The area where I live in France has some spectacular scenery, the coastlines on the North, West and South all have a different character, the woodlands, rivers and villages ooze photo opportunities and then we get to the hills...I live 4 miles from the Monts d'Arree..a ridge that runs through the Central part of Brittany, an area that not only offers some spectacular views but also testing walks..(sorry to sound like a travelogue but it is that good around here) So first walk along the ridge that runs close to La Fueillee..highest village in Brittany. Anyhow had a bit of a lung burster up there, in true Breton weather it was lashing with rain until midday and then the sun burst through...so here are a few 'sketch' snaps..I now have an idea of what to look for up here but this is a start, looking for some time-lapse/video sites and this is pencilled in. Well TFI Friday to y'all
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I'm lucky. I''l say it again...I'm lucky..the trek to work takes me out of bed, down stairs past the kitchen through the lounge and into my office...there may be coffee and croissants on the way, a glimpse out of the window at the flocks of greenfinches, a quick check to see if we have anymore mole hills (3 big ones have emerged) a shrug of the shoulders if it is chucking it down still, lots of rain here but a flick of a switch a speedy handshake and how d'ye do and the internet pours into my workspace and as I'm the Boss, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer what I do is really up to me...and so we arrive at 2015. The latter quarter of 2014 was taken up pumping up my content on Getty images which has been successful, mainly sensible imagery that won't scare the horses or put off the corporate buyer. I have targets and one of them is to keep this going...it's a pain as they seem to have turned the wick down on their FTP and although I'm allowed 100 uploads a week they generally get to waft their all knowing eyes over only about 50...so there is a blockage at the moment and I will slowly withdraw, walking backwards out of the spotlight, bowing and doffing my forelock as I do so, waiting for the plunger to be applied and the torrent of imagery to spew forth onto their site....still waiting... So what else to fill the time...well the book cover work has been parked on the shelf (!) whilst the farmhouse has been getting a feather duster in all of it's crevices so after the ho hum nature of Image Library stuff its back to some barking mash ups for another of my clients...here's one that went this week Always nice to see what happens to images once they leave the nest and flap about in the real world. Just licenced for Germany at the moment but with the added bonus of also being the Audio book cover as well so if it gets on some best seller list I may get more licences if it gets reprinted in different languages...I...as ever...live in hope, I've also been out wandering around the countryside logging and storing sites that may be useful for the stuff I want to get my teeth into starting this summer, just back from a trek along the Mont d'Arree edge that runs through this part of Brittany....breath taking...anyhow here are some book cover images about to be hoicked off to a holding pen, waiting to be prodded and poked and sent off to the highest bidder, some will succeed but some will remain, cast into a dark corner, digital oblivion, the Billy-no-mates of the image world...
...to one of my online retail places.. last year some of you may remember that I had some work taken down on a site that 'infringed' some copyright of a leading car manufacturer and then in late autumn I was told that another image had been taken down because it infringed image rights...it was grafitti in a park in Manchester of the Oasis boys...the Gallaghers... pretty rubbish representation and only recognisable by the tags I had put on it...then this morning I got this email
Redbubble Content Team (Redbubble) Jan 06 15:06 Dear David, Recently concerns have been raised in relation to works published in your Redbubble portfolio, so we just wanted to send you a reminder of our guidelines for uploading content to Redbubble. Redbubble exists as a place for artists to share their own original artwork. The Redbubble User Agreement requires that you own the intellectual property rights to any material you publish on the site, or otherwise have permission to display, reproduce and sell it. We would like to ask that you please review the works across all of your Redbubble account/s and ensure that all works uploaded are in line with our User Agreement andIP/Publicity Rights Policy, specifically that it is your own original artwork or that you have clear permission to publish it. If you do have works that fall outside these guidelines, please remove them immediately. Should we receive any valid reports of works that fall outside of our guidelines on content in the future, your account may be restricted or closed for Deliberate Misuse. Many thanks for your understanding and cooperation. Regards, Redbubble Content Team Many thanks indeed.. I could wade through the thousands of images, make sure I wasn't shooting from any private ground, deleting any spurious logos, cloning out faces...never ever getting to sleep ever again .....the constant worry of it all or I could just stick 2 fingers in the air like I just don't care, put my hand on my hip, let my backbone slip and pull the plug on the lot.....which I have done.... Before I left I did a search for Oasis, The Gallaghers and Jaguar cars...loads of them on the site...multi tasking now as I tut and shake my head....consistency is not apparent ! 2015 is the year of not messing about. to those folk that bobbed in and tested the site to see if 'right click and save ' had been disabled...it appears in some browsers you can nab things off the home page but everything else is a bit more secure. I was getting a lot of traffic from baidu and one site using my own domain as a referring site?? This is a good programme if you think someone is hoicking image files off you for nothing tineye.com which lets you do a reverse image search. Once had an image on my old flickr site that rumbled up to half a million hits so I used tineye and it was everywhere, to be fair on mostly legit sites but it found it pretty quickly. So be safe out there, use watermarks, disable downloading, have a look at who is popping in for a look around and just be vigilant. As I've been uploading lots of files onto Getty as items for sale I've got to be sure that they don't get used for nothing.....
I can tell it straight...3 months of uploading and keywording has left Jack a rather Dull boy...okay..it's work, well work in as much as it devours hours of my time and the keywording algorhythm that Getty use has become easier to use the more I've used it. So if you are the one avid reader of this fluff you will already know that one of my missions this year (last year) is to get online the bucketloads of images that sit quivering and sobbing in the deep recesses of my hard drives, aching for their moment in the luminous glow of a computer moniter.
Time for a breather and time to take stock...I have 2 accounts with Getty and have surpassed my self imposed targets of having images online and for sale, I have an acceptance rate of 70% which is improving now that I just don't bother uploading anything that has a trademark, lacks a property release and even model releases...I research their own database of images to see if mine match up and if they don't...well they just get locked away again....so that has taken up 3 months of time and I've had to ignore lots of other things in the process...this site for instance...looks a bit tired..too many galleries got a bit unwieldy because of that...so in a few moments the hatchet will be out and things will be hacked back.... So ..... the camera has been dusted off, no more iphone jaunts back to FX sized imagery, I have in my head a list of imagery I want to produce and also a significant upgrade to my shooting gear during the summer with a shift towards time-lapse and video, so lots of slithering up the learning curve there then. The countryside and beaches around where I now live in France are pretty spectacular and , once I have researched a shooting list , will be given the once over by me. At the moment I'm out and about just seeing what is possible, creating more sketches than finished articles but here are a bunch from yesterdays and the day befores jaunt along the Mont D'Arree...from -6 to 13c in the space of a day... so hatchet sharpened I'm away to hack back the site..leaving it ready for the green shoots of spring growth to appear. I've finally got around to adding an image download disable code into the site..this may stop the huge volumes of.....hmmmm...slightly iffy site visits I've been getting...it might... |
What's all this then????An unyeilding torrent of Photo babbel full of unconfirmed facts and manufactured photo drivel.. take from it what you like, it won't change the world but may leave you feeling nauseous... Categories
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