Category Archives: technical

Image copyright and the internet – a cautionary tale

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I’ve been looking at content delivery and security services for some of my websites lately, as these services can offer both faster delivery of web pages, and varying degrees of protection against hackers and unwanted ‘bots’. Many sites (large and small) use such services to enhance performance for their visitors, and in this respect, and the enhanced security, they are useful. I did however find a problem with one of the providers – they removed the image copyright data.

The importance of image copyright data

If you put your images on a website it is important for many (perhaps most) professional photographers that copyright information is embedded in the file, as without it there is no way of knowing who the photographer (or copyright owner) is. Without this information in the file, the image can easily become an ‘orphan’, and then lose copyright protection in an increasing number of legal jurisdictions. Other data can be embedded for other purposes – see the Embedded Metadata Manifesto.

For a professional photographer using the internet as a showcase it is important that the copyright information remains with the file, as an orphan file loses protection, and may be used with little or no payment to the photographer. Continue reading “Image copyright and the internet – a cautionary tale” »

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The ‘Rule of Thirds’ – a rule for lazy photographers

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The ‘rule of thirds’ is often quoted as a compositional rule that photographers should follow, and by ‘judges’ who really should know better if they are going to talk about composition!
It’s just a grossly over-simplified version of two other guidelines that artists have used as a starting point for centuries, and the original guidelines (not rules!) are more informative and not that much more difficult to put into practice.
Of course, being a lazy photographer, I’ve not bothered to put together a long post with examples … especially since someone else has already done it! … go visit the lazy rule of thirds by Jake Garn!

mike on Google+

monochrome photography

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I was asked this summer if I would give a talk on monochrome photography to my local camera club and agreed to do so. I gave the talk last Thursday … this is a slightly extended version of the content.

Background

I’ve been involved in photography for over twenty years, mostly monochrome photography, and used to have my own darkroom, as the darkroom was very much a part of getting the images I actually wanted. When I moved to Cheshire from Berkshire in 1999 I was unsure of whether I wanted to build another darkroom, and started experimenting with digital printing in 2000. This early start has played a part in the somewhat unusual collection of software that I use.  I’ll mention the various software packages I use at the end of this article, but this is principally about general issues in monochrome digital photography, not specific software.

monochrome photograph - steps up the beach

Silloth Steps

I’m primarily a landscape, floral, and ‘fine art’ photographer, not a people, portrait, action, or documentary photographer, so my views and approach definitely won’t cover everything! (I did shoot one wedding for a friend … while the bride and groom were happy with the results, I am definitely not open to requests from anyone else!)

Setting up

There are three basic tools involved in photography – camera (including lenses) for image capture, monitor (and computer) for processing, and printer for output.
Continue reading “monochrome photography” »

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Structuring your website content for search engines

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I’ve reviewed the structure of a few websites for friends recently and found some common errors with respect to optimisation for search engines. This article attempts to describe some simple things you can do that will help search engines determine what your website is about.

Which are the important pieces of text?

Search engines like pages that are well structured, and HTML was designed from the start to support well structured pages, with a title for the page, and then hierarchical headings within the content. Proper use of these helps search engines to more easily categorise a page. They also make it much easier for human readers to scan through a page for the parts that interest them.

The other thing that every page has is a ‘name’ – that is, a url. Names are important in the real world, and urls are just as important online. Continue reading “Structuring your website content for search engines” »

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