New Insta­gram Terms of Ser­vice.

The Facebook-ification is starting:

Some or all of the Ser­vice may be sup­ported by adver­tis­ing
rev­enue. To help us deliver inter­est­ing paid or spon­sored
con­tent or pro­mo­tions, you agree that a busi­ness or other entity
may pay us to dis­play your user­name, like­ness, pho­tos (along
with any asso­ci­ated meta­data), and/or actions you take, in
con­nec­tion with paid or spon­sored con­tent or pro­mo­tions, with­out
any com­pen­sa­tion to you.

Where by “meta­data”, they’re not talk­ing about expo­sure and shut­ter speed. They’re talk­ing about loca­tion. Just awful.

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

It’s actu­ally much worse than that. Accord­ing to the terms of ser­vice, not only Insta­gram may do basi­cally any­thing they want with your pho­tos, includ­ing license them out to oth­ers, they also say:

You rep­re­sent and war­rant that: (i) you own the Con­tent posted by you on or through the Ser­vice or oth­er­wise have the right to grant the rights and licenses set forth in these Terms of Use; (ii) the post­ing and use of your Con­tent on or through the Ser­vice does not vio­late, mis­ap­pro­pri­ate or infringe on the rights of any third party, includ­ing, with­out lim­i­ta­tion, pri­vacy rights, pub­lic­ity rights, copy­rights, trade­mark and/or other intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights; (iii) you agree to pay for all roy­al­ties, fees, and any other monies owed by rea­son of Con­tent you post on or through the Ser­vice; and (iv) you have the legal right and capac­ity to enter into these Terms of Use in your jurisdiction.

What that means you as the pho­tog­ra­pher could eas­ily wind up in very deep, very expen­sive legal trou­ble just because you used Insta­gram. Con­sider how this could play out: you take a photo of a ran­dom com­plete stranger on the street and dis­play it freely as an exam­ple of street pho­tog­ra­phy. So far, so good. How­ever, some­one in the PR depart­ment at a generic huge cor­po­ra­tion sees the photo and pays Insta­gram $100,000 to sub­li­cense your photo for a major adver­tis­ing cam­paign. You don’t get any say, or any of the money. Now it’s not look­ing so good. Now we’re get­ting into dan­ger­ous ter­ri­tory, because use of a person’s image for com­mer­cial pur­poses requires a signed model release–which doesn’t exist.

But it gets worse! The ran­dom per­son on the street sees the adver­tise­ments promi­nently fea­tur­ing their face and decides to sue. Because of the Insta­gram terms of ser­vice, you get hung out to dry by Insta­gram and the huge cor­po­ra­tion. Con­grat­u­la­tions, your lit­tle art photo taken with Insta­gram has cost you tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. Too bad your life is ruined because you didn’t read the terms of service.

This really is just like Face­book.

Seen on a mail­ing list:

“On demand” could con­ceiv­ably include any film that Kodak has ever man­u­fac­tured. Some­one in the audi­ence asked the inevitable ques­tion: “Includ­ing Kodachrome?” [Bev­erly Paster­czyk of East­man Kodak Co.‘s] answer: “Yes, includ­ing Kodachrome”. She added that while small runs of Kodachrome were unlikely, it was not out of the ques­tion, since they have had numer­ous inquiries.

To the ques­tion “How could this be made pos­si­ble?” her answer was intrigu­ing. “Vol­ume is the answer. Con­sumer groups of large num­bers of indi­vid­u­als could peti­tion for the return of a spe­cific film. This would include not only large com­pa­nies, but also indi­vid­u­als banded together such as cam­era clubs, espe­cially those with a large enough base such that they could col­lec­tively join on a national or even inter­na­tional basis”.

The ques­tion of pro­cess­ing isn’t really addressed here. I seem to remem­ber read­ing that Dwayne’s sold their pro­cess­ing equip­ment after they stopped pro­cess­ing Kodachrome. How­ever, if that were dealt with, it occurs to me that another com­pany could con­ceiv­ably order a pro­duc­tion run and then resell it, like the way that com­pa­nies buy graph­ics cards from a man­u­fac­turer and then resell them with their own com­pany name.

I came across this dump­ster with a pecu­liar sign on it recently. I won­der if this is some­thing that comes up often?

Despite hav­ing been out of Qual­ity Assur­ance for almost ten years, I still found myself writ­ing two bug reports at the same time as my film scan­ner was scan­ning this photo.

When a char­ac­ter in a movie says, “We’ll ride out at first light,” the scene when they ride out should prob­a­bly not be shot at around noon. Just because Hol­ly­wood exec­u­tives are too stu­pid to tell the dif­fer­ence doesn’t mean every­body is.

The frame counter reset on my Leica MP recently broke, so I took it to Samy’s Cam­era, the store I bought it from. I was afraid they’d tell me I had to send it back to Leica for repair (the last time I dealt with Leica it took them six months to repair a dam­aged lens), but for­tu­nately they told me it could be repaired in the store. To my sur­prise, it took only four days for them to fin­ish the work!

Aper­ture 3 adds Faces, Places, and improved local adjust­ment.

After a long wait, Apple has released the next major update to its pro-class photo work­flow appli­ca­tion, Aper­ture 3. The new ver­sion boasts over 200 new fea­tures, includ­ing the addi­tion of the suc­cess­ful facial recog­ni­tion and geo­t­ag­ging fea­tures, Faces and Places, that were intro­duced with iPhoto ’09. Ver­sion 3 also adds edge-detecting adjust­ment brushes for non-destructive local­ized edit­ing and touch-ups. Along with numer­ous UI and per­for­mance improve­ments, Aper­ture 3 adds full 64-bit sup­port on sup­ported sys­tems run­ning Snow Leopard.

Aper­ture has always had a focus on the work­flow of pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers, but Apple also mar­kets it for ama­teurs that want to move beyond the sim­plic­ity of iPhoto. Aper­ture 3 takes that even fur­ther, seem­ingly meld­ing more power and advanced man­age­ment with the fea­tures and ease of use of iPhoto.

[Ars Tech­nica]

I’d been inter­ested in Aper­ture since ver­sion two as a replace­ment for iView Medi­aPro, which was bought out and aban­doned by Microsoft years ago. How­ever, ear­lier ver­sions of Aper­ture couldn’t han­dle the very large files pro­duced by scan­ning 4×5 film (a slide pro­duces a file around 1.25 GB) and would crash if you tried to add one. That prob­lem has been fixed in ver­sion three–probably due to a com­bi­na­tion of 64-bit sup­port in Snow Leop­ard, and the fact that my Pho­to­shop sys­tem has 24 GB of RAM.

Kodachrome Ends 74-Year Run.

[The Online Pho­tog­ra­pher]

Kodachrome is my favorite color film. The patent for it has to be long-expired by now, so maybe we’ll get lucky and some­one else will start mak­ing it (under a dif­fer­ent name), the way that Fuji makes Polaroid film.

From a mail­ing list for music photographers:

What do pho­tog­ra­phers make?
*Salary data is from PayScale.com. Salaries listed are for full time work­ers with 5–8 years of expe­ri­ence and include any bonuses or profit sharing.

Free­lance pho­tog­ra­pher — $35,728
Pho­to­jour­nal­ist — $37,403
News pho­tog­ra­pher — $43,001
Fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher — $48,710
Sports pho­tog­ra­pher — $44,686

And peo­ple ask me why I don’t want to be a pro­fes­sional photographer…

From a com­ment refer­ring to the Gestapo harass­ing photographers:

That’s right; I don’t want to be too tech­ni­cal, but the focal length of the lens is directly cor­re­lated with hatred of Amer­ica. It goes some­thing like this:

You have a a cell phone cam­era, point and shoot, or 20mm wide angle lens: you are a red blooded Amer­i­can who wants to cel­e­brate our national her­itage by tak­ing pic­tures of pop­u­lar tourist locations.

A 50mm lens: you are also, by and large, a good Amer­i­can, but you have a dis­turb­ing inter­est in “under­stand­ing” the ter­ror­ists and why they attack us.

An 85mm lens: you loath your own coun­try and secretly admire the 9/11 hijack­ers for giv­ing us our come-up-ins. You are not a ter­ror­ist, but your cam­era should prob­a­bly be con­fis­cated and your pic­tures deleted, lest they find their way to al Jazeera mes­sage boards. Your mid­dle name may be Hussein.

A 200mm lens: you are an al Qaeda hench­man actively scout­ing for secu­rity vulnerabilities.

A 300mm lens: you ARE bin Laden!

And yes, every tri­pod is suit­able for launch­ing RPGs, but you need a ball head to attach heat seek­ing missiles.

Another Matt