So Lytro started selling their phase cameras this last week and it seems at least the technology bloggers out there are taking to the wires to talk about how cool this is. And no doubt the technology has potential to be a game changer but out of the gate it’s fundamentally flawed which is why I won’t be plunking down my $500 to pick up a camera.

There are a few things about photography that at least for photographers need to be thought through for a camera to be of any real value.

• Printable
• Color managed (Good automatic is ok)
• Perfect focus
• Easily viewed (Think slideshow)
• Shared my vision

With Lytro they are looking to control much more of this universe than you think and restrict what you can do and how you can view/display your photos.

Printable

It may be the case that you can focus and print your Lytro photographs but I can’t confirm that anywhere on their website. To me this is the biggest deal breaker, I love to print my work and display it. With Lytro I’m not sure I can do that, also they have not said what the MP count is, but they do state HD (1920×1080) which is not nearly enough resolution to be able to print anything of descent size.

Color Management

Cameras today do a pretty good job of managing the color in your photographs but there is room for improvement. This is why DSLR’s allow you to set the color space your camera is shooting in. You can do this by using a white or grey card/cap to tell your camera what should be white/grey and adjust to that. With Lytro and their simple camera there is no such change to be made, maybe the technology is good enough but judging by DSLR’s of today I’d be surprised.

Perfect Focus

I know this sounds funny because Lytro should allow you to get that perfect focus but in my testing of the image below I can’t get it to focus on what I want. This is a frustrating experience for a camera that only lets you focus after the fact. To see what I mean click on the butterfly’s head in the image below, it never comes into focus. So if the focus after you shoot is limited to a specific range it’s of much less use to a discerning photographer. Might still be great for snapshots but I wouldn’t trust it for something important.

Easily viewed

How do you easily and quickly show these off to your friends and family? If they are in a special format that is viewable in only some contexts you’ll quickly become reliant on Lytro for not only your software, hardware but also the tools to present your images to the world and your friends and family. I don’t want a slideshow where I have to focus each image as I show them off. Maybe they have an elegant way of handling this, only time will tell. Secondly unless I’m mistaken the only way to show off your living pictures online is to upload them through Lytro.com and use their Living Picture viewer. This is another step in the process that I don’t want to have to take and gives Lytro via their privacy policy rights to use my work for their promotional gain

From their Privacy Policy
We do not claim ownership of your living pictures; they are yours. To enable us to operate Lytro.com and provide its services and functionality, with respect to content that you submit to Lytro.com you grant us a non-exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicensable and transferable license to:

• Copy, store, display, and distribute such content;
• Modify and create derivative works of such content by using our light field picture player or another player approved by us. We may allow our users and visitors to create other modifications or derivative works and print your content for their personal use;
• Transmit copies of such content to, and embed such content on, other websites;
• Display the Lytro trademark with such content; and
• Display and feature in public areas of Lytro.com, at our discretion, certain of your public living pictures selected by us.

We reserve the right to refuse to post or to remove any user content on Lytro.com, at our discretion and with or without notice.

Sharing my vision

This one is something that is maybe just me but when I post an image to a website be it a forum or my own portfolio site I want the user to see my vision for the picture not any vision that can be derived from the image by re-focusing. Snapshot and fun little things may be different in that it’s fun to play with them in this way but if I come up with a great shot on a Lytro I want to be able to display it my way not just the Lytro way.

There are just too many unknowns about Lytro as a company and about the technology they provide. Any serious photographer should think twice before using the camera and the technology for any shoots that may result in something great they may want to use or display or sell. I’m impressed as anyone with this technology and what it could do for photography but until it progress’s further and the restrictions are fewer it’s not yet ready for prime time. Are you planning on getting a Lytro camera, if so what will you use it for?

Funny clip about getting paid for your work. I don’t agree with everything said here but it does expose a side of writing and I think photography that need some thinking. If everyone is doing it for free what does the Pro bring to the table?

Your local gallery used to be your best friend if you were a photographer and wanted to make money selling your art. Times changed and the internet changed photography, you now have countless options for displaying and selling your work. But with the shear volume of work showing up on the internet photographers if they are not careful can dilute their potential value along with getting lost in the shuffle. Coming to the rescue is a new type of photography site, the curated site built for photographers.

Galleries always had a few things going for them, they knew the art they were displaying so they rarely displayed bad stuff. So if you went to a gallery you were pretty sure you were going to see something at least good. That same philosophy also became a problem for some of the artists, if you were too different than the norm you didn’t get the exhibit time. You also had a limited number of cliental when you held your exhibit, it was a local gallery and you could only reach the local art lovers. Last but not least to satisfy both the artist and the gallery the prices had to be high so even with your local crowd you were limited to those who could spend a lot of money on art.

With the influx of digital cameras and the internet, photographers have never had it so good. You can take a picture and have it in front of countless thousands of people in minutes. This is the golden age for the unknown photographer, it’s never been so easy to get your stuff in front of a large audience. Sites like Flickr and Smugmug allow you to publish you photos and have them seen by people all over the world. Not to mention how popular the camera applications have become on phones like the iPhone.

Ok so why do we need galleries online, if your average photographer can shoot and display their work without giving a cut to anyone? The answer comes in the way of an old idiom “Seeing the forest for the trees”. There are two problems that I see -

Photographer’s Problem – Differentiate your photographs from the mass
Art Lover’s Problem – Finding the best stuff easily

This leaves us at a crossroads, it seems like technology can’t or has not yet been able to solve yet. People have seen this and are looking to curation to solve the issue, where it’s not a volume game in terms of the Art that is displayed but the quality of the art. The thought is if you get enough of the best art in one location you’ll continue to get both the best art and the people who are looking to buy art.

You can see a couple examples of what I’m talking about at -

http://www.1x.com
http://www.levelandtap.com

It’s still to be seen if this approach will take off and become a big driver for the arts or just another option to display your art. I have yet to see any of these were they are exclusive so at least for now you can get your work on all of them and expand your possible buyers.

Knowphoto is looking to expand and we need your help to do it.  We are looking for some great writers who are passionate about photography and writing and want to see their name in lights!

Send your writing samples to me via the contact forms and I’ll get back to you.

Adam

Hey all,
I have a few items up for sale as I’m updating and changing my equipment. If you interested in any of the following please email me at adam at knowphoto dot com

Olympus E-P2 Kit (Body, EVF, 17mm, Nikon and Canon Adapters) – $800

Thanks
Adam

In the digital photography age there are tools to help you manage your workflow, to edit you photos, print your photos and do anything else you can imagine. But one thing most of these have missed is the ability to easily back up your photos, that is where we as photographers have to step in and help ourselves. This holds true if you are a pro on location or in studio or an amateur shooting for fun, you have to backup your images. Too many things to do with your computer and out of your control can happen to your images for you to leave it to chance.

Only you can design a perfect system for you and your workflow so I’m going to try to just explain my system to you and give you some other options for what may work for you.

My Current Workflow -

1. Import Memory Card into Lightroom. Lightroom is set up to copy the files to my attached external hard drive.
2. OSX is set up to watch the Images folder on my external drive. When it detects new images put into the folder it automatically makes a copy of them to a networked drive
3. I have Carbon Copy Cloner set up on my media server to run two daily scripts. The scripts make a two seperate copies of the images onto two more drives. This gives me 4 copies of each and every image I shoot within a day. I have plans to upgrade this process to also be an automated script so all my copies are within minutes.
4. Close Lightroom and my Lightroom catalog settings are set to force backups on exit. This file is backed up to my local hard drive. This means that I have two copies of the catalog both on the local disk and the external drive.

What’s still missing

I still don’t have an external back up in an off site location backup. This is due to a couple of things, first I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to transport a drive to and from a safe deposit box or some other location. The other option is to move them all to the cloud and have a internet copy, this is a great option and once Verizon FiOS and it’s 20-50 Mbps upload speed I may do this. Time Warner Cable on the other hand and it’s 386 kbps upload means it takes about 1 minute to upload each image to the cloud at the moment, shoot a thousand shots and see how long this really feels.

How are you backing up your pictures, am I missing anything else obvious?

We’ve pushed a new feature of the site live today, you’ll notice in the sidebar on the right that you now have a hot photography news section. This is a dynamically changing list of some of the most popular topics going around the photography world over the last five days.

Do you have a photography site that you would like included for inclusion? Submit your RSS feed url on the contact us page and we’ll get it added. When something your talking about catches on in the community it might just show up in our list.

Today I’m going to be starting some new projects on Knowphoto. I’ve felt myself in a rut photographically lately and I know I have not explored nearly enough of really anything to be feeling like this so I’ve decided to make a few changes. This my friends is a boon to you all, as your going to get to come along with me first hand.

Project 1 – Books
I’ve found myself looking at all of these great photography books and wondering if I could do that, if I could stick behind a project and make it happen from start to finish. To that end I’ve assigned my self not one but four book projects. These won’t necessarily be started or finished at the same time but will be something I’m brainstorming and working on.

Project 2 – Printing
With all of this shooting and digital editing and digital displaying of images one big thing that it seems were loosing is the art of printing and hanging prints. I am going to be exploring all aspects of printing at home including printers, papers, inks, setup and more.

Project 3 – More ScreenCasts
ScreenCasts have been popular here on Knowphoto but I’ve let them fall by the way side, that stops now. I am going to be coming out with one new tip a week for you via video. I’m also going to start to build a dedicated video page for the site that will contain all of the video posts we’ve had in the past and all we’ll include in the future.

Stay tuned I have great things planned!
Adam

Issues of copyright are key to photographers, copyrights of your images are your lifeblood when your a professional photographer.  So why is it that more and more often companies that hire out photographers are  trying to take more and more of those rights.  Frommers seems to have rubbed some photographers the wrong way recently and it’s becoming public thanks to the internet.

Bob Krist published a story recently of how Frommers is really trying to encroach on the rights of a photographer with their stock photography terms.  Frommers contacted Bob to license some of his work they wanted to not only license his work for a specific book but also have a perpetual license to re-use it whenever they see fit and to license it to anyone they want without the photographer knowing.  I didn’t have any way to verify the terms of Bob’s assertions with regards to licensing his photos for use in their books so I can’t verify this completely so please take this with a grain of salt.

However Bob did make another statement about Frommers that I can verify which lends credibility to his whole article.  Frommers is running a photo contest trying to get you to submit your photos for the contest but once you do they have given themselves full rights to use your photographs whenever and where ever they please.  It’s quite a gig they have going, they offer a few photographers a prize but the real prize for them is the thousands of photos that readers submit, they can now use in all their publications free of charge.

Partial Frommers Photography contest Official Rules

License: Participant retains ownership of the copyright in any submitted photographs. However, by entering photograph(s) in this Contest, participant grants Sponsor the irrevocable, perpetual right to edit, adapt, use and publish in any media now known or hereafter discovered any or all of the photographs without compensation to the participant, his or her successors or assigns, or any other entity. ENTERING A SUBMISSION IN THIS CONTEST CONSTITUTES PARTICIPANT’S IRREVOCABLE ASSIGNMENT, CONVEYANCE, AND TRANSFERENCE TO SPONSOR OF THE FOREGOING RIGHTS. Photograph(s) shall be given attribution credit based on the name supplied with submission. The winner shall work with Sponsor to change the file in any way deemed necessary for publication of the photograph(s). The participants shall supply, upon request, original, unmodified digital files.

It just goes to show you that even good intentions like those in the content can have alterior motives, in this case it seems pretty obvious that Frommers’ intentions are get lots of free photographs for their books.

What does this mean for photographers that shoot this kind of work? Life may become a little harder when your trying to work in the publishing world on a per image basis. With more and more companies trying to get something for nothing and getting more for less, the photographer seems to be getting squeezed harder then ever. What should a photographer do in a situation like this, let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Check out the full article

A couple of cool lists here, I’ll be updating this as I find more this season.

[Amazon Photo Deals](http://l.knowphoto.com/29)
[Black Friday Deals on Beyond Megapixels](http://l.knowphoto.com/25)
[Top 10 Gifts for Photographers from The Digital Story](http://l.knowphoto.com/26)
[Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals from Photo Bay](http://l.knowphoto.com/27)
[Huge list from Gizmodo, scroll 1/2 way down the page](http://l.knowphoto.com/28)
[Black Friday Deals from Wed Shooter](http://l.knowphoto.com/2a)