LINK: Content Creation and Stock Photography.

Anyone that has blogged for any length of time has come across this problem. You have a story idea but no image to go with it. Sometimes we run into this problem as photographers as well. 9 out of 10 times we will have just the image we need, but occasionally no matter how hard we search our hard drives, that perfect photo eludes us.

When this happens its nice to have access to some free stock photography to use in your designs. Check out this article from The Design Blog on using morguefile.com for stock photography and content creation.

Full article here.

Needed a quick image to create a graphic for a Spanish language blog. Using morguefile.com you can find some great images to use in a pinch.

Can A Monkey Have Copyright ?

I thought this was an interesting take on copyright and a legal battle against wiki commons over this image.

Cute little guy snapped a selfy and now there's a fight over who owns copyright.

Since I started my amateur photography hobby, I've become fascinated by copyright law. So many things I never thought about before, effect copyright. Whether you're an amateur or professional, so many factors have to be considered when profiting from a photo. For instance I never knew you needed property rights when photographing a building or property for that matter.

Then you have all the privacy issues involved in street photography, when you just randomly photograph a person on the street.  Anyway, I thought this was a cute story, and worthy of a post link here. I'm really curious to see which way the court leans. Frankly, I don't think wiki commons has a leg to stand on , but who knows.


Italic text taken from telegraph article.

Wikimedia, the US-based organisation behind Wikipedia, has refused a photographer’s repeated requests to remove one of his images which is used online without his permission, claiming that because a monkey pressed the shutter button it should own the copyright.

Full story here. 

Who do you think owns the copyright ? 

Putting Some Photos To Use.

Its been about a year and a half since I started this hobby. In that time I've accumulated a lot of photos. Some photographs are good, some not so much. I started wondering what I should do with all these photos I've captured.

I uploaded a few to my http://morguefile.com/creative/newaeondesign. My policy with morguefile is that with every image I download and use , I upload an image to give back to the community. This isn't required, but I thought it would be a good personal policy. Currently I think I have 8 images there. If your on morguefile click on the link and follow me .

Autumn in Western New York. One or the images currently found in my morguefile account. You can use the image for just about anything and the license agreement can be found with the image.

I uploaded a few to my flickr.com. I'm new to flickr and just started using it. Most of my images are rights reserved and I watermark them, but I put a few others up under CC license. I tend to put my better shots and things I'm experimenting with on flickr.

One of the last images I took. This is one of my favorites and I uploaded it to flickr.

This barely even covers the amount of photos I've taken in the last year and a half. What good is a hobby if you can't make good use of it ? What to do ? I decided to merge 2 hobbies. I love learning Spanish, and I love taking photographs so I merged these two hobbies together and created a Learn Spanish blog. Enter mi-palabra-del-dia.com

One of the images being used on mi-palabra-del-dia.com. I love the way the dog looks like he's smiling in this picture. Not a really great photo, but more than acceptable for what it's being used for.

This has worked out really well for a couple reasons. 1) I now have motivation to take pictures of everything and use them on the Spanish language blog. 2) Even the pictures that aren't that great (most of them) I can put to use on the Spanish language blog. Every image gets labeled in Spanish now and uploaded to my blog. Well not every image but you get the point. 3) Last but not least I can use the blog as a makeshift portfolio of my graphic design work, and photography work to show to my New Aeon Design customers. I need to start putting a portfolio together.

Anyway, this has really helped me to get motivated, take more pictures, and get my work out there. That's really what this post is about. Finding things to keep you motivated, keep you snapping pictures, and of course putting those images to use !

Use Gimp To Turn A Color Photo Black And White And Add Fog.

Here's two tutorials I used to turn a color photo taken on a sunny day into a darker goth style image using Gimp. This is the original photo taken in a cemetery on a fairly sunny day.

Using the tutorial found at the Gimp website. I changed this to this.

I also made some slight adjustments using Colors/brightness-contrast.Then using the tutorial found at gimpguru. I added some fog.

The entire process took under 20 minutes, and changed a bright sunny day into a darker Gothic style seen.

Ansel Adams - One Of My Favorites

One of my favorite photographers has to be Ansel Adams. I love the way he makes some scenes look almost other worldly. I'm also such a big fan of black and white. Ansel was the master of outdoor black and white photography !

If you would like to learn more about Ansel Adams you can click here for a wiki.

Here's another great article about him written by the Sierra Club.

If you would like to check out some of Ansel Adams work, or if your not familiar with him, I found a great library of his various works hosted in the National Archives. You can see some of this photography here.