Flickr and Links

This post is a bit of a rant that’s been building for a while but bear with me! Especially if you use Flickr.

I’ve long thought it strange that whenever you add a link in Flickr, either as part of your profile within a caption for one of your images, they rewrite it to add in a rel=”nofollow”. The effect of this tag is to stop a search engine (which obviously ranks Flickr quite highly) from following the link and therefore helping your own site’s search ranking.

This is a common thing to do in comments (in fact this blog’s comments do that) as a means to avoid spammers improving the search ranking of their phishing sites. However to do it in my own profile and captions has always struck me as ungenerous and somehow against the community spirit of the web.

The above issue aside, as you will know I have this site, and my portfolio site www.importedlight.com and recently I began experimenting with adding links from some of my travel photography to one or other of these sites. However I ran into a problem.

Working in the web analytics industry and using Google Analytics on both my sites, I of course wanted to include the Google Analytics utm_source, medium and campaign tags on the links so I could see how effective they were at driving traffic to my sites. The problem is, if you do this and then make the linked text anything that looks like a URL or domain (i.e. www.importedlight.com) Flickr would rewrite the linked text to be the same as the actual link href. Linked text that didn’t look like a URL (i.e. “My Site”) works just fine. Read the rest of this entry »

Lightroom Develop Tools Explained

So I keep promising – to you and to myself – to sort out a series of Lightroom tutorials on here. However real life keeps interrupting and as this isn’t my full time job the project keeps getting pushed back. I can only apologise and say thank god for others more committed who I can link to!

One such committed individual is Brandon Oelling over on the X= Blog. After soliciting feedback, one reader emailed to indicate that they wanted more information on the items in the right-hand menu of the Develop module – especially things such as the tone curve and detail panel.

Thankfully Brandon has come to their aid with a great post listing each of the tools available in the Develop panels along with links to articles that go into more detail on each.

So if you’re having trouble with the develop module or just want a refresher on what a particular panel does then check out the X= article “Everything in the Right Hand Menu“. As for my Lightroom series I’ll see if I can get something out this year (but no promises!).

Copyright on your images

The Digital Photography School site has posted an article on “An Introduction to Creative Commons Licensing for Your Photographs” and whilst its a useful resource and I respect the work the Creative Commons organisation is doing, I have problems with marking any of my images in this way.

From both personal experience and that of my friends there seems to be a general belief that if an image is licensed with Creative Commons then anyone can use it pretty much however they want. Unfortunately this is not how the license works and at a minimum you are often required to provide a credit and link back to the image owner. Creative Commons is also frequently used to allow hobby bloggers, etc to use the image but to restrict commercial use. However again there have been cases where images have been used for monetary or commercial projects under the mistaken belief that Creative Commons allowed this.

As mentioned, I think Creative Commons is a good idea (in principle) however the organisation behind it needs to do a lot more promotion and publicity to educate people on the ground about how it works. In addition, its not clear what you would do if your license was violated. The Creative Commons team itself cannot provide legal advice or support. Finally, even the creator of Creative Commons – Lawrence Lessig – when asked whether using an image marked “Non-commercial” on a blog that contains, for example, Google Ads would be a violation responded “I don’t know”. This is due to the fact that many of these cases have not yet been tested in a court of law.

If you’re really worried about people stealing your work, then don’t put it online! However if you do, certainly for now, I would recommend using an “all rights reserved” note at least until Creative Commons is better understood and better tested.

DNG Dicsussion Continues…

I’ve discussed it. Many other sites have discussed it. Today it’s Matt Kloskowski’s turn. He’s just posted an article over on his blog – Lightroom Killer Tips – about whether or not use DNG.

Like many of the other articles (and me!) he recommends converting to DNG and listed a selection of the concerns and comments around why others might not feel comfortable doing this.

Follow the link below to check out the full article on his site.

To DNG or Not to DNG? (Lightroom Killer Tips)

Best of 2009

Above is a video showcasing my favourite shots from the past twelve months. Enjoy!

Happy New Year – and here’s to another great year of photography!

The Blue Mosque

Well I’m back from a brief trip to Turkey and must say I’m very impressed with Istanbul. There’s so much to see and do within a nice compact area it makes it a great destination for a short break. Although if you’re a photographer there’s so much to shoot you’ll definitely want to return!

I don’t think I’ve ever taken as many dusk and night shots as I did on this trip but some of the main attractions, such as the Blue Mosque above, look so good lit up its difficult not to!

I’m still working through all the photos I shot during the past week and once complete I’ll be putting the gallery up over on Imported Light. I’ll be posting more then on the trip.

Site Update & Happy Holidays

Well as you might be able to tell, now that I’ve moved my galleries over to my new site (www.importedlight.com) I thought it was time to clean things up here too. It should all be back working again now but if you do spot anything I’ve overlooked feel free to use the contact form and let me know.

I’m about to head off for a few days to Istanbul, Turkey. Hopefully with the weather we’ve had over the last few days I’ll still be able to get there so look out for some new images in the new year.

So all that remains is for me to wish you all happy holidays wherever you are and whatever you’re doing and I hope 2010 is full of perfect photography moments for you!

Importing DNG and Importing Light

See what I did there? No… well read on. You will…

Firstly, there’s a great write up over on the X= blog about why you should import and convert your photos to Adobe’s DNG format. Definitely worth a read.

Secondly, apologies for it being a little quite round here of late. I’ve been working on a new site that I will be moving all my travel photography over to in due course and it took slightly longer than anticipated. Although its not 100% complete yet it is now open to visitors and you can check it out at www.importedlight.com. Be sure to check out the galleries option which displays a world map showing where each of the photo sets were taken.

If you’ve got any comments on either using DNG (are you a fan or not?) or feedback on the new site, add them below!

Riding into the night

Taken at the Christmas Market in Leeds.

Keyword Sets

As you may know I use Lightroom quite a bit and the keyword lists I created for Lightroom are one of the most popular things on this site. However its not always easy working your way through the hierarchies of keywords to add them to your images. Even typing the start of a keyword and then using the drop-down list of words that appears is not a one-click process.

A recent post on The Lightroom Lab covers an oft overlooked feature in Lightroom – Keyword Sets. These allow you to create small collections of keywords that you use frequently or that are specific to certain shoots and allow you to add them to selected images via a single click.

Follow the link below for more information on this including a handy tip (which I didn’t know about) to switch between multiple keyword sets via a quick keyboard shortcut.

The Lightroom Lab: Keyword Sets Make Repetitive Keywording Push Button Easy