Photo Usage

Going to start blogging the places that my photos turn up. Not going to go back and list all the previous uses, but here are some recent/interesting ones. It is amazing where your photos end up when you give them away for free.

• A German Personalised Calendar
• A Menu on a Yacht
• An article about tomato fighting
• A horror DVD cover
• A CD Cover
• A gadget website
  

Photo Blog #2

Shot some fabric close-ups for Time To Change Fabrics. Good fun, lots of great colours, tartan seemed to come out the best.

Then used some great red fleece I got from the site as a backdrop for my first attempt and some Christmas stock shots. Nothing great yet, just experimenting with the setup of the background, lights etc. This one shows the fabric works well, even my if control of DOF wasn't all that great. I'll have another go later in the week.

Photo Blog #1

Had a couple of hours in Edinburgh yesterday to run around with the camera. It was generally too bright ( between 2pm - 4pm ) so it wasn't very good light at all. That combined with there being lots of people about made it quite tricky. Was up Calton Hill and got some OK cityscape type shots of Leith like:

Favourite shot of the day was probably this one taken from near the top of the High Street, lots of interesting colour:

The closes of the High Street were quite tricky, there is only a very short time when the sun hits them at the right angle and I don't think I was there for any of them. I liked this one though, hopefully get this on the front cover of Iain Rankin's new book 'Rebus and the Killer Pigeon'

Note: full size versions of most blog images can be accessed on Morguefile (if they are links).

Magic Moments

At the risk of going a bit 'listy'.
I was listening to 'The Last Goodbye' by Jeff Buckley the other day and as ever, particularly enjoyed the bit in the song where he sings "Did you say no, this cant happen to me" and it got me thinking, what the individual moments in songs that I like. So, I'm going to use this post to record them all as I think of them. I encourage my reader to add his too.
So here goes:

1. "Did you say no, this can't happen to me" - Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley
2. The very start of the first chorus - Long Distance, Turin Brakes
3. The quiet bit just before "installed by the machine" (then the synths come up with an 80's-tastic retro hit) - P-Machinery - Propaganda
4. "it's gonna be a glorious day." - Lucky - Radiohead
5. "Lick my legs of desire." - Rid Of Me - PJ Harvey
6. "You're not alone" - Rock and Roll Suicide - David Bowie
7. "Wap wap wap waaaahhhh!" - Henrietta - The Fratellis
8. The key change just before the end - Good Thing - The Woodentops
9. "And you could have it all, my empire of dirt" - Hurt - the Johnny Cash version
10. When the bass joins in - Two Tribes - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
11. Right at the end of the choral bit - America, What Time is Love - The KLF
12. "Waiting my whole life for just one...Day...." - Add It Up - The Violent Femmes
    

I can hear Stuart scoffing now...

Lick my legs I'm on fire

Have you ever looked into the eyes of sheep?
They seem to know more than you would expect.
This one knows, you can tell.


"Blogging the Ionesco way."

Way Back When

Back in the early/mid nineties I first hit on the somewhat entertaining notion that I should write a book. I honestly can't say what first gave me this notion, but whatever is what was, I still have it now.
My one blog reader will now that that first attempt at a novel was called "Orion's Belt". A simple tale of love and death (although I never made it as far as the death part). I only made it about 25000 words in before I gave up, I think I lost where the plot was going or lost belief in the story. Could also be because I was trying to combine the comic sensibilities of Douglas Adams with a Zola-esque darkness in plot. Never going to work. (Although I tried to do exactly the same thing in the book I actually finished!) Funny thing is, reading it back now, there are parts of it that still stand up pretty well (to my biased an untrained eye at least).
In the spirit of the intent to blog stuff that wouldn't otherwise see the light of day, here is the beginning of Chapter 6 (in which the central character encounters the girl he loves from afar when the hubcap of her car flies off and hits him). Probably not all that original, but I like still it. So there.

( and to continue and previous theme, read Gleicks book on Chaos too )

Many things in life are unpredictable in some way or other. The only thing that I have found that can’t be predicted with any degree of accuracy is the noise you make after you sneeze. And it’s not just me, I’ve seen it happen to other people too. A quite harmless sneeze suddenly turns into an outburst close to a new form of expletive.

It is difficult to find many examples of true randomness. Even with something as sophisticated as a computer randomness can only be achieved by taking a snapshot of a known state. There appear to be reasons for most things and that is why I always look for a reason for everything. The safe waters of unpredictability like weather and heart attacks have recently been muddied by the introduction of the aptly named Chaos theory. I’m sure that scientists would argue that, despite most of the physical world being deterministic in some sense, at a quantum level nothing can ever be predicted. Until the day he died Einstein never believed this and neither do I. Not because I understand it but simply because I believe in order, I believe in reason, I don’t believe in coincidence and above all I don’t believe in God.

Coincidence I’m sure can be proved. There is a well documented theory that states that given the number of people in the world there is statistically a very good chance that somewhere in the world at a given time something quite unbelievably coincidental is happening to someone. A man is walking up to a complete stranger in the street and guessing his phone number. It’s no fluke, it’s just probability. That doesn’t mean that it’s not totally freaky when it happens to you.

Gadget-tastic

Finally got round to playing with my latest gadget, a USB turntable (which I got all the way back on Father's Day). Very easy to get up and running.
The first album to get the digital encoding treatment was Virgins and Philistines by the Colourfield. It worked really well, and now I can finally listen to The Hammond Song again. Now to track down all the vinyl that I haven't already bought on CD. I'm off up into the loft.

Fine Man

It strikes me that this blog thing lacks a theme and therefore lacks a natural audience, or indeed, any potential audience at all.
Therefore, in lieu of any emerging theme, I'm going to introduce a general 'stuff wot I like' vibe.

And what better place to start than to than to talk briefly about Richard Feynman. I'm not one for having heroes, but if I did, he would be one. A brilliant physicist, wonderfully entertaining and not a bad bongo player either. I won't cheat by regurgitating other content here. If you've never heard of Feynman then I urge you to pour over the excellent Wikipedia entry before moving on to James Gleick's excellent biography Genius. Then, for the final fling, grab any one of Feynman's excellent books.

I now have all his lectures on MP3, I'll give you and update when I have listening to them!

Website of the Day:
MorgueFile - the best photo site and home to many of my photos, all free to download.
Track of the Day:
I'm going to go for something by Seu Jorge from the Life Aquatic Sessions, any one will do.

Lost Bits

Trawling around my PC, I've found lots of scribbles, notes and nonsense that were at some stage meant to appear in something more complete. It struck me that I may as well put some of them here, doubt they would ever see the light of day otherwise.
This was the opening paragraph from an idea for a book about writing a book...

What happens when you put pen to paper or type a letter on the screen? Do the letters and words appear? Can you see them? Well, yes. But what is it you see? It’s not the letters themselves. It’s the shape of the paper or screen around the dark area of the text: the ink stopping light being reflected from the paper. It still reflects from the paper around it and you see the shape of the area that doesn’t reflect the light. The light that is reflected to form the final words is already there. All the words already exist. You just have to find them.

I can see why I gave up on that, its like Abbott and Costello doing some sort of physics based routine. I can see what I was trying to say, but jeez, didn't half make a meal of it.

Website of the Day:
SimplyExplained as a tribute to my wife who has already destroyed my points total in under a week, sheepishly, he retreats from the room, a broken man.
Track of the Day:
Tonight, the big randomizer chose Frightened by The Fall, it has to be the choice. It really is rather special. Although, I'm glad to report that there doesn't appear to be anyone on my tracks currently.
Perhaps not a populist choice but it will keep Stuart happy and, after all, everyone likes a quiet life.

Some thoughts on the stock photo business

This is a post I submitted to the MicroStockPix forums. Seemed worthwhile to replay it here.

Have you ever asked yourself “What is a stock site?”. Let’s break it down to the basics. It’s a website that sells stuff. It has no supply chain issues and pays simple, minimal commission to its suppliers. What does it do for the money it makes? It provides infrastructure and marketing and a pricing mechanism that is attractive to the end customers. Stock sites would argue, for the sake of their own valuation as a company, that they have a massive asset of, in a few cases, over 1 million high quality images. They achieve this massive asset through the assent of several thousand high quality photographers who benefit from the easy-access market place to sell their skills in. This is simply a big numbers games. No one photographer could attract enough traffic on their own to sell enough of their own stuff independently. The many serve the needs of the few.Imagine, if you will, an alternative model. A stock site owned and run by the photographers themselves. If you took the top, say, 100, 500 (more?) stock photographers and got them to collaborate you could take a huge number of high quality images into the birth of a new site. (now, I know that this is starting to sound fanciful but bear with me, it’ll be fun at least). Assuming you could get all these prima-donnas to agree, the costs of setting up the necessary web infrastructure is not prohibitive at all, storage and bandwidth and getting cheaper by the minute. Marketing is easy. The exodus of photographers and images from all the other sites would sell itself.
First of all, there would be no reviewing, if you're in, you're in, it could self-police quite well.OK, so how do you share the wealth? Well, first of all, you could probably make the prices a little higher. One exclusive archive means that all the individual sites no longer need to compete on price (of course, you won’t get all the photographers so you’d have to make sure you get all the good ones!). But, here’s the thing, rather than get paid a mere commission per image, each photographer would get paid a pro rata share of profit based on their contribution to sales. Its that simple. OK, before you say “hang on, but I make commission from 8 different sites, how can that be the same”, you miss the point. An exclusive archive is worth a lot of money, look how much stock sites are going for and they don’t even own the images! The idea is that you sell the whole lot as quick as possible to another competitor, again the money going pro rata to the photographers. 500 photographers, sell the lot for $10M?Then you just do it all again! OK, its maybe a little silly, but the fact is that stock sites do very little for what they get and what they are worth. You could never organise such a collaboration but if you would it would be very powerful. Never think that stock sites do us a favour, without us they have nothing. Literally, nothing.

Random Poem #1

Nothing rhymes with anything
But nothing rhymes with orange
So orange rhymes with anything
And everything rhymes with orange

Wigs

Really. What is the point of wigs?
Here's an idea. When someone goes to buy a wig, give them counselling instead.
Poor misguided buffoons.

The Butterfly Effect

"Yeah, we know, chaos and that."
Well no. This is a different one. Although not without an element of chaos.
This butterfly effect is all about flitting from flower to flower. And is the perfect analogy for what I have to fight against most. In short, I try to do too many things and ultimately have a challenge finishing. Despite this, I do get a lot done but in the limited spare time I have, its always easier to move on the next flower.
Not that I necessarily have the attention span of a gnat (to extend the insect thing a little too far). Those who most likely to read this know that I finished a novel of nearly 80,000 words. No small feat in itself. But, despite being 'finished' in one sense, it is far from complete and needs quite a bit of work. Work that I can't seem to find the gumption to do. This blog is, in itself, just another flower for the butterfly to flit to.
Thing is, I know the problem and can generally deal with it pretty well. My list of deliverables for this week is going pretty well, although tonight could have been better employed. I am tough on myself though, I do work all day, pretty much every day, so keeping up a nighttime work regime isn't easy, especially when there's football on.
Still, I'm pressing on with things and the book, as decidedly average as it is well need to stay unedited for a while yet.
Thing is, I started laying out the plot for a new one last night. The current working title is "20 Questions" and its panning out quite well so far.
"Oh look! A pretty flower..."

Website of the Day:
www.wikipedia.org (its just plain great)

Track of the Night:
Farmyard Connection - Fun Boy Three (its just plain great and I really should have the 12" single all those years ago)

Athletic? Moi?

Friday. "Dress down" day.
Only one thought. Why do they make men's clothes with the word 'Athletic' on them in XXL+ sizes?