© Liz Kearsley 2010 Richard Gustin (left) and Marcus Guske (right) of Bluepoint Investment Corp pictured at this year's Yorkton Film Festival with Minister Dustin Duncan and Valerie Creighton.

“Bluepoint offered the best bid,” Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport Minister Dustin Duncan said.  “Along with buying the assets there is also a commitment to buy new Saskatchewan programming content that will support the film industry and to develop digital content.”

© Liz Kearsley 2010 Dustin Duncan, Minister of tourism, parks, culture and sport, Saskatchewan speaking at this year's Yorkton Film Festival lunch in his honour.

Bluepoint are planning to ensure a community focus is alongside growing as a broadcaster, and the government felt they were the best fit to ensure a continuation of a Saskatchewan educational broadcaster.

CEO and founder of Bluepoint Investment Corporation Bruce Claassen reiterated that by saying: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to operate SCN in the spirit of its original vision, yet with a real chance to grow its audience base with additional programming.”

© Liz Kearsley 2010. Bronwyn Malloy on Spanish Banks, Vancouver. Shot for Ahimsa Media

Many photographers have become fearful of the internet, in recent years.  It is a double edged sword, a great tool for getting our work seen by a wider audience, but it’s also hard to track images, copyright infringements and keep up to date on where and how to safely display our portfolio.

I was rarely lucky to be trained in photographic law, the importance of retaining copyright and it’s worth.  However, with an increasing number of people entering photography from a range of backgrounds, it is becoming vital for us all to keep up to date on the legalities of copyright and how the internet affects your rights as a photographer.

The easy part first: if you take a photograph, whatever it is of, (unless you agree e.g. through a staff job or by written contract) you own the copyright.  You do not need to register your photographs in order to activate it.  However, if you are uploading images to online sites or submitting to any news outlets, competitions … etc. you must, must read the terms and conditions as many will remove all of your rights.

There is infinite depth to this topic, so today I am going to try to simply highlight a few key issues that are likely to affect the majority.

A screen shot of one of Ahimsa Media client Yorkton Film Festival's watermarked albums on Facebook

The most prevalent image outlets in my mind are the ever growing social media sites. They are wonderful tools for connecting with friends and networking, but are not designed to protect the photographer, quite the opposite. Take for example Facebook, they have been recently hitting the headlines due to the site’s privacy laws. From a photographic point of view, their terms have another massive problem. Every time you upload a photograph to Facebook you agree that :

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

What this means is that as long as your photos are on Facebook, they can be used by Facebook without paying you. They don’t prevent you selling elsewhere, but can use your pictures for free.  For this reason I ensure any content I place on facebook is watermarked.  Of course, the vast majority of snaps we put on Facebook are not commercially viable, so you have to decide what you don’t mind being used by others.

Facebook terms, however, are not the only thing we should be fearful of.  An even more worrying feature for the future is the stripping of photograph metadata, and as a result the loss of all copyright contact information.

Metadata is a photograph’s embedded information.  It is contained within the photograph and is there to inform the viewer / potential buyer how the photo was shot, by whom and what it is of.  Some of this data is automatically recorded by the camera (it does depend on which camera you have, how much, if any, is recorded).  For example, the camera settings, f-stop, shutter speed, ISO.  Other information is inputed by the photographer using editing software, like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.  We use this to record our copyright information, website, keywords, captions. … etc … etc.   It ensures that anyone who may wish to use your image knows who to contact for permission.

A screen shot of an image in Adobe Photoshop with the metadata box (file info) open to edit.

In the past (and even at current), metadata has been enough to cover us legally should anyone try to use a photo without permission, as you have included your contact information and if they do not follow up it is a copyright breach on their part.  However there are new laws in the works in both the US and UK relating to Orphan Works.

Without getting too technical, in the last 12 months, both countries have come close to passing bills, which if passed, would have legislated the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search (an orphans work).  That would mean anyone could use any of your photographs that are not watermarked or do not contain metadata.  Currently strong industry opposition has prevented this legislation, but many think it is only a matter of time before it becomes a reality.

In layman’s terms and in the words of Copyright Action, this is what this bill would mean:

Essentially, if photos were cars, so long as the numberplate is missing (or you can get rid of it and claim it was missing), you’ll be able to legally TWOC and use it on payment of a fee to the Government.

And facebook is not the only one to strip your metadata. Most social media sites and blog providers strip that data too. Why? Because doing so saves a little bit of space per image, and with millions of uploads, site providers think this is worthwhile.  They realize few people are aware of the affect that this could have, and I must admit before writing this post, even I was unaware of the extent of sites stripping data.

US photographer, David Riecks, has been doing some research into metadata stripping and his early results shocked me.  He has created Controlled Vocabulary to document tests on different sites and see how they change photo uploads.  As expected, Facebook, Twitter and Google Docs removed all metadata. Flickr retained the content (despite my hearing comments to the contrary).  Currently getting mixed information with blog, like WordPress and Blogspot, so testing that further.  Will get back to you with my findings.

If you are worried about your rights and the law regarding your images, there are a few ports of call I try to keep an eye on: firstly Carolyn E. Wright’s photo attorney website, as she is uniquely useful being a full time photographer attorney, who is also a professional photographer.  Out of Britain I have found EPUK invaluable.  They deal primarily with the editorial market, but their sister site Copyright Action contains a great deal of useful basic information for both photographers and image buyers.  And finally Pro-imaging is great for a variety of information.

Alyzee Lakhani on Spanish Banks beach, shot for Ahimsa Media.

Caption accuracy and editing used to be the main tasks us photographers had to focus on following a shoot.  Today that has all changed.  With a multitude of platforms to display our photographs, most freelancers now have to get to grips with internet distribution too, on sites like photoshelter, flickr and stock agencies.  As a result intelligent and extensive keywording has become a vital tool.

My newspaper background means that I have always been most at home with the new agencies for any sales beyond a newspaper or magazine.  I, like many British press photographers, have many photographs listed with Alamy, yet as my client list widens so do the places I display my work, and with that I have found my workflow techniques evolving.

Everyone has their own process of editing using different software, be it the camera’s e.g. Nikon Browser, professional e.g. Adobe Lightroom or computer based e.g. iphoto.  I use Adobe Lightroom and have found it is a great time saver for multi-use captioning and keywording, as well as embedding photographer information into your images prior to editing.

However it was not until I uploaded our coverage of the 2010 Yorkton Film Festival to flickr that I discovered just how much time can be saved by properly preparing your images.  I’ll use Lightroom processes here as an example, but different software has similar options.

When I open up Lightroom 2 and attach a memory card an option box pops up (see below).  It includes a variety of things you can input for the entire photo batch.  In the local newspaper game each download usually involved several jobs so I wouldn’t fill much of this in, bar my copyright information, (which I have pre-programmed) so I would put in minimal keywording or captioning then download the pictures.

A lightroom screen grab of opening page information

This has recently changed when I realised just how much time can be saved by keywording each image prior to upload and to batch keyword jobs initially. One reason for this is that on flickr you must place quotation marks around each phrase longer than one word to tag or keyword and then a simple space between single words.  Whereas, most other systems use the simple comma to separate phrases.  As a result most of us need to continually remind ourselves to use this method, and it can become awkward when cutting and pasting repeating words.

Whereas, in Lightroom you can place your group keywords in that initial download and then easily add individual words whilst editing.  Take for example the image below:

Screen shot of Adobe Lightroom 2, with keywording options open

On the right hand side of the page the panel gives a variety of keywording options.  You have a list of the keywords already attached to the image (from initial download), then a section to add more, and options for the programme to remember past keywords in groups for you.  It allows you to easily click and add without re-typing.  I tend to keep that option on recent keywords, due to my varying shoots.   Below the keywording panel, is also a keyword list, with ALL your past keywords, which can be handy if you forget spellings. Below this is a section detailing your metadata.  The metadata is crucial picture information: copyright information, caption and shooting data.  This can be edited at either the download section, or within Lightroom. You can also input it in Adobe Photoshop.  (I will explain in a further post the importance of metadata in relation to copyright theft and in particular facebook)

I have found that inputting all of this information into Lightroom significantly speeds up my uploads and keeps my files up to date should I wish to use the photos on a different outlet.  It also means that my contact information stays with my image (bar placing on facebook) so if you wish to upload to various sites you do not need to keep typing the same information.

Embedded information is also very useful should you later wish to put the pictures onto a blog, for example using Wordpress.  It can help bring further traffic to the site, because the photos keywords are also added to the SEO of the post.

Whilst Ahimsa Media were co-producers, multi-tasker Erica had a starring role, was the show’s creator and writer joining forces with Kevin Fraser who took on the show’s story editing aspects.  I’m sure you’ll all enjoy the clip below to see Erica in action.

As many of you are aware, Ahimsa Media has been undergoing some changes over the past year and a half, shifting our focus from Traditional Broadcast and Video Production to New, Social and Emerging Media Storytelling and we are loving it!  In the busyness, it’s taken a while to update and rebuild the Ahimsa Media site to reflect our current focus and work, but here it is at long last!!!

So what are we up to these days?

Our main focus is on New, Emerging and Social Media Storytelling.

What does that mean?  Well, that we consult with Traditional Media (films, tv series, video, books, magazines, writers, directors, advertisers ..etc), Businesses and Corporations to help them tell their stories to the new and interactive Social Media space.  This involves building aspects of their stories online in an interactive manner or telling the behind the scenes story of the making of. An example of this would be Being Emme, one author’s adventures in the writing of her novels.  We also built the original Sexy In Van City (2008), helped with the online promotion of the Vancouver Theatrical Release of Mark Leiren-Young’s The Green Chain, and are currently consulting on menvent.

Being Emme

As an accompaniment to New, Emerging and Social Media Storytelling Consulting, we are also busy educating on New, Emerging and Social Media Storytelling.

Photo Taken by Invoke Media at WIFF New Media Day 2009

Educational Initiatives have included:

• building Bridging Media with Megan Cole
• helping Achilles Media tell the stories of the 2008 nextMEDIA and the BANFF Television Festival online
• co-producing the 2009 WIFF New Media Day with Maayan Cohen and Danika Dinsmore.

Upcoming educational initiatives include:

• New, Emerging and Social Media Classes and Workshops taught by Tris Hussey and Erica Hargreave
• participating on a panel on Interactive Storytelling at the Yorkton Film Festival
• teaching two Social Media Storytelling Classes to teens through the Delta School District

Aside from that, we are busy as always with a few Traditional Media Projects.  The current projects include:

• writing the scripts and education packages for four BC Health related ESL Videos for ELSA Net
• writing the educational package for the movie, The Green Chain
• regularly contributing to Cloverleaf Country Magazine