Photografr.com

Carlos Miller spent a night in jail for taking photographs of police officers against theit wishes.

This kind of story no longer surprises me. Police departments in the US and UK seem to have lost the plot in the face of terrorism “threats”. This is the sort of thing that we used to chastise the old Eastern Block countries for. Whatever happened to our civil liberties? Where do we draw the line?

How long until journalists and writers face the same treatment?

The most humiliating part of my arrest was not necessarily the way the five Miami police officers slammed me down on the hard sidewalk and bashed my forehead against the concrete. Nor was it the way they tightened the handcuffs on me until they cut off the circulation in my wrists. Nor was it the way one officer twisted my right wrist backwards until I yelled out in pain. Nor was it the way an officer threatened to taze me if I did not shut my mouth.

It wasn’t even the way the sergeant taunted me at the precinct by saying, “I don’t know what police department you’re used to dealing with, but this is Miami PD and we don’t put up with that kind of crap here.”

No, the most humiliating part of my arrest was when I was ordered into a small dark room at the Miami-Dade County Jail and ordered to drop my pants, bend over and spread my cheeks while a jail guard with a flashlight ensured that I was not smuggling any contraband into the jail.

Read the full story here.

If you can’t see the above video view it here.

Once again we are faced with another case of a photographer in the UK being treated like a criminal. This is now beginning to make my blood boil. It seems the only cameras accepted in this country are those with CCTV written on them.

For more on this particular case take a look here.

I think it’s about time all our UK readers sent a wee email to their local MP or MSP letting them know of their concerns on this issue and again for every occasion they get been stopped, hassled, detained or assaulted for taking photographs in a public place.

We should not let this lie.

UPDATE: There is a Downing Street petition here, asking the Prime Minister to clarify the laws surrounding photography in public places. If you are a UK citizen, make sure you put your name to it.

[via Photodoto]

View on Flickr ::  View on Ipernity :: View on Zooomr

Hey all. Merry Christmas! Sorry about the lack of posts over the last week. I have been running around like a maniac looking out for our first baby, Holly. She’s just ace, but blogging has moved a bit down the priority list. I’ll have a proper update about her over at NixonBy Name.com early next week.

I’m about to start two weeks off work, so I should grab time to find some great photography for your delectation. And we should be back up to a photo a day very soon.

All the best for the holidays. I hope Santa was as good to you as he was to us.

Following Scoble’s show about SmugMug, I’ve decided to give it a go. I want somewhere to store my photos online safely and reliably, allowing my friends and family easy access, and myself the ability to share my photos with the world.

I am extremely impressed by the services offered by SmugMug. They are a family run business, regular photographers and most importantly, they turn a profit. In this day and age, it’s nice to know your photos aren’t going to be sold on to BigCorp over night.

The SmugMug team are very keen on photography and making sure your photographs look good. They have a lot of pro users with some stunning shots on the site. They have just launched some brilliant new features for viewing your photos at premium resolution on small and large screen monitors. If you love photography, they are well worth a second look.

Depending on how it goes, I think I will drop my pro membership on Flickr come the new year to offset the cost. I get my photo sharing kick from Zooomr, and Flickr aren’t able to offer assurances like back-ups of my shots even at pro level. I won’t ditch them all together, I just wont need the extra capacity of a pro membership.

I’ve decided to go for a Power user membership, which allows me various customizations, but more importantly allows me to upload video. As time moves on I’ll be using video more and more, and want them to be as safe as my photographs.

I will begin uploading my collections to SmugMug over the weekend. If you are interested in giving them a go too click here for a free 14 day trial. If you do decide to sign up in the longer term use the code NGGfJsOJxWpEM to get a $5 discount (this will also get me a discount when I renew).

Photografr.com :: Photography news and appreciation
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I’ve been having a play with new photo sharing site Tagmee, over the last week, when one of the developers asked me what I thought a photo sharing site needed to appeal to photographers. The short reply I started writing turned into the epic (as far as my writing goes) below.

I think there are four important factors when creating a photo sharing site. The photo’s, the community, the publicity and the innovation.

The Photos

People visit photo sharing websites to look at their own, and other people’s photographs. They want to see detail, usually without clicking through to the original size. The photos uploaded must be nice to look at. I would suggest a darker background, or a light-box viewer like Zooomr. Just because Flickr’s background is white doesn’t mean you need to follow the herd. There is a reason that Photoshop tools use a dark grey background…the photos look better and are easier to work with. Uploaded photos must be re-sized well. It’s very easy to do a quick re-size, but these can look really bad. They will need a bit of sharpening, but not too much. Flickr and Zooomr do a very good job of this.

Make it easy to tag and geotag the photos. Tagging should be comma separated. Space separated is a pain in the neck if your tag has more than one word. Geotagging should be made simple through a tool like Flickr’s. They get it right. It’s easy to search for places, you can drag multiple photos on to the map, and you can easily see which photos haven’t been geotagging. The ultimate photo sharing website would use Google maps, because they are a very good standard, and the quality of the satellite images make it much easier to find places you don’t know well.

Make it easy to upload photographs. Have a great uploading tool, but even better, make sure the multi-site up-loaders work with your site. Get in contact with the builders of these tools. Why not have them make a special version download-able from your site with your site as the default upload destination. Make sure when your users upload their pictures, ALL the data they have put in on their desktop application transports onto your site. All that well though out tagging becomes a complete pain in the arse when you have to do it more than once.

Make your site play well with other photo sharing sites. Your users should be allowed to transport their photo to and from other sites. Interoperability is the new big web 2.0 thing. The photographs belong to your users, and you should not place any restrictions on where they want to put them. If you make it easy for your users to transport their photos across to the other guys, then the other guys are much more likely to reciprocate. If they don’t, then let you customers know, but don’t restrict your users as a result of the other guy not seeing the potential.

People want to see their data. Make sure it’s easy for users to see their exif data etc. It’s important for photographers to be able to refer to this data. Zooomr used to show who was linking to photographs and how many link-throughs came from there. This was a great feature that allowed the user to see who was appreciating their work. With a bit of spam filtering, I’d love to see this feature back. I notice that Vimeo are also using this feature.

The Community

The reason photographers upload their work to photo sharing sites is to make connections with other photographers, either to gain an audience, or to get ideas from others. You need to get photographers on the site from the start. All your staff should have decent quality cameras, and be regularly taking photographs and posting them to the site. It shows you care about photography. You and your staff should be commenting regularly on good photographs, and publicise the best ones on your blog. Make sure your best photographers become your most popular photographers. You want the good stuff to float to the top rather than being buried like they are on photo dump sites like Photobucket.

You need to tempt photographers across to your site, so that when they visit, there are already good photographs to look at, comment on, and fave. Why not have a photography contest? Get people to upload their five best photographs to the site, and get your users to vote on the best every month. Most photographers I know are also photo bloggers. Make it easy for photo bloggers to get votes from their readers, getting them to visit your site too.

You need to make it easy to connect with other photographers. Kris Tate’s Zipline on Zooomr was a brilliant idea. Of course, it was far from original, but putting it on his site so that his community could communicate has turned a fractious site into a team. As a result of this, I now regularly chat with the best photographers on the site. I get hints and tips, have a laugh, and now consider many of my Zooomr contacts to be friends. I have never met any of them, but would jump at the chance, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual.

Make it easy for people to find their existing contacts who have already signed up, possibly using their gMail, Hotmail, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo ,etc. contacts. People settled on a social web site often find it very lonely trying to start up on a new one, and very often drift back to where they came from. People are always going to use Flickr. You need them to use your service too.

Until you have an established community, your site IS in beta (in the old fashioned sense rather than the Flickr and Google sense). Without the community, you are not yet doing what you set out to do.

The Publicity

You need to make sure that people know your site exists. Like I said, many photographers are also bloggers, so make it easy for your users to blog their pictures, linking back to your site. Allow them to put slideshows of their pics on other sites. Link up with somebody like Animoto to make these slideshows funky. What about automatically uploading the slideshows to video sharing sites…all wrapped up in lovely publicity for your site.

Make sure your site works for you everywhere. Build a good Facebook app so that your user’s contacts can see what shots they are sharing, and where they are sharing them. Make sure pictures show up easily on Pownce and other micro-blogging utilities. You want the cool kids to see what you are doing.

I think it’s a good idea to restrict who can sign up for the site initially. Make people join a waiting list, then give them invites to hand out when they get in. It seems nowadays that restricting membership is the best way to grow a community. It means that your users will probably know at least one other person on the site when they start. It also allows you to grow at your own pace. Charge for a pro membership with unlimited uploads, but give away pro memberships free to bloggers who promote your site. Make sure your best users feel appreciated.

The Innovation

Ahhh! This is where you’re on your pretty on your own. This is the difficult bit. It’s all very well me telling you where the other guys are getting it right. But you need to come up with a killer idea. Do something that the other guys aren’t doing. I don’t believe there is anything massive that hasn’t been done already, but photographers like features…even if they only use them every now and again.

Be smart. If features aren’t working, withdraw them and try again with something better. Constantly innovate your site and always look for features on other sites (not just photo sharing) that you could borrow and make your own.

So there you have it. Follow these simple rules and you’ll be the next Flickr. Take my word for it.

In reality you are going to need a lot of hard work and a lot or luck to even get on the radar for many photographers. While it’s not perfect, Zooomr have done an astounding job getting to where they are now. Many of the features for my ultimate photo sharing site are exactly what Zooomr are doing. As a keen hobbyist photographer, they are doing the best job at this point in time.

What do you think should be included in YOUR ultimate photo sharing website? Post a comment or reply on your own blog.

Photografr.com :: Photography news and appreciation
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It’s been a little quiet in the past month month in terms of news on the site. As I’ve said in previous posts, holidays, a kitchen installation and a pregnant wife have meant that Photografr.com was a little neglected.

There were some stunning photographs featured over the last few weeks. I’m continually impressed with the quality of photography on photo sharing sites. It serves as an inspiration to my own photography. Here are a few of my favorites this month.

Ipernity Groups: Media sharing web site, Ipernity, launched groups. This is a huge development for the site, adding a bit more social to social sharing. I have found that Ipernity suffered in the past from not having a way to interact with similar minded photographers.

Facebook: Zooomr RSS Reader: John Wesley launched the very first Zooomr app for Facebook. When installed, your latest Zooomr photographs show up in your Facebook profile. It’s great to see a photography app in Facebook that’s not related to Flickr.

Photography Voter: I found nice “Digg clone” site dedicated to photography. Photography Voter follows the same Digg principle of voting the best stories to the front page. With a bit of a push this will become a great resource for photography fanatics.

Technorati Tags: photography, news

In much the same way that I have always loved travel writing (especially Bill Bryson) I am a huge fan of travel photography. I think it takes an outsider to capture something special that even the most experienced photographer may miss in the familiar.

Nothing exemplifies this more than National Geographic magazine. I’ve had access to a monthly subscription of this since birth, and it’s yellow covers and the wonders within have made a huge impact on my view of people, animals, the planet and the universe. I love that each read of the magazine brings a new experience. The photography contained captures the mind and the heart. It inspires me to see the world through somebody elses eyes…a very important attribute for any photographer.

If you want to improve your photography, my advice (for what it’s worth) is get yourself a subscription to National Geographic before any photography magazine. While the latter will show you the technical how-tos of photography, National Geographic will inspire you. Good photography is not about capturing a scene…anybody can do that. Inspiration gives you insight, and insite further inspires. That is when photography becomes an art form.

There are a couple of great places to start if you don’t have access to a back catalogue of National Geographic, and the 10.5 million photographs published since it’s inception in 1888. Through the Lens is a wonderful coffee table book of around 250 of the greatest photographs the magazine has had to offer. Cover to cover, it is packed with a huge variation in photographic styles, all capturing real life scenes.

You can also visit the National Geographic website, and especially their Photo of the Day, which can also be dowloaded as a desktop background. They don’t offer an RSS feed, but it’s well worth a click from your browser each day.

Technorati Tags: national geographic, photography

Uploaded on Jul 5th, 2007
by Barrie Seed

Technorati Tags: zooomr, photography, photo sharing

Raoul Pop over at ComeAcross has done a great comparison of photo sharing websites Flickr, Zooomr and Picasa Web. His friend was making the move from Yahoo! Photos and needed advice on where to go.

Asking the basic question, “What do you want to do with your photos?”, it points you in the right direction based on your answer.

Head on over to see what Raoul has to say. If you haven’t decided where to put your photos, this is a great place to start.

Technorati Tags: photo sharing, news

Zooomr’s static photos are now fully back online. That means that blogged photos, including the ones here on Zooomr Hits will should now be fully visible.

This is the first visible step to Zooomr itself coming back online. I would expect to see the final results today.

I’ll keep you updated.

[UPDATE: Kristopher and Scoble have been working hard at the data centre getting thing going. Apparently all is well with the systems and Scoble says the "flick will be
switched" at some point on Saturday (California Time). In the mean time they are all
getting some rest.]