bikes and things

Building Design are at it again! Using my imagery without permission! So on last Friday the issue of BD hit my desk where I find there is a full page use of one of my site images of the Ashmolean Museum taken shortly before it opened to the public last October. Great I thought and nice to be published again.

They were provided this image in a press pack last year for FREE and have obviously kept it on their server for later use. Unfortunately the license was clear that a credit must always be provided. BD don’t seem to care about this bit. The copyright information is also clearly embedded in the IPTC metadata of the file.

So I’m going to send them an invoice for each time they use images against the terms of the license. It’s not as if it’s the first time it’s happened with images at BD? If they keep using this image uncredited in the rest of their marketing material for this event I should be in for quite a windfall.

Nice to see another of my images used in a prominent position on a well read website.

Not so nice to see that they couldn’t be bothered to credit the Photographer. Not much to ask is it?

So I finally had my first encounter with the law, or rather a Police Community Service Officer, whilst taking photos in a public place. I spent a fair bit of time last Tuesday in Hammersmith taking pictures of a building for some CGI renders. I was there during the afternoon with a tripod, dSLR and a fairly large shift lens as well as remote shutter release. About 30 mins after I had set up I was approached by a PCSO. Uh oh! I was told that I had been “seen” on CCTV and he would like to know what I was doing. Now, I’ve been through this scenario in my mind a number of times in anticipation of this situation. Most of them revolved around a smart arse reply such as, “…there’s a reason you haven’t made CID yet isn’t there?”. However all I could muster was an apologetic explanation of what I was doing. I was on work time so didn’t really want to cause a fuss. I needed to get these shots for the next morning and being arrested wasn’t on my list of things to do that day. I was asked for my details, name, date of birth, contact number etc. He was polite enough about it all. I did make the quip that I couldn’t have made it any more obvious what I was doing, it’s not exactly a discrete set up.

So I got my shots delivered for the next morning but I still felt as though he had no right to inquire about what I was doing. It was fairly obvious and it is a public place. He also had no right to have my details. Annoying but next time I think I’ll try and stand up for my rights a bit more.

Anyway, here’s the shot I came away with later in the day.

The shot is a horizontal stitch of three images taken with the amazing Nikkor 24mm PC-E lens. Each shot has the lens shifted up higher each time then assembled in Photoshop.

A rather large copy of one of my images of the Ashmolean Museum has been used on a number of websites last week – dezeen, The Independent, Building and the BBC. . Really like the image that they chose too and most gave a credit which was good. Nice to have my image sitting alongside some well known Architectural photographers.

More and more magazines seem to be struggling with making revenue when there is so much seemingly real time information coming out on the web. One of those organisations is Building Design who are owned by UBM media. They’ve stopped free circulation of their weekly paper to architects due to falling ad revenue. They’ve even locked the website down so that only registered users can login, presumably so they can track users habits and provide greater insight for their advertisers. The trouble is that the login system has completely broken down today. So as well as no weekly paper, the website is completely inaccessible. Seems like one hell of a balls up, but then that’s computers for you.

So instead of seeing news stories, I’m seeing this.

Found this little video on Tim Crocker’s site.

There’s something incredibly beautiful about it. Perfectly framed and composed architectural photography but with the movement of people within. Stunning and very inspirational!

It’s pay day today so it’s buy a book time. This month it’s a great book called Building with light by Robert Elwall. A bargain at £12.99, normally £40!

Funnily enough I met him briefly the other night at a lecture and he happens to be picture editor at RIBA Pictures. Looking forward to sitting down properly with this one.

For a long while I stopped buying CDs, books and journals. I don’t know why I stopped, maybe I felt a bit burnt out from my Diploma at Portsmouth or maybe I’d just lost interest. Anyway I’ve started buying books again each month. I kind of think this has something to do with getting interested in Architectural Photography. As well as looking at the Architecture I’m constantly scanning the images to see how they have been done, who the Photographer is etc. I set aside a little money maybe £50 – £60 and then buy a few nice books. Emma also has started doing this, she buys four novels a month and aims to read one a week. She calls hers “Brain Food”, I call mine “Eye Candy”. This month I kind of blew my budget a bit but never mind.

So the books in order are (top left clockwise)…

Happenstance by David Solomons
Underground by David Solomons. Both are available to buy here.
A Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman
Henk Snoek: Architectural Photography
Stanton Williams: Volume

Looking forward to this talk by Morley Von Sternberg. Should be good!