Anyone bored at work today, which will be most people, as well as EVERYONE ELSE, should go and watch this now:
[LAFKON] – A movie about Trusted Computing.
Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’m impoverished and working hard to buy bread.
Seriously.
Hah! Mission accomplished.
Update your site Den, go on. Bloody hell, update it man.
Well that would have contradicted one of my new years resolutions. No posts in January. Well by Jove, dagnammit and whopsie, I managed.
Why ? Err, that’d be telling, but at least now I can breathe a sigh of relief and start spouting.
Notice, please, that there HAVE been two photos (or three?) updated during the silence, so perhaps it would actually be best for me to shut up and just post photos. No comments, please.
There are about 3,244 more photos to come but lets be honest, my gallery is waaaaaay not capable of handling that and, yes, if you look through the archives I’ve been saying I’m re-writing my gallery for at least as long as I’ve had one. I’m not promising anything this time because I’ve realised that it never pans out. Just watch out for changes, because yes, eventually, they’ll come. Like bigfoot though if you’re not careful you’ll miss him completely or, worse, get a really shoddy photograph of him disappearing over a hill.
Did I mention that I haven’t gained any weight?
After a period of offline-ness the contact form is back online. Why you ask? Well we had a bit of a tantrum and it turned out that due to a multipart message exploit some dirty spammer was using my oh-so-innocent contactform to send out crap.
It’s not all my fault! I’d simply used the “WordPress Contactform” plugin, which doesn’t take care of this.
Bit of fiddling later and *bam*, now it’s (hopefully) resistant to that kinda of foul play. I should probably inform the author of the plugin but I’ll do that later under the Sozu banner.
What are you waiting for? Contact Denyerec!
Ahhh, Christmas. Contrary to popular commercial belief it’s not been and gone yet, it is in fact still over 10 days away! 10 whole days to do some headless chicken impersonations in the town centre looking for presents for Coley and my folks.
Anyone out there want to buy me:
* A Nikon D200
* A Nikon MB-D200
* A Nikon DK-21M
No? Didn’t think so…
Bah Humbug!
Picked this link up on a quake forum (Yes, Quake…) and blow me, it’s some impressive if slightly talent on display. You’d think that’s all the internet was good for…
Crazy Paper Folding Skills.
Admittedly it’s more cutty-cutty- gluey-gluey, but I don’t know what you call that. Papercraft? Anyway, go look, it’s awesome.
Someone mentioned to me a while back about some guy developing a camera that could refocus images after the exposure had been made, using “Some gizmo containing loads of lenses”, or words to that effect.
Well, here’s Ren Ng’s Standford website about just such a development, a Lightfield Camera.
The maths is heavy, but the basic principle is fairly understandable and the videos on the website are illuustrative. Don’t expect this stuff to be creeping into compact cameras anytime in the next few years, but it’s certainly a very interesting development.
This short film is about the atrocities conducted by the invading army of the US in Iraq, specifically Fallujah. The only weapons of mass destruction in that country were the ones the yanks took with them.
Admittedly, these days I could be arrested and detained indefinately for saying stuff like this, such is the world we’re living in.
I just wonder how this is going to play out. M.A.D ? A tyranical American super-state a-la Adolph’s original vision? It doesn’t smell good to me, not good at all.
Atrocities in Fallujah, Iraq
Note: Please be aware this clip contains graphic images, and may shatter any illusion you were clinging to about the US being leaders of world peace and liberty.
More on the BBC about US Use of Chemical Weapons.
I stumbled across another stock photography site today called Dreamstime or something. Didn’t give it a thorough workout but I noticed that they’re flogging high-res stock images for 77 US Cents.
77 US Cents.
Gah. You know the issue is so tired with me I can’t even find the energy to rant about it. People say “You may as well put photos up on a site and get 30 cents per download off it” using the arguement that “You wouldn’t make money off it anyway, so why not?”
The “Why not” to me is painfully simple. Good images are simply worth more than that. Equipment, time, travel, expenses and gosh-darn, bloody **experience**. To see people throwing good images that have cost them to produce onto sites like this just makes me sad. Will there come a point in the future where there won’t be any such thing as a professionally produced image, because people have become too accustomed to paying $0.77 for a photo? I’ve had experiences in the past of people asking “How much?” and when they’re told they go crazy with things like “Why should you charge that when I can get photo’s off the ‘net for a dollar?” (Or worse, steal them from Google images…)
It seems to me as if there’s 3 broad categories of people who upload stock to these sites. Either they were never going to make a penny off their casual shots, so they’re giving it a go to see what they can make. Then you have the people who don’t value their work and think that $1 per copy is “all they can hope for” because they’ve been beaten into submission by a market demanding stupid cheap prices for quality work. Finally you have the people who treat it like a full-on enterprise. They’re Pumping thousands of images into the database using napalm tactics to ensure that they get a reasnoble financial reward, even if they’ve put in far more work than the cash value they’re getting out.
Why should I even care? I’m trapped in a moral (?) dilemma of sorts. I’m broke, I could use the money, but do I really want to sell out my artwork for a lousy 50p a shot? I could literally make far more working in McDonalds and wouldn’t have to stress about technique, location, new material, ideas, equipment, insurance… The list goes on.
Maybe I’ve just got the wrong mindset, perhaps it is all well and good, it’s a sensible way for photographers to make money etc etc yadda yadda. I just can’t feel it though, giving away your creativity for 50p a time. ..
People pay more for a king-size Snikers bar.
