When I post an image on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/cameratraining/ I see what people like, and comment on:
So I see someone “shared” my post. Nice. I’d like to see who, of course; so I click on the link. Now I get this:
Seems very odd that someone is allowed to share my copyrighted picture, but I am not allowed to know who this is. Doesn’t it? Facebook has some odd “policies”, and it appears this is another one. Photographers, beware.
Thousands of visits a day – keep ’em coming! And for all my new readers: I welcome comments here, and especially questions to answer. I’ll approve you upon your first post, then you can comment whenever you like.
Sitting back and waiting!
When you use TTL flash (automatically metered flash), you can get great images – I use TTL all the time. Like in this image of Anastasia:
But sometimes, oooh, it goes wrong and the image goes too dark. Like here:
What happened?
I’ll tell you what. Your camera’s evaluative/3D Color Matrix metering tries to expose well, and to avoid over-exposed areas.
And that watch is reflecting the flash. So it would be over-exposed. So the camera tells the flash to fire at lower power- to avoid that. Hence, the rest of the image is underexposed.
Simple, once you know: in TTL flash images, avoid reflective surfaces like the watch!
Be careful to question dogma – in photography like everywhere else.
Two items of such dogma:
So this is not OK?
Sure it is. No rule, even the best ones, always holds. Sometimes art can be made by breaking rules you thought were sacrosanct!
Prior to a class the other day, I decided to do a very quick self portrait or two. Let me share, and explain how.
How? This is how:
Not bad eh?
Finally, one more with a different gel on the background flash: egg yolk yellow, my favourite colour.
Total time taken: Maybe two, three minutes.
Ha ha – I am not the only person to take issue with what I see as Facebook’s Taliban mentality! Read this, in Gawker:
An interesting read, and it underscores my warning about the excessive power wielded by Facebook.
And about the Taliban nature of their policies. I will tell you what I find obscene: the fact that an implied vagina is deemed worse than crushed heads, deep wounds, and excessive blood. That is sick.
I am using a flash and my image is too dark! What’s wrong?
It could be any of several things. The top ones in this handy checklist:
Now try again!
In continued protest at Facebook and its prudishness, its heavy-handedness, its terms of service, its rude suspension of my account from its monopoly service for a perfectly OK image (see yesterday’s post), and its “no questions, no appeal” process, I am going black for the day. As far as I recall, this is the first day since I started this blog that I have had no post.
The Economist warned in an article last week that things like this would happen, and that Facebook had better be careful (I paraphrase) – regulators will increasingly look at them, and users will increasingly dislike them. Even in a monopoly situations, having your market dislike you is not a great idea.
So here’s today’s image of the day:
See you all tomorrow (and for my Facebook friends, in a few days time).
From where I stand, Facebook has the morality, or the sad excuse thereof, of a Taliban mullah. I have now been banned for three days for “abusing facebook features” for posting an entirely innocent image, much tamer than many I have seen.
It was the following, funny in my opinion, set-up shot, made in honour of another photographer who shot the same model in a similar shot some years ago:
Um, and now, it appears, I am “abusing features”?
It is hard to describe the contempt I feel for these morons.
Now, when I log in, I see this:
The only section in there that seems even remotely to offer a reason for the ban is this:
That to me is not nudity – nothing showing. It is definitely not not pornography; it is also certainly not sexual, let alone “inappropriately sexual”. if they think this is sexual, they are sick.
The dictionary I just consulted says that nudity means the state of being nude, which they say means this:
“nude (njuːd) — adj 1. completely unclothed; undressed 2. having no covering; bare; exposed”.
That does not apply here, so I must conclude that Facebook has redefined nudity as “anything remotely hinting that there may be nudity somewhere”. The Taliban, in other words.
So am I being ungrateful to Facebook? They are providing a free service, after all?
No way.
“Noblesse oblige”. If you are a monopoly, you have to be careful not to abuse that. You will be held to stricter standards. Facebook will find, one day, that its value is limited by its behaviour.
In the mean time, let me express how sorry I am for my American friends who have to live in a land ruled in part by their equivalent of the Taliban.
And censorship does not work. You can now go look at many more images – and these are NSFW, and do contain nudity – on my Tumblr page, here. Tumblr is not ruled by Taliban.
POST EDIT: Thanks to all my photographer friends from SPS, who have been universally supportive (and annoyed at FB’s prudishness).
I took this shot of jazz great Peter Appleyard, the wizard of the vibraphone, back in 2009:
So how did I do this – what was behind my decisions?
Here’s my thinking and execution:
This is the thinking that goes though a photographer’s mind quickly. Practice the same – think about things like lens, light, exposure, and composition. You will see you will get quick at this just by asking the right questions.