[chakalakasp]

Okay, gave it a look-over. Path Less Taken 15 is okay, HDR 4 is okay to use. Definitely don’t use HDR 5; I can’t protect you from Getty’s lawyers. 🙂

If you guys need high resolution versions (most likely you will), just give me a holler at digicana@gmail.com (or PM here, I changed my profile email addy so it should go through now).

Note that there is no property release for the HDR 4 shot, though I do have a release for the model. Not sure how picky your publisher is on such things.

[chakalakasp]

Hey, yeah, my email has changed. Gotta get that fixed. 🙂 Let me look back into the thread and see which pics exactly you guys are after — so long as none of them are being handled by an exclusive agency (Getty is a serious hardass with their contracts), I don’t mind contributing to the book. Will get back to with a yay or nay for each image.

[chakalakasp]

Basically, the new language says you retain the copyright (which is apparently inherant, as I’ve been told by a bajillion people that you can’t transfer copyright the way they were trying to do it before), but that FARK can do anything they want with your image, including use it in advertisments, sell it, put it in a FARK book, etc., without giving you any kind of payment or asking you for permissoin. As written, it’s pretty close to what’s known as a “copyright grab”. Though, honestly, if they actually tried to do that with any of my images, I’d end up in litigation with them, depsite the fact that I really love FARK and it’d kill me to do it. That’s the short version; I wrote a rather long dissection of it here.

[chakalakasp]

No, imageshack’s policy is much better:

All files are ? to their respective owners. ImageShack? directs full legal responsibility of files to their respective users. All other content ? ImageShack?. ImageShack? is not responsible for the content any uploaded files, nor is it in affiliation with any entities that may be represented in the uploaded files.

[chakalakasp]

Well technically, my understanding is that if you “turn a blind eye” to any copyright infringement, then you lose the right to pursue other instances of it. So says Disney at least 😉 Regardless, the FSM and Farktography.net don’t bother me either, but it’s another piece to the copyright issue. Anyway, I’ve emailed Drew a head’s up that this is an issue for Farktographers and PS’ers. I’d encourage you to do the same as well. I think if he understands the issues fully, he’s likely to work with us to come up with something that works for both Fark and contest folks.

I think that’s trademark infringement you’re thinking about. You do have to rather agressively defend your trademark if you want to keep it… it’s part of the law that grants trademarks. 🙂

I just saw today that Drew is taking this seriously, which is great, since it’ll help protect FARK better from here on out and also not attempt to violate submitters — everyone wins.

[chakalakasp]

I don’t mind the Farktography site and FSM gathering photos for editorial use. I guess if someone wanted to be a butt they could demand that their stuff stop being used in that manner, but I can’t imagine anyone being that dumb. 🙂 There are quite a few technical copyright violations out there that are only worth turning a blind eye to, either because the infringer has no money, or because the infringement actually kinda works like an advertisement. The copyright grab at FARK, however, is something entirely different, as it assigns FARK the new owner of the content.

I’m pretty sure the whole point of the copyright grab was NOT to do anything nefarious with our content, but rather to protect FARK from lawsuits and to give them more ammo when litigating against people ripping FARK off. I’ve had a few legal types contact me and suggest that, in all likelihood, FARK’s copyright language would not hold up in court. So Drew has a double reason to change it — his current legal language is not only extremely bad for content submitters, it’s also probably illegal and nonbinding — and thus leaves his site unprotected from the kinds of litigation he is trying to avoid.

[chakalakasp]

Wow — it’s pretty new to me! Hope it hasn’t been around for very long. Essentially, it doesn’t matter if Drew or anyone would never “claim ownership” — he doesn’t have to, as the legal page ALREADY claims ownership by default. This can interfere with more than just a spat between FARK and a photographer. If, for example, someone else steals a photo of mine that I’ve registered copyright, and I then sue that somebody, that somebody can now point to me posting that photo on FARK and claim that I’ve already given away the copyright and thus don’t have the right to sue — only FARK does. And they would be right.

[chakalakasp]

There are some great pano tutorials out there on the net if you Google, but if you don’t have a really great speacialty pano head for your tripod (these are expensive), the best advice is to use a telephoto lens and take photos of something faaaarrrrr away, while making sure that nothing near you ends up in the picture. Parallax errors are very minor at long distances, but are almost impossible to overcome (without a pano head) when you include near foreground elements.

[chakalakasp]

Agreed — get a dedicated slide scanner (Nikon is the best, but modern Canoscans are good too). Slide all your negs, then sell the scanner on Ebay. The scanners tend to have a very strong resale value, especially the Nikon gear.

[chakalakasp]

If anyone takes a cat picture, make sure lipstick is involved!

[chakalakasp]

Whoa, thanks Jim! 🙂 I have a feeling I won’t be on top for very long, though — the farktography threads never cease to surprise me with the kinds of shots farktographers come up with.

[chakalakasp]

I’d also be glad to be a link in the chain, if the camera’s not fully booked. 🙂 I would also be happy to mail it anywhere in the world, including to an international destination, so long as that destination is prepared to mail it to the next hop.

[chakalakasp]

Heh, this should be a weird one. I mean, most stitched photos are bigger than 700 px — we’re going to have a lot of link clicking to do! 🙂

[chakalakasp]

Man, it’s been too long since I read here! 🙂

Generally, it’s not possible to create a real “HDR” using just one RAW photograph. The reason for this is that a camera sensor is, in most instances, unable to capture all the dynamic range in a single scene. If the ground is well exposed, the sky is blown out. If the sky is well exposed, the ground is a shadow, etc. RAW will generally capture more dynamic range than is shown on the screen; however, it’s still nowhere near what most would consider HDR. This is why we generally take more than one photo at different exposure values and them merge them together.

The merged together file is encoded in 32bits, which is to say — the entire range of the exposure information captured by all three shots is there. However, this is way more range than our monitors can display. Think about it — the sun is so bright that when you look at it for too long in real life, it burns your retina. However, you can look at a picture of the sun on your monitor all day and not burn your retina. 🙂 So that end of the dynamic range is heavily clipped. With a properly shot HDR, though, the file itself contains the data that would tell a theoretical monitor capable of displaying the image correctly that the sun should be searing your eyeballs. It will also contain information saying how bright the tree in the forground should be. Of course, we then generally downsample the 32 bit file to 16 bits or 8 bits to properly display on our crappy normal monitors. 🙂 But because we are downsampling from all that information, we can retain and compress more detail into the range that the monitor can display.

With a RAW, however, if you shoot a picture exposed for the sun, everything else will be in shadow. The sensor will simply register the tree as a big black tree-shape, and will have no data on how bright the tree should be. Similarly, if you exposed for the tree, the sun would be a big white blown-out blob that took up half the sky. By exposing for the tree, the amount of light the sun puts on the sensor exceeds the sensor’s ability to measure, and as such is rendered as a blow-out.

So, no matter how much you ran tone-mapping features on a RAW file, you would never get real HDR output. You would also not get nearly as much information when you downsample to an 8 bit file, as that information was never captured by the camera to begin with.

You can definately get some interesting effects by putting a RAW file through Photomatix, but the image was never at any point HDR.

[chakalakasp]

Congrats to SaintDiluted for the awesome baseball shot! & let that be a lesson to everyone who thought I was a sure win this week — nobody’s a sure favorite for any contest. 🙂 I knew last week that I probably wouldn’t win this one, not because I didn’t have good entries, but because I knew that there are a whole lotta talented farktographers out there and that only a few of them have ever tried their hand at HDR… and that once they did, we’d all be surprised how awesome it looked.

BTW, BobRoberts — I really dug your entry this week. You have a habit of thinking outside of the box!

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