So, I finished one of the projects I started whilst off.
As with ever with me these things are rarely absolutely 'complete', but it's in a good state where everyone else will accept that it is finished, and I can return to fiddle with it in due course once other more prioritous matters have been addressed.
And I'm happy with it. It is an art installation. Well, I think it is art, and therefore it is . What I did was sit down with my laptop and scour through my many many photos, select a few hundred, print them off and stick them on the wall that rises with the staircase.
My pictures, my wall, my project, my installation, my art. All my own work.
Obviously I had the computer 'size' the photos according to my direction. I told it whether I wanted 2, 4 or 9 pictures per sheet and it did the rest to ensure they were all the same size. Well, sort of.
Oh, and I selected black-and-white printing. Well, it's art, isn't it. Whilst colour would have looked lovely and bright, it could have looked a mess and confusing. And whereas black and white compromises the colour element it accentuates the contrast. But mostly with it all being black and white it makes it all the more striking.
With black and white, though, you can't just click black-and-white and be done. Each photo needs adjusting. Those very, very grey scenes often need the brightness toning down and the contrast increasing to pick out the differences in the immense amount of grey. Whereas with those that are very starkly black or white, they can often require the opposite so that delecate nuances can be picked out and don't get over-powered.
So I tinkered with the brightness and contrast ratios, and the white and black points (the points where a very light grey becomes a white or dark grey becomes a black).
But they are my photos, obviously.
Just like the ones from New York which formed my Christmas cards for the family a year ago. I took some lovely photos, cropped them down, resized them appropriated, greyscaled them and then overlaid a colour picking out certain aspects of the photos...
Lovely. And mine.
But I didn't actually recolour the photo. It took half a dozen clicks and a few hertz of processing power. And a hell of a lot of skill by the software manufacturer.
But I had still taken the photo, still made the decision to make the adjustments. So, does the photo-journalist lose any credit where the editor makes the decision to crop the image, or to print it black and white?
A few years ago there was a bit of a storm in a teacup regarding some Reuters photo-journalists who had digitally manipulated their images, adding people into scenarios where they weren't; reducing the real distances between people and conflicts or merging two scenes to enhance the dramatic effect. They weren't accused of losing control over their own images, but of misleading the audience. But they had still taken both of the photos which they had merged, they made the decision, so they retained ownership in both the originals and the composite.
And it will obviously be clear that where someone scours the internet and stumbles across a photo of me on holiday and puts Brad Pitt's head on my body, they have no ownership of my photo. But, despite having taken neither of the photos, they would almost certainly have ownership of the composite. Useless ownership: they wouldn't be able to exploit it without the permission of myself and whoever took Brad Pitts's photo, but they have made the creative decision to put them together.
And it's a lazy creativity. They have expended no skill or effort, over a couple of clicks or so. Certainly not the same skill as someone who were to find my image on the net and paint a portrait of me from it.
But where do we 'lose' our ownership? At what point does ownership pass to the software or some other party? I will go into a full "Copyright and Moral Rights" legal definition at some time in the future. However in the meantime consider...
There was a bit of a furore a year or so again when Facebook changed some of its terms whic seemed to suggest they were trying to take control of your photographs. They weren't, that was never the intention. But what they do have control of is the servers upon which your photos are stored, and control over the software that you use to view the images. So if you fall out with them and you can't get to your images, how much control over them do you really have?
And take, for example, my photos from Brighton last year. The vast majority of them were taken by me, so are mine. Then there was one very kindly emailed to me by a chao who thought that half-a-dozen santa clauses on their way to the beach on the hottest day in June was rather amusing. That was clearly his: his camera, his snapshot, his. But in the grey area is the photo which I asked an unknown lady to take for us. I gave her my camera, we posed, she took the photo and gave me the camera, containing the image, back. On a technical basis, she is the one who did the point and click. She could have elected to zoom in, to adjust the aperture, to ask us to arrange ourselves differently, to apply any settings she chose, and therefore technically she probably 'owns' the image. This is despite the fact she could barely find the 'big silver button on the top' to actually take the photo.
She owns my image and I barely even know her name.
As with ever with me these things are rarely absolutely 'complete', but it's in a good state where everyone else will accept that it is finished, and I can return to fiddle with it in due course once other more prioritous matters have been addressed.
And I'm happy with it. It is an art installation. Well, I think it is art, and therefore it is . What I did was sit down with my laptop and scour through my many many photos, select a few hundred, print them off and stick them on the wall that rises with the staircase.
My pictures, my wall, my project, my installation, my art. All my own work.
Obviously I had the computer 'size' the photos according to my direction. I told it whether I wanted 2, 4 or 9 pictures per sheet and it did the rest to ensure they were all the same size. Well, sort of.
Oh, and I selected black-and-white printing. Well, it's art, isn't it. Whilst colour would have looked lovely and bright, it could have looked a mess and confusing. And whereas black and white compromises the colour element it accentuates the contrast. But mostly with it all being black and white it makes it all the more striking.
With black and white, though, you can't just click black-and-white and be done. Each photo needs adjusting. Those very, very grey scenes often need the brightness toning down and the contrast increasing to pick out the differences in the immense amount of grey. Whereas with those that are very starkly black or white, they can often require the opposite so that delecate nuances can be picked out and don't get over-powered.
So I tinkered with the brightness and contrast ratios, and the white and black points (the points where a very light grey becomes a white or dark grey becomes a black).
But they are my photos, obviously.
Just like the ones from New York which formed my Christmas cards for the family a year ago. I took some lovely photos, cropped them down, resized them appropriated, greyscaled them and then overlaid a colour picking out certain aspects of the photos...
Lovely. And mine.
But I didn't actually recolour the photo. It took half a dozen clicks and a few hertz of processing power. And a hell of a lot of skill by the software manufacturer.
But I had still taken the photo, still made the decision to make the adjustments. So, does the photo-journalist lose any credit where the editor makes the decision to crop the image, or to print it black and white?
A few years ago there was a bit of a storm in a teacup regarding some Reuters photo-journalists who had digitally manipulated their images, adding people into scenarios where they weren't; reducing the real distances between people and conflicts or merging two scenes to enhance the dramatic effect. They weren't accused of losing control over their own images, but of misleading the audience. But they had still taken both of the photos which they had merged, they made the decision, so they retained ownership in both the originals and the composite.
And it will obviously be clear that where someone scours the internet and stumbles across a photo of me on holiday and puts Brad Pitt's head on my body, they have no ownership of my photo. But, despite having taken neither of the photos, they would almost certainly have ownership of the composite. Useless ownership: they wouldn't be able to exploit it without the permission of myself and whoever took Brad Pitts's photo, but they have made the creative decision to put them together.
And it's a lazy creativity. They have expended no skill or effort, over a couple of clicks or so. Certainly not the same skill as someone who were to find my image on the net and paint a portrait of me from it.
But where do we 'lose' our ownership? At what point does ownership pass to the software or some other party? I will go into a full "Copyright and Moral Rights" legal definition at some time in the future. However in the meantime consider...
There was a bit of a furore a year or so again when Facebook changed some of its terms whic seemed to suggest they were trying to take control of your photographs. They weren't, that was never the intention. But what they do have control of is the servers upon which your photos are stored, and control over the software that you use to view the images. So if you fall out with them and you can't get to your images, how much control over them do you really have?
And take, for example, my photos from Brighton last year. The vast majority of them were taken by me, so are mine. Then there was one very kindly emailed to me by a chao who thought that half-a-dozen santa clauses on their way to the beach on the hottest day in June was rather amusing. That was clearly his: his camera, his snapshot, his. But in the grey area is the photo which I asked an unknown lady to take for us. I gave her my camera, we posed, she took the photo and gave me the camera, containing the image, back. On a technical basis, she is the one who did the point and click. She could have elected to zoom in, to adjust the aperture, to ask us to arrange ourselves differently, to apply any settings she chose, and therefore technically she probably 'owns' the image. This is despite the fact she could barely find the 'big silver button on the top' to actually take the photo.
She owns my image and I barely even know her name.
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