The story of the monkeys that snapped photographs of themselves made the rounds last week. A photographer’s gear was borrowed by a band of monkeys, and they managed to squeeze off a few photos of themselves. Some of the photos are actually very interesting.
**Photograph on left copyright 2011, an unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia. Photograph on right copyright 2011, another unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia.**
Here’s where it gets muddy. The photographs were taken by the monkeys, not by the (human) photographer that lugged the gear to the spot. Copyright is granted to the creator of a work - the photographer, not the owner of the camera. So, in this case, if copyright applied it would belong to the individual monkeys that triggered the shutter.
I took this photo of Evan during the 2007 Calgary Stampede. We were in the kid’s section of the midway rides, and he was soaking in all of the excitement. He was almost 5 years old, so the sounds and lights and motion and energy had overstimulated him pretty strongly. Shortly after this, he hopped onto a dragon rollercoaster, and rode it until he nearly fell over. It was a good day.
I’ve decided to disable comments on my blog again.
I don’t care that the comment threads often wound up in left field talking about meta-meta-meta-social criticism. Having comments open invites that kind of thing to happen - it’s leaving an open mic plugged into the PA system, and inviting anyone to take it. That’s essentially the whole point of having open comments, to see where things go after hitting “Publish.”
Duncan Davidson, a photographer I’ve admired for years (he’s one of the guys behind the dailyshoot project), wrote up a fantastic description of the recent Kind of Bloop/Blue photograph copyright brouhaha. A photographer, Jay Maisel, takes an iconic photograph of Miles Davis. It’s an amazing photograph. It’s used for the cover of Davis’ Kind of Blue album. Wonderful stuff.
[caption id=“attachment_4951” align=“aligncenter” width=“530” caption=“Pixel-art image by Andy Baio. Photograph by Jay Maisel.”][/caption]
This is one of those photos that looks extremely dramatic, but has a boring and mundane backstory. I was doing housework - probably laundry or something equally exciting and glamorous - when I looked out of our bedroom window and saw these clouds. The sun was just about to set (nearly 9pm on a mid-July evening), causing some severe and dramatic lighting, and the storm cell was boiling up over downtown into higher altitude winds. I ran, grabbed my handy XT, slapped on the el cheapo 300mm lens and started messing around to see what I could capture. And then a plane moved into the frame. It was far away from the storm cloud, but the lighting and long focal length made it look like a narrow escape. Often, people think this photo was taken from the air, and that I was shooting down on the cloud. I wasn’t so lucky.
It’s describing an engagement process based on the goals of inclusiveness and sustainability, rather than corporate risk management. That approach could come in handy in lots of places.
We rode up Highway 40, over the Highwood Pass. The highest paved highway in Canada. It’s closed for the winter, and doesn’t open to motorized traffic until June 15, so it’s wide open for bicycles for the short period that it’s passable before being open.
The route we chose wasn’t long - total ride was just shy of 34km. Nothing fancy. But the elevation gain was 1850 feet, over the 17km climb to the summit. When we got to the top, there was still several feet of snow on the ground (recently cleared from the highway by road crews).
A blog of funny faux-historical tweets published a book a couple of years ago, and used one of my photos as the background for a twitter account of a caveman. Pretty cool. They’re going to print again, and the photo’s still in there.
The book’s available on Amazon.com. I don’t see a penny of sales, but I wouldn’t have seen a penny for that photo anyway…
This was taken during a session as part of the Open Education 2009 conference in Vancouver. David Wiley and Stephen Downes were meeting, to prepare a manuscript for a book on open education, and they agreed to conduct the meeting as an open conversation. The venue that was provided set the tone - the meeting took place in an old courtroom, with all of the trappings still visible, abandoned, behind them as they talked.
**Photograph on left copyright 2011, an unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia. Photograph on right copyright 2011, another unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia.**
