rant

On your marks

Earlier today, I received an e-mail that read:

Good morning!

I am looking for a photographer that has the equipment to remove watermarks from a school proof photo. I have a letter from lifetouch giving me permission to do so.
Is this something that your studio is able to do?
If not, are you able to refer me elsewhere?

With sincere appreciation,

(name redacted)

A school portrait business like Lifetouch or for that matter, any other type of photography business would not give permission to remove a watermark. It doesn’t make any sense.

This is like asking, “Can you shoplift a jacket for me? I have a letter from the store giving me permission to do so.”

As all professional photographers should know, it’s illegal (and here) to remove, alter, or hide, a watermark or copyright notice from a picture of which you don’t own the copyright.

As every consumer should know, the easiest way to remove a watermark from a photo is to pay for it.

 

Door-to-door energy scams

(This post has nothing to do with photography).

If you received an e-mail saying you just won a million dollars, would you believe it? If an e-mail said your bank account or credit card was compromised and you needed to “click here” to verify your information, would you do it?

Someone came to my front door today saying he was with the “Ontario Energy Safety Board”. He was here to do a furnace safety inspection. Of course, he was lying. There’s no such thing as the Ontario Energy Safety Board. The company name he used was meant to be confused with real Ontario Energy Board.

Now that warmer weather has begun, many homeowners will be receiving similar knocks on their front door. This will go on for many months. Sadly, all levels of Canadian government have refused to fix the problem of door-to-door scams. We have Do Not Call and CASL but we don’t have “Do not knock” like Australia.
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Cheap stock pictures fail yet again

Was the federal “Department of Canadian Heritage” named ironically?

The National Post this week pointed out that the cheap stock pictures used by Canadian Heritage are from a foreign-owned picture agency and were shot by foreign photographers.

Why does this federal agency use foreign photos to promote Canadian culture? It suggested that Canadian photographers are too expensive.

Unfortunately, the National Post article is many years behind the times. The federal government’s practice of using cheap stock pictures from foreign photographers has been going on for a long time. That’s correct: the Canadian government avoids Canadian photographers and buys cheaper work from abroad.
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The not so deep freeze

Today in Toronto, it was about -8˚C. A normal winter day. My cameras worked just fine outdoors. My flashes worked as normal. After less than an hour outside, I reached into an inside coat pocket to retrieve my cell phone and my iPhone 5 said:

Of course, it probably meant to say that it needed to warm up. The phone was completely useless. Thank goodness it wasn’t an emergency.

It turns out that an iPhone doesn’t like to work below 0˚C. Not even this will help.

I know that cold weather affects all batteries and can freeze LCDs. But I don’t recall having any previous cell phone freeze on me. My digital cameras have never failed even at -20˚C. The iPhone seems to be my only electronic device that fails when the temperature is less than ideal.

Perhaps today’s smartphones are wimps or maybe they’re just turning us into wimps.

 

Lasting photo memories

Last week, I went to a funeral. As is common these days, the family had a photo gallery on their son’s online obituary page. The pictures covered almost the last half of their son’s life.

Many of the photos were either out-of-focus, badly exposed, had heads partially cut off, or the boy was so far in the background he was barely visible. Most of the recent photos appeared to have been shot with a cell phone due to the obvious low resolution and low quality.

Pictures are important, especially personal pictures.

If you’re a parent with young children, please buy a real camera and learn how to use it.
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Mission Creep

A potential commercial client e-mailed to say they needed “a few product shots” and they’d do all the post-production work on the images. Their budget for “a four hour photo shoot” was quite small but it could be doable if there was only a few products and the production value was kept low (no assistant, no big lights).

I called the company to get more information.

Yes they wanted a few product shots. In fact, they wanted all of their products photographed with full studio lighting. Since some products were big and heavy, the lighting would have to be moved from location to location within the building (i.e. at least one assistant would be needed).
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An Open Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

As reported by The Globe and Mail (and here), CTV, Toronto Star, Macleans and others, the Canadian federal government (or probably more accurately, the Prime Minister’s Office) is planning to amend Canada’s Copyright Act so that the government can freely use any “news” content for any of its political advertising without the permission of the copyright holder(s).

“News” is in quotes because it’s only vaguely defined as being any published content that features any politician acting in their capacity as a politician or anyone who might be seeking a political position, or relates to any political issue. News content can include video, photographs, text, audio and music.

“Published” seems to be defined as being published, broadcast or otherwise made available, in any media, to the public. This includes any TV news broadcast or any other news program, news radio programs, newspapers, news periodicals, and news web sites including everyone’s favourite news site, Youtube.
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