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Photography and model-release laws in the UK

The rights of a photographer according to the law of the United Kingdom:

1. The photographer owns the copyright of any photo s/he has taken, with the exception of photos taken as an employee of a company for his or her employer, or under instruction from an employer or employee of a company;
2. A picture of an individual or individuals may be taken from any public area and/or in any situation where the subject(s) may reasonably expect to be observed, or from any private premises unless permission is expressly denied beforehand, or where instruction is otherwise reasonably signposted;
3. A photographer does not require a model release for commercial use of photographs in which the subject’s face is not clearly visible and/or recognizable.

Photographers have more rights than you might expect. Visit this site for more information.

In addition to the main laws that I have outlined above, interfering with your equipment is criminal damage.

My Ibanez (8 of 365)

Today we play with depth of field and the focusing settings.

A loose definition of the depth of a photo is the amount of the photo that is in focus. If everything is in focus, the photo is said to have a ‘deep’ depth of field. If a particular subject is in focus and the rest is not, the photo has a ’shallow’ depth of field.

Ever since I have started to get into photography proper I have adored depth of field - I love the way that it can be used to guide the viewer’s eye, or focus his or her attention. On my old point-and-shoot camera, I discovered that I could get a very shallow depth of field by using the macro setting. On my new EOS 400D SLR, however, it works a little differently.

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My Project 365

To be able to visually re-live every day of a year; to better your photography day by day; to document your growth both physically, cosmetically and mentally - this is Project 365.

An article on photography newsletter/blog website Photojojo has inspired me to be a part of this project. And I suggest that all other budding photographers, bloggers, and even anyone who owns a digital camera should join me.

Seven good reasons to start your own Project 365:

1. You will have a visual diary to remind you of any day for a particular year;
2. By looking back on what you have chosen to photograph, you will learn to monitor yourself, prioritize, and figure out what is important to you as a person;
3. You will become a better photographer as you learn your camera and start to care about composition, lighting, technique and so on;
4. You will get into the habit of taking your camera everywhere with you (you never know what will crop up for you to photograph!);
5. You will develop an eye for details and your creativity will soar as you are forced to find inspiration in everyday objects;
6. You will learn to appreciate the details of the world around you (think of it as reaching a state of enlightenment!);
7. You will have a visual story to look back on in years to come (especially if you choose to annotate your pictures);

There are more, of course; you just have to think them up. Try taking a look at Taylor McKnight’s Project 365 from 2006 for inspiration.

My Project 365 will be hosted on orangeacid.net in the Projects section. I will put a daily update on the homepage too, if I can figure out how.

Homemade photo-frames from jewel cases

In their first ever video-tutorial, Photojojo detail how to create very stylish and modern-looking photo-frames from CD jewel-cases.  For this project you’ll need jewel cases, some cardboard, a craft knife (or sharp scissors), double-sided sticky tape (or glue), and Velcro (or blu-tack).

Despite my general laziness I am actually quite into these little creative projects… for instance, my room has been turned into my own personal gallery.

Photojojo is a great site to scour for creative photography tips and tricks, although it does tend to lean towards novel ways to display photographs, photography products, that sort of thing.

Photojojo article, Via Lifehacker

Your bedroom walls: your own personal gallery

You have loads of great photos that you want to show off to your friends and visitors to your house, right? And there’s a big, naked area of wall in your room screaming for dignity? Kill two birds with one stone and turn your room into a makeshift gallery.

I have written a quick recipe, based on what I did - feel free to change elements if you’re going to implement this yourself.

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Rediscovering Photoshop, Pt. I

I take a lot of photos - between 5 and 15 on an average day, up to perhaps 50 if I get carried away. When I’ve got a focus (at a gig, or on a day trip perhaps), I’ll take something between 70 and 150 photos. Though I love photography and improving photos, I will invariably have scarce enough time to do my GCSE coursework, attend band practices and guitar lessons and see my girlfriend, let alone photoshop 100 images.

Because of my lack of time (and perhaps also a degree of lazyness), I turn to a program called Picasa to help me edit my photos.

Picasa is great because it fits it’s purpose perfectly. It isn’t made for graphic designers - it is a photography tool. It is both a highly usable image organizer - without which I would not be able to find most of my photos - and an image optimizer in one. Graphic designers will be turned off by it’s lack of selection tools, text tools… even a brush tool.

However, for the more artistic and adventurous photographer, there are a few effects built in. Picasa basically contains the most useful features of a photo editing suite, and cuts out the less commonly used stuff - tools to crop, straighten, remove red-eye, brighten, sharpen, (de)saturate, and adjust shadow and highlight levels are provided, excluding the very neat ‘I’m feeling lucky’ one-click fix for pretty much everything. There are also some other neat effects such as blurs, glows and focal black and white - the picture to the right is a good example of what can be done.

Picasa isn’t the holy grail of digital photography, though - there are few people in the world of IT who haven’t heard more than a faint whisper of Photoshop, the industry standard in photo editing. I started using photoshop a while back for adding an effect called vignetting. Notice the darkened corners around this image? It’s useful to give your photos a professional feel and to draw the viewer’s attention to the subject.

For a time I disregarded Photoshop, considering it a tool purely for those who enjoy manipulating images, creating blends and banners, that sort of thing. I did this myself for a while - my poorly done and inexplicably popular pink phonebox on Flickr is testament to this. But now I have started to use it again…

I have discovered some useful features in photoshop, such as HDR and the ability to fine-tune certain colours. The picture of the taxis below is the first in a series of images that I have used to experiment with Photoshop. This picture features heavy vignetting and also the slight de-saturation of every colour except yellow.

Those of you who are becoming interested in digital photography may be interested to know that I managed to get this focusing effect by using a small aperture of f2.6. Anyway, more photoshop goodness coming soon…