The business side of photography
You can see an adjustable reflector on the left edge of the picture. The darker fabric was lowered or raised in front of the white reflector to control whether light was reflected full length or just on the upper body of the subject.
It may have been lucky that William Notman was born the same time photography was born.
Cameras have a changed a lot over the past hundred years. They got smaller and lighter, became more electronic, film gave way to digital sensors, and we now have flying cameras commonly called “drones.”
Aerial photography started at least as early as 1858 by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) who photographed from a hot air balloon in France. But most photographers didn’t have a hot air balloon handy so they had to find other ways to get a high camera angle:
I’ve always wanted a panoramic tripod head to do real estate photography. A stitched panorama will have much less lens distortion than a single image shot with a very wide-angle lens.
High-quality panoramic heads are priced from about $400 to $900 and they have many features. But I only need to occasionally shoot a horizontal row of photos which can be stitched together.
Before buying an expensive panoramic head, I bought a 240mm nodal rail with a sliding camera mount for $35. There are shorter rails but a longer nodal rail can work with a wider range of lenses.
It turned out that this cheap, little attachment works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Did I mention it was cheap?
Today I received this message through my contact form:
Name: John
Email: JohnBowles@xero.com
Message:
Hello,
Your website or a website that your organization hosts is violating the
copyrighted images owned by our company (xero Inc.).Take a look at this report with the hyperlinks to our images you utilized at
www.warrentoda.com and our previous publication to find the proof of our
copyrights.Download it now and check this out for yourself:
https://storage.googleapis.com/ . . .[redacted] . . .
I do think that you deliberately violated our legal rights under 17 U.S.C. Sec.
101 et seq. and could be liable for statutory damage as high as $150,000 as set
forth in Sec. 504 (c)(2) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”)
therein.This letter is official notification. I seek the removal of the infringing
materials described above. Take note as a service provider, the DMCA requires
you to eliminate and/or disable access to the infringing content upon receipt of
this letter. If you do not stop the utilization of the aforementioned
copyrighted materials a law suit can be started against you.I do have a strong faith belief that utilization of the copyrighted materials
referenced above as presumably infringing is not authorized by the copyright
owner, its agent, or the law.I declare, under consequence of perjury, that the information in this
notification is accurate and hereby affirm that I am permitted to act on behalf
of the owner of an exclusive right that is presumably infringed.Very truly yours,
John Bowles
Legal Officer
xero, Inc.xero.com
12/06/2021
(My last post reminiscing about old pictures.)
One of the many good things about working for a newspaper was the variety of assignments. Each day brought different photography work and each day you met new people.
A few examples:
• I shot an Aerosmith concert on January 6, 1990. That was followed by two hours of standing in January winter weather photographing a late-night fire at the Polish consulate in Toronto.
• On June 24, 1996, I photographed a story about a group of homeless people. My next assignment was at one of Toronto’s most expensive hotels where an International Olympic Committee executive was being feted.
• I photographed Stephen Hawking at the University of Toronto on April 27, 1998. After this, I shot a rock concert by the Deftones.
• My assignments on October 29, 1999, were to photograph the Prime Minister of Hungary and then photograph a real witch (no joke) for a Halloween story.
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There are a few reasons why a photographer will shoot or crop a portrait very tightly:
1) Cut off distractions in the foreground or background. Sometimes the subject themselves might be wearing a distraction like text or logos on clothing, a shirt with an ugly colour or loud pattern, etc.
2) Dramatic effect. A tightly composed portrait emphasizes the person’s eyes and facial expression. An otherwise routine portrait can be made more attention-getting by cropping tightly.
3) Graphic effect. A tightly composed portrait can sometimes produce interesting lines or shape.
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