Tubular

To illustrate why extension tubes are useful, there have been questions regarding this, I have with a lens with a 55 mm focal length taken one shot without an extension tube and one shot with a 36 mm tube. Lenses have a minimum distance you have to be from an object to be able to take a clear shot, with extension tubes you can alter this distance and the amount of magnification without having to purchase a much more expensive macro lens.

Forgotten

How quickly they forgot all the support and visibility they got when the old blog "Den Rockande Kocken" ("The Rocking Chef"), Scandinavias largest rock blog at the time, was around and also after when I went full in with the photography shooting their concerts providing music magazines with great imagery. Some bands have gotten loads of free promotion, but where are they now?

In this pandemic hysteria era there have been no concerts to shoot and I have been forced to switch to other motifs when photographing. None of the bands have shown an ounce of support for most of the photographers who have made it possible for artists to provide their fans with live shots, not even as little as linking our portfolios to help us get some visibility.

The bands still have live streaming available as well as regular streaming on various platforms, they're still making money from their music. Forgotten are not only the photographers, but also all the people who was there to set the stages up, the technicians enabling them to be heard and seen on stage and many more. Still they wants all of us to promote their new songs and videos.

Chanterelles

It's been a busy day sorting and editing images to make them ready to be uploaded to the stock photo agencies, after yesterdays little tour to the woods I came home with, in addition to the actual mushrooms, some 500 images that have kept me somewhat occupied today.

I wasn't alone out there though, my fiancé, her daughter and granddaughter went along and of course I got a shot or two of the little redhead while picking chanterelles.

Purple Shrooms

The colors of fall have begun showing themselves. Today I went into the woods and found loads of shrooms of all sizes, shapes and colors.

European

Finally Printler's begun making deliveries available for residents in Europe, some countries already with more to follow. With Christmas coming up now is a good time to begin shopping for nice gifts.

MetalPhoto at Printler

Unfortunately I'm limited to only 15 items at Printler and there are only prints available, but if you wish to shop for other items and/or motifs you can do so at Redbubble, Fine Art America and Spreadshirt.  These deliver internationally by the way. If there is any other type of motif you wish to find items with please leave a comment and I'll do my very best to make this available too.

Getting close

Looking forward to new adventures in the world of macro photography, yesterday I won an online auction and secured a set of macro extension tubes for a fraction of the cost of brand new ones. It's not the big earnings that will make you rich, it's the small spendings. Although I'm already using a couple of short telephoto lenses with macro, one even with progressive macro, with these tubes I'll be able to convert the smaller lenses to macro lenses as well.

The real reason for getting them tubes though is to allow my eager student, my fiancé wanting to learn photography, to dip her toes into the macro pool without having to purchase a whole new range of expensive lenses.

I'm not really new to the world of macro though, already with my first system camera back in the seventies (a Minolta SRT-100x) I used similar tubes to make macro lenses out of regular MC/MD Rokkor lenses.

Normalcy

At long last some kind of normalcy in the wake of the pandemic hysteria has returned, the first monthly members luncheon with the local chapter of the party since February took place and I had a chance to sit down with likeminded friends to chat about current events. On the way there I took a stroll by the city church just to get some shots of that part of town.

Escape

I guess it's time to move on, time for an escape to greener pastures. After a lot of thinking and soulsearching I have come to the conclusion that if I want the blog to take off I need to move to another platform where using services like Bloggportalen, services that require tracking codes to be implemented, is possible as it seems there is no likeness of this being made available at Nouw.

Next up will be to canvas the Swedish platforms to find which one can provide what is needed to compete with all other platforms, quite possibly I might even set up a new domain at my current web hosting provider where the company website is already hosted. As it is now only 10 precent of the visitors originate from Nouw anyway, the rest come from my own efforts promoting in social medias.

This ain't my first rodeo. I have been blogging for more than 15 years, between 2010 and 2018 I published what became Scandinavias largest rock blogs with over 80,000 unique visitors every week when it peaked, it ranked in the Top 10 in Sweden (all categories combined) and as it combined rock music and food it achieved becoming one of the three most influential food blogs in Sweden as well (2014).

In the fall of 2018 I decided to switch focus to photography only and a year ago realized that a blog still would be needed for visibility and marketing purposes, that's when I ended up with Nouw. At that time it was possible to include widgets with tracking codes and the new MetalPhoto blog began climbing, when the platform was changed it came in as number 8 in the catory Photo & Art. After the change the module for widgets is nothing more than a copy of the link module. Today the blog can't even be found in the ranking lists. All thanks to not being able to include tracking codes. Needless to say new visitors found the blog through the listings which hasn't been happening since May when the change came about and the blog dove right down into obscurity.

Keep visiting for updates on the coming escape so you won't miss the move.

Thinking (or not)

You can't help wondering sometimes what they were thinking when they named things, the cavity next to the bridge is called an F-hole...

Exotic

When dealing with people on social medias you sooner or later come to a point where you want to cry out "I'm surrounded by idiots!" and "What the hell is wrong with people?!?", at least when dealing with some of them. Just now I posted a black and white rendition of a rudbeckia and got the comment "When will you post images of animals, exotic animals?"...

Honestly, I live in Sweden and document the environment around, I shoot Swedish nature and animals. More than 85 percent of my followers on social medias are outside of Scandinavia, to them the animals I post photos of are exotic. Asking this is like asking Metallica when they are going to play country & western songs...

My response though was to answer with a shot of my neighbors parrot. Is that exotic enough?

Confined

At the moment I'm confined to quarters, a voluntary quarantine while waiting for the corona test results, due to a massive cold. This doesn't in any way mean I can't play around with photography though, the last couple of days I have been busy with Photoshop and greyscales. I do like to work with black and white, you can get so much more drama in a photo when you take out the colors and use contrast, light and shadows instead.

Bonsai

Living inland as I do these days in the middle of Sweden there are two things I miss more than anything else from my home town of Karlskrona in the south, the ocean and the archipelago. Just to get something that at least reminded me of that region I made a little installation with some water polished stones (called sea stones in Swedish, "sjösten"), some driftwood and couple of small Coleus plants of the variety Tidbits Tammy which looks very much like some wild plants that can be found by the rocky beaches where I grew up.

It didn't take more than a quarter of an hour after posting images of the installation at Facebook when som nut had to "piss" on it suggesting that I should ditch the Coleus plants and do bonsai. First of all, what the hell does Japanese miniature trees have to do with Swedish archipelagos?

Anywho, this actually per definition is a bonsai. Splitting up the Japanese word into it's components, "bon" means bowl and "sai" means plant so a bonsai is a "bowl plant" and that's exactly what the installation is.

No easy task

All of a sudden I find myself just waiting, waiting for some companies to get back to me regarding those pesky property releases needed to get some images up at the stock image agencies. One such release is required for some shots with my adorable child model where she's dressed in a jacket with print, at least at that company they're working on it. At MGM they won't even reply with a "no way", they just ignored the query.

It's no easy task attempting to play a violin made for adults either when you're only 5...

Unsuccesful

Working hard with the images from Friday's model shoot, a lot of editing and adjusting getting them ready for the stock photo agencies. As always there are a shot or two that are "unsuccesful", they can't be used for the agencies but are still fully useable portrait photos.

Anything and everything

When out and about with my cameras I shoot just about anything and everything. Even a piece of torn plastic film on a steel wire can become photographic art.

Violinista

New items available at Printler, Redbubble, Spreadshirt and Fine Art America. Keep an eye open, more is coming soon.

Releases

After a slow Sunday with "The Missus" I'm about to kick into a higher gear and get to work with imagery for stock photo agencies, when I have obtained so called "model releases" from a couple of my poor "victims", I realize I need a "property release" or two as well. For instance the jacket in this photo has print on the back for which someone own the copyright, if I want to commercially use images like this I need that person or companies consent. So now I have to get the mother of the child, she's the one who agreed to a model release as the kids legal guardian, on the horn to find out of which brand the jacket is and contact them. With a little luck they will at least reply unlike the company who owns the rights for The Pink Panther who couldn't even be bothered to say no.

Who said it was a walk in the park being a photographer?

Copyright / Upphovsrätt

Härom dagen uppstod en kontrovers angående uppladdning/publicering av bilder innehållande personer i en grupp på sociala medier, ett utlägg om vad man får och inte får göra hittar du i "För att jag kan". En snabb koll i flödet i gruppen visade att de som hade en massa tyckande och tänkande själva lägger upp bilder som gör intrång i upphovsrätt (copyright), på bara en minut hittades ett tiotal sådana bilder.

Det här testet har jag gjort tidigare på Facebook, men hur är det med alla i bloggvärlden, kan ni? Nedan finns fem bilder varav endast en inte gör intrång i upphovsrätten, alltså en enda av fem som egentligen inte skulle vara olaglig för dig att publicera. Kan du avgöra vilken som är tillåten? Kommentera med numret på den du tror.

Alla bilderna är tagna av mig, så långt är det inget intrång. Det handlar alltså om innehållet i bilderna. Rätt svar kommer om ett par dagar i ett uppföljande inlägg.

Black Friday

Yesterday I had a Black Friday of sorts of my own when stepping way out of my safe zone to do a session with one of my fiancés beautiful daughters. I must confess that doing a shoot of this kind was actually quite fun and I'll be doing more of that in the future.

Childhood's End

I have been asked umpteen times if the series of images called "Childhood's End" have something to do with World Childhood Foundation to which I can answer no. The name is borrowed from the novel with the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, one of my favorite authors.

The idea behind the images is that, much like in the book where mankind and Earth cease to exist after literally, physically childhood have been lost when the children ascend to a higher plane of existance, childhood's innocence will at some point be lost.

When we leave childhood behind we usually also leave our old toys, often broken, behind and they fall into oblivion. With the series I want to let these old toys gain new life photographically at the same time as the images will remind us that childhood is something fragile and precious that sometimes end all too abrubtly. All the images have in common that they are black and white, also mostly dark, to enhance the feeling of the ominous of loosing the innocence we possess as children.

Footnote: The book is also an unexpected and interesting intrepretation of the biblical "end of days" when the Devil causes the destruction of the World.

Portrait

Who said portraits had to be of humans? Why not a bull?

Beauty in death

Sometimes you don't even have to leave the comfort of your home to find beauty to shoot. The other day when pruning my potted plants I took an old leaf from my Alocasia Amazonica and put in a vase with a black backdrop, there is beauty in death too.

This image is available as prints and novelty items at Printler, Spreadshirt, Redbubble and Fine Art America, check it out and get your own beautiful stuff from the shops.

Shades of grey

Yesterday I had a black and white kind of day, everything came out in shades of grey...

Credits

Returning for a moment to the "Infringement" post. This is how it should be done properly, keeping the logo in the image and posting credits. And this is done by a young mother less than half the age of the dingbat whom actually late last night sent a Messenger message asking for more pictures to be taken and even requested I should come this morning and do it.

Infringement

That's it, from now on I will NOT do people any favors taking pictures free of charge. Not even for in-laws or family.

The other day an in-law, kind of as his cousin's married to my cousin, asked me to snap a couple of shots of him to use for his business endeavours. Photos taken and edited to make them the best possible, then delivered as high resolution images so they can be used for printing and of course as he got them for free with my company logo on them.

Now I discovered that he had posted one of them on social media with no credits and even had cropped the image so that the logo was gone. Honestly, this is copyright infringement. Just because it's him in the picture it doesn't mean he owns the image, I own the copyright. I'm seriously considering reporting him to the social media platform, question is if he will get the message or will he just upload the photo again?

NO more favors for people, if they want photos shot they will have to pay for it!

Sign of the times

It's a sign of the times that Redbubble, Pixels and others have added to their product lines face masks that you can order with printing. Some of my images have also been made available on masks and more are to come. "World in hand" mask ready for purchase at Redbubble.

Patina

Patina, a fancy word for rust...