Sometimes you just can’t capitalise on an opportunity.

I’ve been working in the garden, and had a skip outside the front of the house, which had dug up turf thrown in it. I was going to photograph it under the caption “I don’t like football”.

However, I was muddy, sweaty and had dirty great boots on – not suitable for nipping in and fetching the camera! Besides, my digging assistants might have thrown me in the skip if I’d stopped to “Prat about with cameras” while they were working.

By the time we’d finished for the day, the turf was buried and the shot was lost.

The moral of the story? I’m not entirely sure – perhaps it is that you should choose helpers that understand the sudden urge to stop everything and pick up a camera!

A quick post prompted by an article in Layers magazine online.  While I agree with the spirit of the article, and applaud the use of a high-profile site to remind artists and photographers to take steps to protect their work from copyright theft, I think some of the suggested protections are counterproductive, as even the article sort of admits in places.

Take  image sizes displayed online as an example.  Average screen sizes and display resolutions are getting bigger, and an 800 x 600 picture is no longer going to fill many viewer’s displays.  While sites like Flickr will upscale a small image in the slideshow function, that upsizing is going to introduce some loss of quality.  Do you want to show your work off in a way that will likely decrease the perceived quality?

Speaking of which, over-compressing the JPEG file as an anti-theft mesaure?  Call me an old cynic if you like, but have you been to retailers like Next in the UK and had a close look at the images they sell ready-framed up as ready-to-hang artwork?  OK, they may only be £30 or so, but all the same, there’s some pretty nasty JPEG and/or upscaling artifacting going on in all of the ones I’ve seen.

So, keeping a small image size and adding JPEG compression artifacts isn’t going to put people off, not if they’ye already paying £30 for a badly-printed, poor-quality image in a wooden frame made in some cheap third-world factory.  Sad though it is, is you want some protection from abuse of your images that you put online, I think branding is the only way to add a modicum of security.

Years ago, I started branding with a small, discreet footer added to my pictures.  This started off as plain white text, in a rather nasty font, and later got slightly neater with a sans-serif font in white on a trasparent black bar, so it blended in the bottom of the image slightly more.  However, seeing examples where footers had just been cropped out by the abusers, I decided it was time to do something more difficult to erase.

I now have a Photoshop action that adds a white text footer on a 50% opaque black bar, and another that adds large 10% opaque white text right across the middle of an image.  It’s not often that an image is useful without the middle, so it’s pretty crop-proof.  This lets me still save at up to 1024 pixels, and fairly good quality levels; I tend to use Photoshop quality level 10 or the Lightroom equivalent for the web.  I’ve automated these using a droplet so I can invoke as a post-export action from Lightroom, which hopefully I’ll expand on a bit a future post. Ideally I’d like to set it up using ActionScript, so it can look at the metadata and stamp the right year on the file itself, and accomodate wildly differing image sizes automatically; another future post topic, should I ever get that working!

See some examples of this branding approach on my Flickr Photostream.  I don’t think it’s terribly intrusive, nor do I think it spoils the picture too badly.  I’d be interested to see any comments from other photographers and digital artists.

This morning, my lovely wife and I went for a little wander in the sunshine to a church in the area, to see what the photographic opportunities might be.  It’s an old church, and not the most beautiful I’ve seen, but with the green of the trees and sunny blue skies, perhaps there was scope for something.  Well, I figure I need a tilt-shift lens, becuase you I couldn’t get far enough away for my 17-40mm lens to catch the tower without significant distortion.  I got a few shots that I was prepared to show the world.

While mooching around the church yard with my camera and enormous Crumpler bag, I was pondering the implications of what I was doing.  What would locals think of my activities?  What would the Church (organisation, not building!) think?  Was I inadvertently breaking some moral, social or legal obligation?

For starters, there’s all those graves.  My own views on the end of mortal life aside, these were once people with parents, and one presumes most likely siblings and children too.  You can’t just go wandering all over the place without any consideration for what you might be walking on.  How do you know where the graves even are in churches of a certain age?  Headstones aren’t always in neat rows, and the absence of a headstone may not mean anything.  Then there’s the headstones themsleves; while most are obviously old and many essentially untended, there are those where it’s obvious they’re looked after regularly, and osme look far more recent.  I’m always wary of photographing anything that might have the personal details of somebody who still has living relatives that come and care for the grave, so photographing headstones needs some care to try and avoid getting too much detail.

Then there’s the legalities of it.  The church yard is owned by the church, and as such is private property.  If the church wanted to stop photography on its grounds, I’m sure it would have the legal and moral right to do so.  But in the absence of notices, what rememdy would a church have to prevent use of photographs taken on its grounds?  Could the shape and visual amenity of a building be copyrighted, or even specific views and settings that could only be obtained on private property?

So although they’re not great pictures, they aren’t too terrible in my biased opinion, and if it would help the church in websites or leaflets to use them, I’d be happy to let them have a license to use them for the promotion of the church and its activities.  But, I’m slightly wary of approaching them, for fear of opening a can of worms.

Plenty of people photograph churches, and legal people aren’t making themselves very rich off the back of it, so perhaps I’m just jumping at shadows?