Storytelling and the value of context…
5 minute read
February 24, 2021, 6:40 PM
Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about how my photography tends to present itself in the various places that I post my work. This is on the occasion of a nearly yearlong backlog of photography that is sitting in my queue just waiting to be published. In other words, this is why there haven’t been any Photography or Life and Times sets published from 2020 as of yet (they’re coming, I promise). 2020 was a banner year for me as far as photography went, as I was more productive in that year than I have been for the last several years. I’ve just not gotten much of it out the door, with only a relatively small amount’s being published as the photo feature on the front of the website, as well as in the Journal. The rest of it is still waiting to be published.
The reason for the delay in publication is because of a giant Flickr project that I’ve been working on since around April or so. What I want to do is to use my Flickr as my main photo library, i.e. most stuff that I publish goes on Flickr. The ultimate goal with this project was to take everything that I had previously published on Wikimedia Commons and ensure that it was duplicated on my Flickr. I called it “putting Wikimedia Commons behind me”, because I’m essentially moving on from the platform, and making it where I never have to refer back to it again. But I didn’t just do a straight sweep of Flickr and copy it all over. That would be too easy, and if I’m publishing something on a new venue, I want it to look good by my current standards. Thus I go in and locate the original photos in my archive and process them according to my current techniques as if they’re new material. Sometimes the cut is a little different, and sometimes the lighting comes out a little differently than before, but I think that it’s a much better end result. Recall that I did the same thing when I converted Schumin Web to WordPress back in 2011-2012. I went back and reprocessed all of the photos from the originals, and they looked awesome.
This situation was made a tad more complicated by the way I did things back in 2013 when I first started getting serious about my Flickr. In that case, I went through things from the beginning, but I was very conservative about what older material I published to Flickr. I didn’t publish a lot of older material when I did that initial upload. Who knows why. So for this project, I did two waves. The first was a second dive through the archives up to 2013, looking for stuff that was worth publishing as a standalone work. That took several months to do, and resulted in about 17 pages’ worth of new uploads to Flickr. Some of that was stuff that had previously been published other places, and a lot of it was new. I figured that I would catch most of the stuff that was on Wikimedia Commons that way. While I did catch quite a bit of it, I knew that I wouldn’t catch all of it. Thus my second wave was to sweep through my contributions to Commons directly, and catch everything that I’d missed. I figured that I would probably catch about 100 photos and put them up on Flickr. Oh, how wrong I was. When I finished my sweep, I ended up having 528 all together. Made me think of Strong Bad when his computer got a virus, and he said, “That is not a small number! That is a big number!” I located all of them, edited all of them based on my current standards, and now I’m in the process of uploading them all. Thankfully, the process has gone fairly smoothly.
Continue reading…Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta
I could have told you that was going to happen…
6 minute read
February 14, 2021, 4:48 PM
So the story of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment has come to an end. And it ended exactly as I predicted, with Trump’s being acquitted by a comfortable margin. While a majority of senators did vote to convict, it did not reach the two-thirds majority (i.e. 67 votes) required to remove. I am always a little bit amused to see people watch the whole process, including the chatter from the various senators involved telling the media how they are going to vote, and then act all surprised when a conviction does not happen. Truth is that a conviction was never going to happen. The Democrats didn’t have enough votes to convict without substantial Republican support, and they knew that going into this.
And to this I say, sometimes, I hate being right. I admit that I was rooting for a conviction on this, even though I knew it didn’t have a snowball’s chance of ever happening (hey, one can hope). But I also stand by what I said in my earlier post that an impeachment was unnecessary. With Trump’s having fewer than two weeks left in his term when the triggering event occurred, it would have made enough sense to just wait it out and let the prosecutors have at him as soon as he left office. As it happened, the entire impeachment charade was a moot point, because Trump was already out of office. The whole thing also showed me that the Democrats under Pelosi seem to be extremely petty, and it has lent some credence to the idea that they were simply out to get Trump, throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. This was their second attempt at removing Trump from office within the span of a year, after all. Practically speaking, you really only get one shot at impeachment, because after that, you start to sound like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, and shoot your own credibility with every subsequent attempt.
In addition, this whole impeachment charade has cost us much in terms of legislative time wasted in both chambers for political games. There are people who are hurting pretty badly right now due to the economic effects of the pandemic, and the time spent impeaching and then trying Trump could have been spent working on economic stimulus packages and other measures to help people survive until things turn around. After all, let’s be honest: politically, Trump is old news. He’s no longer the president, and as such, he is no longer relevant as far as current politics goes, and as such, Congress has more important matters to attend to than to worry about getting revenge on him.
Categories: National politics
Some people just don’t learn…
9 minute read
February 7, 2021, 10:20 PM
Do you remember Marilyn Armstrong, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago regarding a case of copyright infringement? She came back for a second round. Apparently, she found my Journal entry, and just couldn’t leave well enough alone, going on another rant in the comments:
First of all, NO ONE intentionally took anything. This appeared in a pile of pictures listed by Google as “free for public use.” No name or other information was attached. I didn’t write the piece, I didn’t post the picture and if I want a picture, I use my own since I am also a photographer. One of the people who writes on this blog was just looking for a picture of a building with an orange roof and it came up in that Google collection. I don’t know how ANYONE can figure out whose picture it is when there’s no attached information AND it did not come from your site. I already said I was sorry, that it was accidental, unintentional, non-commercial. Beyond that, you really might consider embedding copyright information in your pictures so people have some way of knowing that the picture is NOT — as Google said — free for public use.
Since I didn’t select OR use the picture personally, and since GOOGLE was the organization that pulled it off your blog and stuck it in a pile of “free for public use” pictures, maybe you should consider going after them. Someone ought to, but they have a lot of money and a lot of lawyers and if the U.S. government can’t get them, I’m pretty sure you can’t and I can’t, so they’ll just keep doing what they do and people like me will get blamed for assuming that they aren’t lying.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Some people