Proposed Change to Copyright Law

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The federal NDP put forth a Private Member’s Bill, Bill C-440, that proposes to abolish Crown copyright in Canada. The Copyright Act Section 12 currently states:

Where copyright belongs to Her Majesty

12. Without prejudice to any rights or privileges of the Crown, where any work is, or has been, prepared or published by or under the direction or control of Her Majesty or any government department, the copyright in the work shall, subject to any agreement with the author, belong to Her Majesty and in that case shall continue for the remainder of the calendar year of the first publication of the work and for a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year.

For comparison, the US government generally puts all federal government works in the US public domain. Those works were paid for with American public money so the American public should have free access to them.
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Refurbished products can keep your wallet happy

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Refurbish: to repair and clean equipment so that its condition is like new.

 

Photographers like buying new equipment and that equipment is often quite expensive. What you may not know is that many manufacturers sell refurbished or demo products at a discount.

Nikon Canada used to have a semi-secret mailing list selling demo and refurbished camera gear. While Nikon does continue to sell some refurbished and demo products at its head office in Mississauga, it seems that some refurbished camera gear is also sold through Henry’s. Many camera stores also sell demo products.

Nikon USA has a site for refurbished products but the prices aren’t very good. Canon USA and Canon Canada also sell refurbished products but the discounts aren’t the greatest.
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Marketing Fools

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Toronto’s first cannabis store opened this week on April Fools’ Day and it pulled a prank on everyone including itself.

The store’s very first customer was fake. A pretend customer. Someone who works for the store as its publicist.

When found out, their excuse was that they wanted to make sure its first sale, which was being recorded by the city’s news media, didn’t have any “issues.”

Every other cannabis store in the country, since last October, has managed to open and sell to their real first customers without any “issues.”

This Toronto store is now getting publicity for all the wrong reasons:

It may have violated Canadian advertising standards:
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Li-ions and Alkalines and Acids, Oh My!

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Photographers use batteries and all batteries can leak. This means that sooner or later, many photographers will end up cursing at leaky batteries.

Contrary to popular belief, all batteries don’t leak acid. Lead-acid batteries leak acid because, well, that’s why they have “acid” in their name. But alkaline batteries leak . . . wait for it . . . an alkaline material called potassium hydroxide.
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The De-skilling of Photography

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De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.

– Merriam-Webster

Many tasks today require less skill to perform due to advancing technology. But when something requires less skill, some people wrongly assume that it also requires less creativity, less expertise and less talent. A good example of this is photography.

For the third time in seven weeks, a company sent me business headshots they wanted fixed. It was plainly obvious that all of these companies had used amateur photographers (or a really bad professional).

Fixing Cheap Photography

A small law firm today sent two business portraits and a list of what they wanted fixed:

– fix the uneven brightness of the faces

– make skin colour better

– the eyes are too dark. Make brighter.

– replace the [office] background with a plain background

– add shoulders to each person and make the pictures square

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Catalogue Shopping

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Photographers need to catalogue their images. A catalogue is a visual list of your pictures that helps you organize, search and retrieve them.

There are a lot of photo editing software but very few for digital asset management (i.e. cataloging). There are many cloud-based cataloging solutions for larger businesses but the high cost of these pushes them out of reach of most photographers.

Media Pro, a popular cataloging application for many years, was discontinued in August 2018.

I started using Media Pro in 1998 when it was called iView Multimedia. Back then, the British software company gave it away as shareware. In the early 2000s, iView Multimedia changed its name to iView Media Pro and gave it a $60 price.
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The customer is right even when they’re not

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This photo has nothing to do with this post. It’s another view-from-my-office photo.

If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.

A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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