Pushing Pixels

NASCAR driver Kurt Busch, takes the high line into turn 1 at Darlington Raceway, during the 60th running of the Southern 500, on Saturday, May 9, 2009, in Darlington, S.C. (AP Photo/Brett Flashnick)

The clock showed it was 2am, as I made way home to Columbia in the back seat of Mary Ann’s car early Sunday morning, following the 60th running of the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, in Darlington, SC. I was completely drained from two non-stop days of making my way around the “Lady in Black” while on assignment for the Associated Press, but was content as could be, and didn’t mind the fact that it would be 3am or later before my head hit the pillow. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ap, assignment, associated press, car, darlington, NASCAR, photography, photojournalism, race, racing, sport, tire, track, work.

On Friday, September 26, 2008, the United States Senate passed their version of the Orphan Works legislation by hotline. A hotline is an informal term for a request to members of the Senate to agree to allow a bill or resolution to be approved by the Senate without debate or amendment (for more information on hotline process read this article by Sen. Tom Colburn).

Currently the House version of The Orphan Works Act of 2008 bill, H.R. 5889, is in the House Judiciary Committee, and while it is not as damaging as the Senate version S.2913, either version of the bill would cause catastrophic harm to creative communities which depend on protections of their intellectual property, provided under current Copyright law.

According to the Orphan Works Act of 2008, an “orphan work” is defined as any copyrighted work whose author is unable to be located by an infringer who claims they have performed a “reasonably diligent search” (however it in no way gives any parameters as to what a reasonably diligent search is. In a departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use the work for any purpose, including commercial usage.  

This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use.  It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work.  The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder’s ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement.  The bill also has a disproportionate impact on visual artists such as photographers, because it is common for an artist’s, work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed electronically removed by others in our current, electronic age, where many of these images wind up on the internet.

The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives’ work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art.  The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information. These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans.  There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.

In the end, the artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries.  Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive; therefore countless working artists would find existing works orphaned from the moment they create them.  The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this burden of registration would result in their work automatically becoming an orphan and subject to legal infringement.

I don’t feel that there are words strong enough to tell you how important it is to personally contact your Representative in the United States House, and ask them to stand against this piece of legislation.  However if you don’t have enough time to call or write them personally please visit http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321 or  http://www.petitiononline.com/Stop2913/petition.html or http://www.house.gov/.

If you would like to find out more information please visit http://owoh.org/.

Tags: artist, copyright, house, important, legislation, orphan, protection, senate, works.

I have received several emails from readers and people who have seen my shot from the 2008 Carolina Cup Races, that I posted a few weeks ago, so I decided that I amy going to demystify how you make a shot like this work, by using a remote camera.

For those who don’t know, a remote camera, is a camera which you place in a specific location ahead of an event that would not be accessible during the event, and is then triggered by a hard wire, or radio signal. The list of equipment I used to make this image is as follows.

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Digital SLR
Lens: Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM
Remote Trigger: Pocket Wizard (not pictured) and LPA Designs Pre-Release Cable CM-N3-P
Mounting Hardware: Ultra-Pod II
Protection: Kata E-702 GDC Elements Cover

Complete Setup: This is what the setup looked like when it was completely assembled. The camera and lens were mounted to the Ultra-Pod II and then inserted into the GDC Elements Cover. After everything was strapped down and the camera was protected from any flying mud or sudden rain showers, I used the left arm hole to attach the PocketWizard and the Pre-Release Cable to the camera and then cinched up all the other loose openings. You don’t have to use a rain cover or a remote cover, a clear plastic bag, a plastic cup, and some tape will do the same trick. I really do prefer rain covers as opposed to remote covers, so you can see to make any adjustments to exposure or focus without disturbing the entire setup.

Now comes the setup. Be prepared to get there early, some venues require you have the remote in place days before the event, while others will allow a remote to be placed hours before the event. It is also a good idea to make sure your liability insurance is up to date, because if someone or something trips over your remote and gets injured, you could be in some hot water. Once you have looked into all of the logistical details, its time to place the remote. It generally helps to have some working knowledge of the event or sport you are photographing, because you will have to anticipate everything happening long before it actually occurs. Since this was not my first time photographing a steeplechase or horse racing in general I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to see. With this in mind I chose a fence to place the remote under, and estimated the spot in the jump where most of the horses would come over. With these things in mind I had my assistant for the day, Cindy stand at that position in the jump so I could focus and frame the image up. Once everything was set, I taped all of the adjustment dials, focus rings, etc… on my camera in place so they wouldn’t move, made sure the whole setup was nice and tidy, and proceeded to make some test images of Cindy and I jumping around the frame to verify focal plane, and framing of the image. Once this was all done, it was time to go make some feature shots while waiting on the race to begin. *This is why it is important to use a pre-release cable, because it will keep your camera awake and ready to fire, so there is no delay firing the first frame when the time comes.* When the race began I decided to shoot from down the track with my 300mm f/2.8 and 1.4x converter, with the PocketWizard on the hot shoe of the camera, so I could have two angles of the shot, incase the remote didn’t work for some reason. Once the event is done with, you can go back to your remote, and collect your images and hope you got what you envisioned.

Tags: Camden, camera, carolina cup races, photograph, remote, SC, south carolina, steeplechase.