In my line of work, I try to digest a lot of news—both to stay up to date on what’s happening in my local and global neighborhoods as well as to be able to offer informed commentary. One of my favorite tools had been Google Reader. It was an excellent way to skim a huge volume of headlines, pick out the few I wanted to read, and then share, star, tweet, or facebook articles as appropriate. I typically used the stars to mark articles that might make good blog fodder later, and shared articles so they’d appear in the news feed on this blog and so I could offer friends the ability to follow the stories I’m reading. It also made a nice archive of articles I’d read in case I needed to hunt one down for a fact-check.

Then Google re-launched Reader with a “cleaner” design and made it to work more exclusively with Google+. I don’t use Google+ and don’t know anyone who does. If I want to share something compelling, I use Facebook selectively for the articles I think are most accessible to a wide audience, then Twitter for articles I care enough to comment on for folks who care enough to follow me, then Google’s erstwhile “share” function to create an RSS fire hose of everything I’m reading. So Google effectively turned off that fire hose by removing the “share” button. Searching for alternatives was frustrating, as they turned up the same few options that didn’t replicate this function. Mostly I was relying on mobile apps like Feedler on our iPad and gReader on my Android. These both work great, and already offered a UI superior to Google Reader. Both piggy-back onto your Google Reader subscriptions and account with no export files needed. Even better, these still (fingers crossed) have the good ol’ “share” function and my RSS feed of shared items still works even after Google removed those buttons from their reader!

But I still wanted to be able to browse and share news on my laptop. It would have been great if either Feedler or gReader had a web-based version. Finally, I came across Feedly, an add-on available for Firefox and Chrome. I’m currently using the Firefox version. The UI isn’t quite as elegant as the apps or the original Google Reader, but it does the job. Click on an article, click on the eyeball icon to “preview this article,” and then you’ll see that “share” button in the upper right menu. I guess I’ll be using Feedly until Google Reader either reinstates the “share” button on their own reader or breaks the back-end function that lets these third-party apps continue to populate the feed. Feedly also has mobile apps, which I haven’t tried yet since I’m very happy with the others.

I’ve been seeing various articles about something called HiveMined being created as a direct response to the Google Reader changes, but it’s still in development. I’ll give it a look once it launches, but for now, Feedly’s doing the job Google Reader doesn’t want.

Out with the old.... (Kind of ruins the moment when my copyright is emblazoned across the face of a Palestinian girl facing Israeli soldiers, no?)

I’ve read a lot of different perspectives on watermarking and could never quite make up my mind. I’m not sure what finally pushed me over the edge, but I’ve decided to switch from a completely intrusive watermark with diagonal lines to a more discreet one in the corner that makes clear this is my copyrighted property but I’m not going to get all up in your grill about it.

I think what it came down to was the fact that if somebody is going to steal my image and crop my copyright and credit, they were never going to buy a license to begin with. So the worst case scenario is that a few of my images are floating around out there unauthorized, hopefully telling the story of Palestinians struggling against the Israeli occupation or immigrants in America struggling for their rights or Norwegians … enjoying  a nice sunset, or whatever.

In the meantime, when folks stumble across this site, or an image I share on Facebook or Twitter, they’ll be able to enjoy it more fully without having to mentally screen out those annoying lines and being reminded that I’m a money-grubbing freelance mercenary who can’t live with the thought of some thieving a-hole using my photos for free without permission. Those things may still be true, but at least now viewers won’t be reminded of it with a big in-your-face watermark. And I’m still blocking right-clicks in the galleries to foil all the thieving a-holes too dumb to do a screenshot.

So it’s going to take me a while to work my way through all the galleries the archive, but say good by to my “crossbones” (as one client put it) and say hello to my elegant little credit in the lower right corner.

....In with the new. (Now the story is front and center, instead of my need to assert intellectual property ownership.)

Get a load of this. My cousin emailed me a screenshot from her photography curriculum at the Academy of Art University that cites an article I wrote for Sojourners about renowned war photographer James Nachtwey in 2004—in which I reflected on my experience of not getting into Sudan in 2000:

Since writing these articles I wouldn’t say I’ve made a career covering war, but living in Palestine is giving me plenty of opportunity to reflect on conflict photography. In her email, my cousin asked what might change if documentary photography focused on education and communication imagery as much as war imagery. I do tend to take a lot of photos of people with guns.

But I’m also trying to be more intentional about finding positive images. Working for MCC helps—our partner orgs do a lot of amazing work in development and peace-building. But even then there’s the tension of wanting to include the context of the conflict when showing the resiliency of those enduring it. Here’s one of my recent favorites, though—workers in Gaza straightening rebar taken from bombed-out buildings for re-use in new construction, due to the Israeli blockade on construction materials:

Shortly before heading to Palestine I used some “eBay bucks” to buy a camera bag that could accommodate all of my gear: two D700 bodies with battery grips, an assortment of lenses, a laptop—and on the flight over at least, my external hard drive and any other sensitive tech gear. I settled on the Lowepro Classified Sling 220 AW which has worked pretty much as advertised: comfortable on the back, with a tuck-away waist belt to ease shoulder strain on long walks or when it’s full of heavy gear—and most important of all, it slings around to the front for easy access to cameras or lenses. Here’s the one review I found with enough detail to know what I was getting.

The only problem was that for everyday use—and I’ve been trying to carry a camera almost everywhere I go—carrying around this fairly large sling pack just to hold a single camera body with a spare zoom lens or two was bulky and conspicuous. Since I really only needed the pack’s full capacity on a more intensive outings that require most of my gear—such as a recent trip to Gaza—I started looking for a smaller bag for daily use. I wanted something discreet and comfortable with practical features.

The hard part was finding a small bag that could still take a pro DSLR with battery grip (which I just can’t quite give up, even for everyday use). After looking at some pricey offerings from Think Tank, which has some really gorgeous canvas satchels and functional beltpacks, I settled on the Lowepro Stealth Reporter D100 AW, for less than half the cost of Think Tank’s bags. I should also thank my in-laws for making it my birthday present, and the friends of friends who let me ship it to them in Michigan so they could bring it along to Jerusalem. Buying specialized gear like this here is always twice as expensive. My favorite feature of the Stealth Reporter—aside from the cool name—is the zipper across the lid that opens into the main compartment, making it easy to reach directly in and swap lenses without fighting a flapping lid. It comes with some other gimmicks I don’t use—card wallets, cord pouches, and such—but the design is otherwise simple and elegant.

Using my Tetris skills, I figured out how to fit one D700 (with battery grip) mounted with my general purpose 24-85mm zoom, nestled among my supa-wide 17-35mm and telephoto 70-300mm zoom. This lets me carry a really wide range of focal lengths in a pretty small bag. The other bonus is that I can now keep all of my other everyday essentials—such as my cell phone, passport, money clip, business cards, etc.—in one bag rather than having to remember to swap them between my big bag, my pockets, and Ingrid’s purse. Now I have my own purse.

And on the very first day I loaded it up and took it out for a trial run, I ran into a common but photo-worthy scene in a nearby coffee shop—Israeli soldiers toting their assault rifles while waiting in line for their cappuccinos. With universal conscription, Israel is a rather militarized society, and ubiquitous soldiers carry their ubiquitous guns on and off duty. I often wonder what effect it has on children to see so many guns so much of the time. Just a week before, I was kicking myself for not having my camera when we encountered a group of female soldiers strapped with their big guns while shopping in a toy store. This time, thanks to my snazzy new man-purse, I discretely whipped out my camera, slapped on the 17-35mm, got these shots (notice the sandals…):

As I tried to indicate in my last post, I was more flattered than upset about the unauthorized use of my photo for a pro-immigration rights billboard in Arizona. So it was especially encouraging and touching to receive a gracious and apologetic personal response from Mary Ellen Kazda, one of the billboard’s owners, with her side of the story, excerpted here with permission:

Dear Ryan,

I am the person who found and (together w/ my husband) chose a photo, belonging to you, for use on what we’ve named TMA (Triangle Message Art). I learned of you just today in a local AZ news story and I want to apologize for not being as careful as I ought to have been. I also want to express gratitude for your gracious and graceful statement to the press.

I found the photo by using google search for “immigrant families” and as I have told all press, to the best of my knowledge it was in the public domain. When I clicked “the family” it came up on the cover of a sort of newsletter(?) named “The Learning Community” and I read their terms of use because under the photo was “may be subject to copyright”. Believing the photo was theirs (no distinction was made between words & images) and that personal but not commercial reproduction was o.k., honest to God I thought public domain. I now know it was/is not and Frank (my husband) and I would like to pay you for its use. It was up for over four weeks on a 3×6 paper, sharing half that space with the odious words of Sheriff Paul Babeu. I’ll be happy to post a check or could use PayPal for whatever you think fair.

Having read your story at your site and having looked at a good body of your work, I’d like to let you know a bit of the back-story. The TMA is in a very public spot in our little town, the post office (major hub!) being adjacent to it. Frank and I have lived in Oracle since 1979 and the land (Triangle) was bought in partnership w/ a group of our friends back in the 80′s to keep it from being developed. The intention was always to welcome public use. It pretty much just sat there and over the years came death, divorce, moving away … all selling their share to me and Frank, and we have been sole owners for a long time. Years ago we built a ramada w/ picnic table for folks to sit at, a gazebo w/ little benches was built (close to ramada) in memory of two dead friends. Other than that there is a small hill that kids love to slide down when it snows. They even come from Tucson, an hour south.

We’d often muse about doing some sort of community bulletin board-ish thing but it was the passage of SB 1070 that inspired us to rally. We conspired w/ friends on design for a steel structure w/ flip up opening case to hold “message art”. We hired a local craftsman to fabricate the structure and the graphics are composed by local artist and friend. It’s debut was in early July, ” Happy Birthday U.S.A.” & those were letters cut from grocery (brown paper) bags by me. There have been four since that time. Not so much attention until …

Last Thurs. when our sheriff chose to issue press release to express “outrage” rather than phone a constituent (me or Frank), but that’s his MO and we do the best we can w/ it … & that’s another story. We felt the juxtaposition of his quote with your photo (there WAS another family photo prior but not as contemporary; it got no reaction from him) pointed to the danger of public officials painting w/ a broad brush and to how it only contributes to polarization & utter lack of civil discourse. The TMA had the effect of him wanting to distance himself from what he said. That’s a good thing. He’s been a darling of Fox News and is a lightening rod for “immigration issues.” He claims to be consistent in separating the wheat from the chaff. We know he isn’t. And we would like him to be, if not in his heart then at least in his public statements. …

Again Ryan, I’m sorry for my lack of attention to detail. … You made a beautiful and powerful picture of a family which has caused quite an amazing reverberation. I will continue to do my best to honor them and to compensate you in any way.

I’m not sure about my grammar in all the above or of how much of a light we may be able to shine on some ugly situations but I am sure that my faith, along w/ little visits from the Holy Spirit help to keep me on track and hopeful.

So, I gratefully accepted a modest token of payment for their use of my image, and have enjoyed receiving further updates regarding their efforts. Case in point, check out their latest billboard image—very compelling (click the image to enlarge):

After marching through my existing digital archive last year, I embarked on the daunting task of scanning my entire negative film archive—more than 15 years of color and black and white negatives. I started with color, which was smaller—only about 10 years’ worth, and have now begun scanning black and white. Here’s my color workflow. My B&W is still under refinement, as I contemplate the best solution for removing dust and scratches. Unfortunately, the miracle of ICE, which automagically uses infrared light to somehow sense and eliminate blemishes from color film does not work with the silver emulsions of B&W film. So sad. BUT, ON WITH COLOR…!

1. Scan in NikonScan

• I scan directly in NikonScan—rather than doing a Photoshop import scan—because this allows you to save scanned images while another scan is in progress.
• Scan at maximum resolution
• Leave curves alone, unless you need to tweak to avoid clipping in the histogram
• I leave multisample scanning in Normal (1x) mode—for my purposes, higher settings just seem to add a lot of processing time without significant improvements in quality. I did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons to come to this conclusion.
• I also only can at a bit depth of 8 rather than 16 like all the purists out there. For my purposes (primarily freelance journalism, microstock), I can’t justify the additional hard drive space.
• I use the following ICE/ROC/GEM settings:
  • ICE=normal (I don’t find higher settings make significant difference)
  • ROC=0 (ROC is supposed to fix faded colors from old negs—which hasn’t been a problem for me)
  • GEM=3 (GEM reduces the appearance of film grain. This can introduce artifacting and loss of detail if overused, so I set it at 3 for a happy medium)
  • Note: using any of these settings significantly increase processing time–though I find that the results from using ICE far outweigh the time I’d spend retouching in Photoshop with the clone or heal tools.
• I didn’t discover Nikon Scan’s batch feature until I was done with the bulk of my color archive. That was frustrating. But it took some fiddling to figure out that you have to set the settings for each frame before they’d stick during batch scanning. Still not quite sure what I did to make it work right, but here’s the forum thread that I read to help me figure it out. Nikon scan also has pretty good naming options in batch mode that are real time savers, allowing prefixes, suffixes, and sequences with a selected number of digits. Now if I could only get all those evenings back I spent single scanning. At least I got through all five seasons of Lost on Netflix instant viewing…

2. Save as TIFF

• Though I swear by RAW formats when shooting digital, I’m not convinced that it’s necessary or an improvement over lossless formats like TIFF when scanning.
• TIFF also embeds metadata when retouching in Lightroom, eliminating the need for XMP sidecars required for RAW (NEF with NikonScan) formats

3. Import to Lightroom

• Make all color corrections, adjustments, levels
• Add captions, keywords, etc.

4. Export JPEGs for online archive, microstock

After yesterday’s post extolling the value of full-frame DLSRs and the wisdom of Ken Rockwell, I feel compelled to offer this snippet from one of his articles on the “full-frame advantage”–which helps to illustrate why I value his perspective. He’s no gear pimp.

WARNING:

If you just want to make great photos of things that matter, don’t worry about this baloney and get whatever you find convenient. I use my D40 and its kit lens or my 18-200mm VR 90% of the time for my photos that matter. …

Don’t start counting pixels until you can make the right pixels. I was an idiot and wasted my first 15-20 years of shooting worrying about the wrong things, like resolution instead of color. This is why I so strongly caution you not to get caught up in this foolishness. This article, like many of mine, deals with minor technical issues. These fine points are only significant after all the far more critical basics of location, composition, lighting, timing, color, tone and gesture have been mastered. Worrying about minute details like noise and resolution before you know how to make a good photo will ensure you never learn enough about the important issues to make great photos. If you’d like to learn how to make great photos, don’t bother with these technical articles, instead read good books or take a local photo class. Your camera doesn’t matter if you know what you’re doing, and if you do know what you’re doing, a better camera just makes it easier to get the results you demand.

He has longer rants on similar topics here and here.

I frequently pray for wisdom when approaching major gear purchases, and try to keep this tension active within me as I invest more time, energy, and yes, money in my photography. I don’t generally find it helpful to calculate the number of starving children that could be fed with, say, the $1200 I just spent on a lens that I should be able to use for the rest of my life. Hopefully, the images I make with that lens will inspire action and advocacy that will change the structures that result in starving children.

But even so, nuggets like Ken’s here help me to keep things in perspective, and will hopefully prevent me from an ever-increasing spiral of gear acquisition, and keep me focused on a few wise strategic investments that will stand the test of time.

Because I report my freelance photo earnings as a small business, I usually make most of my new gear purchases at the end of the year to spend down my revenue, reduce my tax burden, and invest in new gear for the coming year.

This year, I became convinced by both experience and research that it’s time to upgrade from Nikon’s DX format to a full-frame FX DSLR. However, I didn’t pull in enough income from freelance sales this year to finance the jump, so instead made some purchases to prepare for it–mostly lenses.

For those unfamiliar, DX is Nikon’s first digital sensor format, which has the effect of increasing all of your lenses’ focal lengths by 50%. Click here for a more complete explanation of why this happens. That might sound great at first–your 80-200mm zoom is now a 120-400mm zoom! But I hadn’t done my homework when I bought my first DX format camera (a Nikon D70s), and was disappointed to learn that my trusty wide-angle 24mm f2.8 Nikkor was now effectively a 36mm standard range lens. And I just can’t work without a nice, fast wide angle. This is why most kit lenses that ship with consumer level DLSRs are in the neighborhood of 17-55mm or 18-70mm. They’d be a superwide on a standard format sensor, but are just normal wide on a DX camera. However, many of those lenses are made exclusively for the DX format–slap them on a standard format film camera and there’s massive vignetting around the corners of the image–beyond the edges of what the DX sensor would cover.

Aside from magnifying focal length, the DX format also messes with one of my top priorities: low-light capability. It’s a basic fact of photography: Increased focal length requires increased shutter speed to freeze camera shake. That means no more bracing against a wall and shooting at 1/30 or 1/15 hand-held. Even shots at good ‘ol 1/125 can get jiggly when I’m using my trusty 50mm f1.8 wide open for low light scenes like candlelight vigils. Newer stabilized or vibration reduction (VR) lenses help to cope with this, but only help to freeze the camera–not the subject.

So for these and other reasons, Ken Rockwell has me convinced that FX is the way to go–both for sharpness and for that boogeyman of high ISO digital shooting: noise. The D700 has the mind-blowing available ISO of 25,600, but more importantly, according to Ken: “if you want to shoot in available light, ISO 6,400 looks great without excuses on the D700 or D3, but not on any DX camera.”

This becomes especially important when my microstock sites reject photos for too much noise, forcing me to abandon higher ISOs on my current D90. So here are the lenses that I invested in in anticipation of the Nikon D700 that I plan to purchase in 2010, all purchased used on eBay:

17-35mm f/2.8 ($1200)
28-200mm f/3.5 – 5.6G ($285)
70-300mm VR f/4.5-5.6G ($450)

As mentioned, I already own a 50mm f/1.8, and routinely use an 85mm f/1.8 and 80-200mm f/2.8 which are owned by Sojourners, though I’m trying to build up my personal kit. Granted, these together cost more than a used D700 body ($1900 or so on eBay), but without the lenses to use it effectively, it seemed better to put these horses before the cart. I also figure the longer I wait, the more prices on used D700 bodies will come down, while lens prices are relatively stable. I also jumped on some SanDisk rebate deals to stock up on 16GB CompactFlash cards, since the FX cameras all use those instead of the SD cards I currently use in my D90.

You may have noticed that most of the links above go to KenRockwell.com, which was an extremely valuable resource in researching lenses. I recommend hime for his encyclopedic listings of Nikon cameras and lenses, including discontinued models that may be just what you need. This is especially true in hunting down FX-compatable lenses (aka 35mm film lenses!) and separating the deals from the duds among Nikon’s catalog (like skipping the otherwise tempting 24-120mm VR).

To be honest, I’m still a little shocked at how much I’ve spent on this pile of lenses. But part of it is due to relative success in my first year of microstock, and the other part is justified by a need to make some longer-term investments in gear for reasons I will detail in a future post…. I’ll also likely write about my rationale for buying a new Lenovo T400 laptop that arrived at the office two hours after I left for the holiday break….

After enjoying modest success on Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and BigStock microstock sites, I’m expanding a bit to Fotolia and hopefully iStockphoto. I waited on these latter two because they don’t have editorial options, and that’s been the bulk of my work. But now that I have a fair body of stuff that qualifies as royalty-free—my shots from Petra and Jerusalem are among my top sellers—so I’m ready to expand my horizons a bit. So far I’ve earned a whopping $1.20 on Fotolia in my first week! Woo-hoo!

iStockphoto sets a bit of a higher bar for applying. They make you take a quiz and then wait several days while they review three sample images. I applied last weekend and am still “pending approval.”

So far, I’m impressed with Fotolia’s relatively speedy approval process. We’ll see how their sales compare to the others. Dreamstime seems to be the slowest, but I’ve had my highest sales there…. Hopefully that doesn’t mean there’s an inverse proportion.

I haven’t written much about my adventures in microstock, partly because I feel like I’m still learning the ropes. My buddy Laryn Kragt Bakker taught me almost everything I know about microstock, but our photographic genres are generally different, so I’ve had to do a fair amount of experimenting to find what works for me. Much of my work is editorial in nature, and I decided to experiment with microstock more as a way of putting some of my dormant archives to work—as opposed to seeking out opportunities to shoot highly marketable stock imagery. So most of what I’ve contributed has been from rallies and events in DC that I was shooting anyway, as well as appropriate images from my world travels. Right now, it seems like my images of Barack Obama and Petra (the ancient ruins in Jordan, not the Christian rock band) are my most popular. I’m not selling a ton, but enough to make it worth my while to submit them.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of microstock, they’re basically volume discounters of stock images. Unlike traditional stock agencies such as Getty or Corbis which make it very difficult for someone who is not a full-time professional to contribute, microstock sites welcome any contributions so long as your images pass their quality standards. Of course, they pay much less–often less than $1 per image, but if your images were just going to sit on your hard drive anyway, they might as well be sitting on a microstock site earning you some cash that you can put toward your next lens or camera body. And some folks do quite a tidy business. Laryn has earned $11K in about 3.5 years. I’m not on track to earn that much, but I should clear about $500 by the end of the year.

Laryn also clued me in to Alamy, which is kind of a happy medium between microstock and more typical agencies in that they make it relatively easy for a part-timer like myself to submit as few or as many images as I’m able, but pay significantly higher rates per image. However, they don’t sell nearly the volume of the microstocks, so the upshot is fewer sales at higher prices. Double however, it’s taken me until now to make my first sale of the year—$76 for an image from the Obama inauguration—while other images lie dormant. They also have a few more hoops to jump through when submitting images, including a highly counterintuitive required upsize to tiff followed by a conversion to jpeg. (Huh?) Whatever floats their boat. But perhaps this sale will motivate me to do a few more submissions, since up until now, between the zero sales and strange format conversion requirements, I had focused most of my efforts on feeding the dependable trickle from microstocks.