California Nature Photographers Journal

This site has been on line for a month and a half now. In that time it has grown quite a bit. I have a steady following of visitors and I have put a lot of hard work into the articles that I’ve written. But it has also put a lot of pressure on me. And pressure and stress don’t help creativity. I know that many of the newer visitors to CalNatuePhoto may never have heard of me before they came here, but I have had a presence on the web since 1999 when my site SierraVisions.com went online. Over the last month and a half I have been trying to keep both sites updated with fresh content on a consistent basis and it’s become way to much work. I also have a photography and graphic arts business that I run and the creativity that goes into them has began to suffer. So something has to give. And that something is CalNaturePhoto.

This will be the last post on CalNautrePhoto. I’m going to let this site go. SierraVisions.com will become my main focus again. Now if you have enjoyed what you’ve read here, then come on over to SierraVisions, I will be continuing everything I’ve done here over there. I will continue to do photoshop tutorials, photo tours, and updates on the hotspots in California photography. I will also be writing more e-books about where to shoot in California.

At the moment SierraVisions is a little out of date. In fact, it’s an antique. I don’t have RSS feeds on there or all of the other toys of the modern web, but I’m working on that. SierraVisions in the process of a major overhaul and will be totally Web 2.0 compatible in the very near future.

So I’m hoping that all of you who have enjoyed CalNaturePhoto will come join us over at SierraVisions. I wish this site could have made it, but the work of keeping two major sites updated has created a situation that I didn’t foresee when I started it.

Take care and thanks for the support you’ve shown to a California Nature Photographers Journal. I hope to see you over at SierraVisions.com
Steven

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Ever wonder why we think of something as cute? Well so do many researchers. Here’s an interestng article over on The Thinking Blog called The Cute Factor. It’s about why we see things like babies and animals as cute. It also goes into how cuteness has been used as a marketing tool for many years.

It makes me think about all of the greeting cards you see that feature photography of cute babies, puppies, kittens, ducklings and any other things that’s cute. Gives me many ideas for future pictures too.

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This is a fun little quiz that will tell you which famous photographer you are.
Here is the link
http://www.youthink.com/quiz.asp?action=take&quiz_id=164
I’m Ansel Adams. Imagine that. I knew it was going to say that half way through the quiz

Let us know who you are.

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With the current situation regarding Rebekka’s stolen images still circling around the digital photographers world, (Read Jim Goldstein’s good article about it.) I have been thinking about ways to protect our images from being stolen off of our web sites and photo communities like Flickr. Unfortunately I couldn’t come up with anything that the photographer can do to stop their images from being snatched. There are a few ways to fool people into thinking that they can’t take your images, but these ways can easily be worked around by the thief. The sad fact is, if someone wants to take one of your images from the web, they can and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The best protection we currently have is to never put hi-resolution images online. The images we put online should have just enough resolution to look nice on a monitor, but not enough to look good printed. 72 dpi at 1024×768 pixels is about the largest I feel you should go. For me the preferred size is 720×523. Also don’t save web images at %100 quality. They don’t need it. I save all my web images at %70 and they look fine.

So, if there’s nothing that we as photographers can do, then what needs to be done to protect our images from the scum that will take them and use them without permission?

Here’s my idea.

The photographers need to have the ability to copy protect the images files. What I mean by that is in order to make a copy of an image file, the user must enter a password chosen by the photographer. No more right click on an image and choose copy or save as and then download the image to your hard drive. With copy protection in place the user would be faced with a password box and a message telling them that they can’t copy this image without the password. The photographer also needs to be able to turn copy protection on and off. This to would require a password. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But, like everything in the digital universe, it’s not that simple.

Not only would someone have to design this sort of protection, it would require a lot of coordination by the software companies, camera manufactures, web site designers, photographers, and let us not forget Microsoft and Apple, to make it happen. Copy protection would have to be universal throughout all operating systems and software platforms and it would have to work on all of the image file types such as JPG, TIFF, and RAW.

Can this be done? Sure it can. Bigger things than this have happened in the world of computers. Will it be done? That’s impossible to say. Maybe if all of us photographers demanded it, it might get done. I’m sure that I’m not the only person out there who’s thought of this idea. In fact, I’d bet that there is already something like this out there. Hell it’s probably being used on our computers right now. There are most likely files on your computer that can’t be copied without permission from someone else in the form of a password.

So why not make that technology available to us photographers so that we can protect our art from the scum that would steal it.

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I just got a link to a great resource for identifying plants, fossils, animals, and many other things. The site is CalPhotos. It’s ran by Cal State Berkeley. It contains thousands of photos of plants, animals, fossils, fungi, habitats, and much more. By far the biggest collection is the plants and animals collection. There are over 70,000 images in the plants-annuals/perennial collection itself. The whole collection can be searched using an advanced search that let’s you define your search in many different ways.

I was looking for my unidentified flower from the last post on there. I now know that the flower is a violet. So I chose plants-annuals/perennial for the type of photo and then chose viola for the scientific name and 544 images came up. I went through the first 12 pages or so and came up with two possibilities for the flower. I will go through the more picture later and see if anything else looks close.

Thanks to John Wall on the CalPhoto Group for pointing me to this site.

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