Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Social media platforms seem to change their image sizes pretty much every time you login. And every time that happens, photographers everywhere have to scour the internet searching for the new sizes. You just know that facebook is going to CRASH your photo if you don’t feed it the exact right size.
Well, here’s some good news: Mainstreethost blog already did the leg work for you.
Chances are that in the time it took you to read this sentence, a photographer (or ten) was asked if his photos can be used for free.
This happens all the time and has gotten to the point where it doesn’t faze most people, but when a company valued at over $30 billion asks a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer if they can use his photos in exchange for credit, you know you’ve hit rock bottom.
Keep reading to view the correspondence between award winning photographer David Carson and a Twitter account belonging to CBS.
I have been working on ways to automate some of my social media and blogging activity over the last little while and one of the super useful tools I’ve been using is IFTTT (If This Then That).
However, browsing the recipes on IFTTT I have realized how redonkulously easy it is to fully automate the theft of photography from social media.
It’s so easy its crazy – which leads me to my second thought:
How can it possibly be this easy to automate the theft of copyrighted creative content from social media without the permission or knowledge of the content’s owners!?
Or, in other words – why don’t social media networks give a flying fudge-nugget about copyright???
By now we should all know that taking someone’s photo and uploading it to social media is not cool (and not legal either). But what happens when you retweet or pin or share a photo that someone else stole? An interesting case now presented to the courts of California may change how easily you retweet photos forever.
California based photographer Dennis Flaherty is suing beverage company Big Red Soda for allegedly posting one of his photos to social media without his permission. Nothing new here. If this is indeed the case, Dennis would probably have a walk in the park in court. What’s more interesting is that Dennis is also suing every single person who retweeted or pinned the photo.
Sometimes ranting about things works. On Friday, Jared Polin of FroKnowsPhoto posted a rant in which he expressed his frustration with Live Nation about their policy of not paying photographers for their work while retaining the rights to the images.
After replying to a job ad looking for photographers to cover the opening of their new Ascend Amphitheater, Polin was informed that the position “is a great opportunity to build a portfolio.” In response, Polin made a video as an open letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. In his original bog post, Jared urged readers to “share this out with the world and lets make Michael Rapino hear that he needs to make a change inside his company and #RespectPhotographers.” And, apparently, it worked.
We’ve seen this before; hunters kill helpless animals and then hurry to have a photo taken with their ‘trophy’. Sometimes an unlucky hunter’s photo gets shared enough that it gains the internet’s attention and all hell breaks loose.
The bigger and more endangered the animal, the more respected these hunters are among their scumbag peers; but the criticism and hate messages they receive increase as well.
Keeping that in mind, imagine what happened when Chris Tilly jokingly posted a photo of Steven Spielberg next to a triceratops prop and blamed him for killing the ‘defenceless animal’.
‘Trophy hunters’ get a kick out of killing the largest and rarest animals they can find, and no trophy kill is complete until the hunter gets the traditional photo next to the dead animal.
Unsurprisingly this behavior, and proudly sharing the photo of the event, leads to ongoing protesting, name calling and furious responses by those opposed to this kind of “sport”.
Every once in a while a specific photo goes viral and sparks a heated debate between hunting fans and wildlife/animal welfare advocates. This time it was a photo of the former winner of the “Extreme Huntress” show, Rebecca Francis, after comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted a photo of the huntress with the African gentle giant.
One of the reasons the photo went viral was Francis’ unusual pose with the kill – she lay on the ground smiling alongside the giraffe.
The photo has since been retweeted over 23,000 times and made headlines worldwide, but the huntress claims she killed him in order to “honor his life”.
Over the past month, the events taking place in Ferguson have become a significant catalyst for rising tensions between the public and the media. With the emotional responses that issues of racism trigger across the political spectrum coupled with the response to police brutality that we’re already so familiar with, there’s an unsettling amount of conflict for the journalists and photographers involved.
Just recently, that crossfire hit 30-year-old freelance photographer Leo York, who was present in Ferguson during the riots. An Al Jazeera writer posted an article discussing his contempt for the media’s reaction to the events, and mentioned how an unnamed reporter asked him if he could take a picture of him and Anderson Cooper. That same reporter also mentioned how he was there for the “networking opportunities”.
“One reporter who, last night, said he came to Ferguson as a ‘networking opportunity.’ He later asked me to take a picture of him with Anderson Cooper.”
– From Ryan Schuessler’s original article on Al Jazeera
After the post went viral, grabbing attention from multiple online blogs, Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter posted an article asking readers to find out who the people being referred to in the post were since the Al Jazeera writer, Ryan Schuessler, wouldn’t give out any names. Eventually, a few readers managed to deliver on the request, finding pictures of Leo York posing with Anderson Cooper on the former’s personal Twitter account.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
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