Nova Scotia's Treasures

Another wonderful day touring around Nova Scotia's South Shore! Not far from Halifax we hit Lunenburg, where the Bluenose II was in port. We were able to climb around on the sailing vessel and appreciate the grandeur of the ship that's on the Canadian dime.

Before that we stopped at Rissers Beach. We got a second chance at swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. What a great feeling to be bobbing in the warm salt water. After our beach visit, we hit the Lobster Wagon in Lunenburg for the best haddock fish 'n chips I've ever tasted. Another highlight was the cable ferry trip across the river at LeHave.

Peggy's Cove and Lobster - Nova Scotia

Yes, they are clichés, but some things just have to be done! On a trip to Halifax you have to do the typical touristy things. If you go to Calgary, you need to eat Alberta beef and visit Banff, and when you go to Halifax you need to eat lobster and visit Peggy's Cove.

Luckily for us it was a glorious sunny day absent of tour buses. Peggy's Cove is smaller than a postage stamp, but it has an immense amount of charm and appeal. The surf is mesmerizing and wildly dangerous. Sitting on the granite rock formations and watching it is like being on another planet. There are a few kooky types around - the woman at the base of the lighthouse on her squeeze box and another welcoming you with bagpipes. The whole experience is somewhat surreal.

The drive back to Halifax included a wade into the Atlantic Ocean at a roadside beach. At 19 C it was practically tropical. After that, we picked up a couple of live lobster at the SuperStore and created a feast. A walk along the Halifax boardwalk under the full moon completed a superb day!

Image Theft - A Rant

I was checking my web stats last night, when I found a site using one of my images (shown here) without my permission. Amazing what you can learn from your stats! It wasn't a big multi-national or anything, but a blog. The person took a stock image off my portfolio site. It had my copyright symbol clearly on the top of the image. It wasn't even cropped off. There was no credit, no link back to my site (in fact it was linked to Nike's site), nor was I asked if they could "use" it. Needless to say I was a bit taken aback at first, and then I became angry. This is what I wrote to the blog:

I noticed that you poached a triathlon photograph from my commercial web site and posted it on your blog. This is in violation of International copyright law. The photo that you stole, even has the copyright symbol still on it, which is not necessary under law, just a friendly reminder in case people don't know.

I am a commercial photographer. I make my living shooting and selling images. I give many free hours of my time and photographic expertise to amateur sports associations and athletes, however since you didn't ask my permission, nor gave me a link or credit back to my own website and/or stock photography library, I must bill you for the usage of this photo.

This photo can be purchased with a Royalty Free license at web resolution for only $20. Please do so from the link here. As a courtesy to me I would also like the Nike link removed from my photo and instead paste this link in its place.

Just because you can access and "right" click "just a picture from the web" as you call it, does not mean that you can or should do this. Just like it's illegal to download copyrighted music, it is also illegal to download photos without consent and in most cases payment to the artist. Triathlon costs a lot of money to participate in. The cost of traveling to races, wet suits, running shoes and especially bikes keeps many people out of the sport. Surely you can afford $20 to support someone who cares deeply about supporting athletes, especially women in sports.

I get sick of people not respecting copyright and just thinking that everything on the internet is free for the taking if you can. There are enough $1 images around that there should be no need for anyone to steal any photographs anymore.

Sure, I could build a flash website to prevent this type of thing, but they aren't as SEO friendly as HTML sites. I would lose my high ranking in Google, plus, the updates would be slower to do and I'd probably have to hire an expert to make changes. I just want people to "get it" and stop poaching photos of people's sites. Do you steal food off the shelves in the grocery store - just because you have access to it?

If this person would have asked me for the photo instead of stealing it, I would probably have given it to them in exchange for a link to my PhotoShelter Archive. As it stands now, I'm just ticked off! Possession, as they say is 9/10 of the law. They stole it. I found it. Now they must pay!

Balzac, Alberta - Heritage Day

I'm sure many of you have seen the hit TV series Corner Gas. Many small towns on the prairies have similar set ups. One of those is the store in Balzac, Alberta. The Balzac Store has a wonderful café full of nostalgic decorations with old movie star photos, horse tack and saddle sales, and of course gas (which sells for less than in suburban Calgary only a few kilometers away). On the east side of the gas station along the railway tracks, sits a traditional prairie grain elevator housing the Balzac Seed Cleaning Plant. On the west side a couple of churches.

The fate of this corner is precarious as the Balzac mega mall and accompanying exit ramps have already forced the closure of the nearby garden centre. I was in the garden centre the other day hoping to find discounted perennials and it was already looking like a ghost town. I also noticed that the Balzac store had a "For Sale" sign on the side of it. I don't know what the fate of the store is as I didn't have a chance to speak to the owners about it during the busy lunch hour when I was there, but I suspect they will also succumb to the suburban "progress" of nearby Calgary.

If you get a chance, stop in and have a club sandwich special at the Balzac Store, fill up your car with gas, and enjoy the nostalgia while it exists. The Balzac Store is at the Highway 566 exit on the west side of Highway 2 (QE2) just north of Calgary.

UPDATE: The grain elevator of the Balzac Seed Cleaning Plant has now been leveled. I'm so glad I was able to get some photos of it before that happened.

AMPA and Uppercase Gallery Host an Evening of Design Pairing

Read on for an event of note, I'd like to pass along. Janine Vangool designed my corporate portfolio and logo a couple of years ago, and I've had nothing but compliments on it. I hired her because among other things, she designs beautiful books and magazines. I will be in Halifax the day of this event, but I encourage you to attend. I wish I could!

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July 22, 2007 (Calgary, AB) – The Alberta Magazine Publishers Association has partnered with Art Central’s Uppercase Gallery to host a gathering for designers and design-lovers on Thursday, August 14 from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

Design Pairings is a networking and learning opportunity, featuring a talk and design feedback from Uppercase founder and proprietor Janine Vangool. The evening focuses on pairings: which typeface perfectly suits which image? Plus, Uppercase will have all its best toys on hand: letraset, woodtype, dimensional letters, rubber stamps, stickers, pegboard letters, typewriters, etc. so that people can play with type. No computers—this is all hands-on.

Janine Vangool graduated from the Visual Communications program at the Alberta College of Art & Design in 1995. Her solo design studio, Vangool Design & Typography, was formed the following year. Her client focus remains in arts and culture, creative small business and publishing. Past and current clients include Calgary Opera, ACAD, Ottawa Art Gallery, TRUCK gallery, Art Central, Beyond Magazine and Whitecap Books. Her award-winning work has been included in Communication Arts Design Annuals. She was a member of the 2007 Alternative Pick illustration jury and was a judge for the 2006 Junos’ music packaging category.

Join AMPA and Uppercase for fun and fascinating evening with local designers, design enthusiasts, and magazine professionals. Entry is free, with a complimentary wine and cheese to follow.

Design Pairings begins at 7:00 pm

Uppercase Gallery
#204, 100 - 7th Ave SW (upper level of Art Central), Calgary

-30-

For more information, contact:
Anh Chu, Communications and Program Assistant

ampa@albertamagazines.com T: 403.262.0081 F: 403.670.0492

Grizzly Hare Scramble

This past Saturday July 19th, I shot the kids Grizzly Hare Scramble XC motorbike race. What a blast! Girls and boys as young at 5 were racing their bikes through the Maclean Creek Recreational Area just southwest of Bragg Creek, Alberta. The kids were great and were very keen to hang out with me when they weren't racing. The weather was great too, so that made it all the more fun.

It wasn't the easiest event to photograph and I was a bit disappointed with my camera's (Canon 5D) servo focus. I have photographed many mountain bike races and other fast action sports using servo as well as manual focus, but the camera focus could not keep up with the action in this event. I'm pretty sure it's not the lens, as I've shot ski racing with my old EOS3 with no problems tracking focus. Maybe it's time to upgrade to a higher-end sports shooting camera.

Other technical details: I shot using fill flash for many of the images, with my Canon 580EX flash set at -1 using TTL and the High shutter speed setting. I shot using all sorts of shutter speeds as I was experimenting, but 1/800s and higher speeds seemed to freeze the action best. I used 400 and 800 ISO to try and keep decent depth of field, but that wasn't always easy, especially in the trees. Lots of mixed lighting in the trees made post processing a bit of a challenge too. One or two images would have been fine, but having to deal with hundreds was daunting. Shooting in RAW saved me.

Just like the triathlon, I focussed on the individual athletes as opposed to the event as a whole. My goal is to sell files and prints to the riders through my PhotoShelter Personal Archive. Check out the Grizzly Hare Scramble gallery. It was the first time I shot motor cross country and I learned a lot by doing it. Great workout too! My butt was sore from all the crouching and hiking along the course. A special thanks to Joal (#75) and Owen (#900) and their parents for inviting me to the races. And congrats to Joal for winning his race, and to Owen for placing 3rd in his!

Coral Springs Triathlon Photos Now Online

Summer has been slow to come in Calgary this year, but I've managed to get some great shooting days for the events I'm covering. July 13th, I shot the Coral Springs Triathlon in Calgary. With that, I'm using my PhotoShelter Personal Archive to sell personal use licensing of those event photos. It's a great self-serve selling system. I'm not a computer or web programming whiz, so I opted to use PhotoShelter for online sales. Once the uploading of images is done, the client is able to purchase the files from the archive, with no further interaction on my part. I also set up PayPal to collect the money. PhotoShelter has very thorough instructions on how to set everything up. Configuration of PhotoShelter and PayPal still took a couple of hours though, mostly because several decisions need to be made during the process, and I was back and forth with the instructions a lot.

On the subject of uploading, even with high-speed Internet, it took a couple of days to upload 300+ jpg format photos ~2MB in size. Of course this wasn't constant uploading, I sent the files in batches of 30 or so, in between the post processing of all the raw files. I realize though, that this is a process that needs streamlining or automating, and next time I have hundreds of files, I need to figure that out better.

As far as the personal use licensing, I'm going this way as the photos are unique to each athlete so the market for the photos is very limited. Plus, none of the photos are model released. I will also sell prints, but in order to do so using PhotoShelter, I would have to use an American supplier and all the pricing would be in $US. My events are all very local to Calgary, and I don't feel right selling in $US. I'll sell prints if people contact me directly, but since most people do their own printing, I'm not counting on that. I'm hoping that eventually, PhotoShelter will partner with a print supplier in Canada so that production and shipping costs will be less, and will also be in $CAD. Maybe Technicare would be interested? They would be a perfect partner, as they have labs from Vancouver to Winnipeg, so could service the country well.