I’m posting this as a token of support to Rebekka, who writes:
I have a LOT on my mind right now.. to be honest, i’ve rarely been so royally pissed off as i am today.
The photos shown above all have one thing in common (besides being rather lovely landscape photos):
They were all taken , without my permission, by the London based print-selling company Only-Dreemin. This company prides itself on offering its customers only the best quality canvas prints of the finest photos , by top artists.
What they fail to mention is that some of the photos they’re selling prints of have been illegally obtained, and are being sold without the artists consent or knowledge.
In my case, a friend of mine came across their store on ebay and recognized one of my prints. (this was way back in january i think)
I looked into the matter and discovered 7 more of my photos being sold there. In the case of pictures 1, 2, 6 and 7, the image had been divided up into 3 vertical panels. ( Something i would never DREAM of doing myself. ) Furthermore, the images had been given new and exciting titles, like “Seraque II” and “Attica”, “Dawn expander II” and ” Joga” (barf)
I spent a good many days researching, going back thru their customer feedback, and was able to track back the sales of at LEAST 60 prints made from my images. These prints sold for a total sum of 2450 british pounds (around 4840 US$)
Read the rest on Flickr and draw your own conclusions about this issue, but personally I wouldn’t buy anything from Only-Dreemin until the issue is clarified, and I would let them and eBay know what I think about it.
In the meantime, I suggest that you browse around Rebekka’s pictures. They’re just beautiful. Maybe it’s time for Rebekka to start selling prints by herself and make some money rightfully. I reckon she could gain some extra income, which she could then use to sue the bastards ;).
Update: The photo page has now more than 14,000 views and it has been dugg 869 times, all of this in a little more than three hours. Many of the commenters wrote that they mailed the offending company, who are probably by now bitterly regretting their actions.
Following the lead of Jeremy and Leo, here are my latest geo-tagged photos on Google maps. Not a lot of exotic destinations of late, as you can see.
Now it would be nice if there were a parameter that allowed you to show more than the latest 20 or so pictures. Or show a map for a specific set. There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Flickr to generate a feed for a set, though it is possible to generate a feed for a tag. So here’s the map of all my photos tagged “umbria”, which is only a subset of all the pictures taken on a recent trip to Umbria.
In the end, using the Yahoo-supplied map on Flickr itself gives more complete results, though probably less amenable to cool mash-ups.
What a show was yesterday night’s total Moon eclipse! The air was as clear as a crisp winter night can be, so I headed out of town with a friend, we mounted our tripods in the countryside and spent a couple hours shooting at the moon with our cameras.
Thanks to my long zoom, I could fill a decent portion of the frame with the moon and got some nice shots. Unfortunately, as the umbra of the Earth started covering more and more of the Moon, which was getting more and more dark and reddish in color, two factors contributed to make the pictures of the totality phase less then appealing.
The first problem is that my camera is very bad when it comes to focusing in low light conditions. Fortunately, I had manual focus on and set it when the moon was still bright enough, so I could have still saved most of them, but in the dark I didn’t realize that humidity was condensing on the lens as the night grew colder. I wasn’t aware of this until this morning, when I saw this particular picture.
Anyway, I put the best pictures in this set on Flickr, but I had really hoped for some nice “red moon” images. Maybe I’ll have better luck next time. The next lunar eclipse, on August 28, is going to be total as well. The only problem is that the best place to see it will be French Polynesia. Should I start booking a trip to Tahiti for my next summer vacations? 
I took this picture last night in Leiden (where we had a Joost meeting). Strangely enough, it was one of the rare occasions when I found fog in the Netherlands, apart from my very first trip to Amsterdam, more than one year ago.
I think the fog lends a special atmosphere to the Dutch towns like Amsterdam and Leiden, with their canals. Unfortunately, I only had a lousy camera with me, so the picture is quite blurry and noisy, but I think it captures quite well the atmosphere of the moment, and the lone biker is sooo Dutch.
More pictures in this Flickr set here, including a couple nice shots of this morning’s sunrise taken from the plane.
Speaking of Joost, I still have a few invites left, so if you want one, leave a comment here stating your full name, email address and URL of the blog or website where you intend to mention Joost.
Technorati Tags: joost.com, joost, theveniceproject, leiden, amsterdam, netherlands, fog.
Just uploaded some pictures from our trip to Umbria to this Flickr photoset. I didn’t get many good shots, since weather was generally bad and lighting far from perfect. Luckily, my Aperture trial period hasn’t ended yet, so I was able to correct some of those to make them look a bit better.
There’s just no comparison between Aperture and iPhoto when it comes to correcting luminance and colors: I was able to rescue some pictures with Aperture that I had given up any hope of fixing with iPhoto. If my camera were able to shoot RAW, there’s no doubt that I’d be buying Aperture as soon as the trial period ends.
I already mentioned that weather was mostly bad, but the countryside and the towns of Umbria are gorgeous even under the rain. Moreover, we were lavishly treated by our host, as far as food and drinks are concerned: on our first dinner, he presented us with a couple bottles of Sassicaia, one of the most renowned Italian wines. Now that I’ve tasted it, I must admit that it lives up to its fame.
Technorati Tags: aperture, umbria, sassicaia, iphoto.
I’ve recently subscribed to Thomas Hawk’s photostream on Flickr via RSS and am constantly amazed at how Thomas often manages to extract interesting shots from situations that might seem boring to most amateur photographers. Capturing a spider against the sun or your own image reflected on the ceiling of an elevator might turn out to offer unexpected opportunities for great shots.
I thin I should start imitating this attitude, which basically means carrying my camera with me wherever I go. I do have my camera with me now, actually, but I forgot the cable at home, so I cannot offload the pictures I’ve taken to my laptop. Doh!
My Moo MiniCards have arrived and boy, are they cool! They’re also tiny, though. I wonder whether they will offer larger formats in the future. I can definitely see myself getting a bunch of them, in any case. Now that’s a company that knows how to do some kick-ass word-of-mouth marketing.
A word of caution: prefer bright subjects, they come out much better than darker ones with that kind of format and paper finish.
Technorati Tags: moo, minicards.
Being jet-lagged is not fun, but when you are going west it allows you to be well awake at dawn and catch some nice pictures.
This dawn over Austin wasn’t particularly memorable, mostly because the view out of my hotel room is over a parking and the I35 highway. But I think that capturing the reflex of the room light makes it somewhat interesting. Don’t you agree?
I just realized that I only posted nine new articles to this blog in the month of September. So I’m writing this just to avoid equalizing a negative record. At least, you get a free photo.
FlickrBlog: “Flickr’s great for exploring photos by photographer, tag, time, text and group, and now it’s also great for exploring photos by place. There are a couple of short video tutorials (or ’screencasts’) which give the 90 second overview on how to geotag your own photos and how to use all the controls for searching and exploring geotagged photos. Watching them first will give you all of the information you need to get up and running.”
Hey, this geotagging feature is cool! I’ve started going back to my photos and geotagging them all, which won’t take much as I don’t have a whole lot of photos on Flickr and the tagging interface is quite slick. I don’t actually agree with Ted: most of the time I tend to group all my photos in sets and most sets tend to be made up of pictures shots in a single place, so tagging it from the organizr is as simple as selecting a whole set and dropping it to the right place in one move.
Technorati Tags: flickr, geotagging.
On the second leg of my trip back home from Portland, we flew by a huge thunderstorm approaching Minneapolis from the north shortly after sunset. This allowed me to snatch some really great shots out the window.
I got the best results when I set the shutter speed to the maximum I could set on my camera, that is 8s. You can see some of them, together with some aerial shots taken on the PDX - MSP leg here.
OSCON actually started today, but yesterday evening a bunch of geeks with a penchant for photography met for a walkabout around Portland. If you were in the vicinity of Portland’s Steel Bridge at that time you could have spotted this group of people pointing cameras around, shooting at the weirdest objects and taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone … ad infinitum.
One of the most interesting aspects of it all was that you could have seen the whole gamut of equipment, ranging from very professional cameras, lenses and tripods, down to compact point-and-shoot models. But I bet that, by looking at the results here, you’d be surprised to learn that some of the most intriguing shots were taken with the least expensive equipment.
Earlier on the same day, I did lots of walking around Portland, mostly in downtown and across Washington Park, which I walked through from the MAX station up north to the Japanese Garden and the International Rose Garden, then back down to Pioneer Courthouse Square. I stopped only when the heat really started to be intolerable (I spotted 95F on a display in downtown) and my feet started developing blisters. Then I jumped on the MAX and got back at the hotel for a few hours of rest and refreshment.
My sightseeing is chronicled by a bunch of Flickr sets that you can find here, here and here. Now, what I would like some digital photography guru to explain me is why my shots of red flowers—roses in particular—come out with the reds completely saturated, giving them a very “flat” and unnatural look. What can I do to avoid this defect, besides changing my camera?
Technorati Tags: portland, oscon06, oscon.
I managed to snap some good shots on my trip to Portland and am just now uploading them to Flickr. It’s 5 o’clock in the morning here, but due to jet lag I cannot sleep anymore, so I’m abusing of the free Internet connection offered by the hotel.
I guess having so many free hotspots in the city encourages hotels to offer free Internet service. This way people will maybe stay in the hotel and consume some drinks instead of going out to find the nearest free hotspot. I always thought that having guests pay for Internet at hotels is a total rip-off, given the costs of a wide-band DSL connection nowadays in most of the civilized world.
Anyway, you might want to have a look at this photoset. All the photos are from the AMS-MSP leg, since I managed to get some sleep on the MSP-PDX one, but the scenery must have been spectacular as well. We got a great view of Mt. Hood on approach to PDX, but the flight assistant had already asked that all electronic equipment be shut off and I didn’t want to risk being reprimanded. Maybe I’ll get some shots of this part of the voyage on the way back.
It’s almost sunrise now, so I think I’ll bide my time a little more, then see if I can get some breakfast and head out for a tour of Portland in the early morning, when the sun is not that hot yet. Forecast for today is a respectable 98F (about 37C), whew!
I’ll get some more pictures today and possibly more this evening, together with the other OSCON folks at the Sunday Photography Walkabout.
Technorati Tags: portland, oscon06, oscon, greenland, labrador, free wifi hotspots, traveling, nwa45.
Uh-oh, it looks like someone appreciated one of the photos I posted on Flickr and asked for permission to use it on the eventi.parma portal, a website dedicated to upcoming cultural events in the Parma province.
What can I say? I’m flattered, and here of course is the obligatory backlink.
Did some nice macro shots today. Here’s one of the best, but there weren’t many good-looking flowers, except for dandelions.
The European Homepage For The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope - News Archive: “This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of “grand design spirals”, and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released from Hubble.”
Wow! Quite a gorgeous desktop background.
Technorati Tags: hubble, astronony, galaxy, images
No, I’m not referring to Ajax as in Asynchronous Javascript and XML — Apache Cocoon has actually been supporting Ajax for quite a long time — but to Ajax as the football team from Amsterdam.
The reason why I’m putting Cocoon supports Ajax in the title of this post is that yesterday a bunch of Apache Cocoon developers (including three committers) went to the Amsterdam Arena to show their support for the home team in the Champions League football match against Inter F.C.
(If you thought that I, as an Italian, should have supported Inter, think again.)
Ajax, with a young and unexperienced lineup, started off briskly and hit Inter twice, with Huntelaar and Rosales in the first 20 minutes. We were cheering together with the other 49,000 people at the Arena, but our enthusiasm lasted only until the beginning of the second half, when Stankovic scored a lucky hit and then, just four minutes before the end of regular time, Julio Cruz (ex-Feyenoord) equalized for Inter from a short distance, thanks to an illuminating pass by Figo and then Cambiasso.
All in all, it was a nice match but I think Ajax has little hope of going through, having to win against Inter in Milan in two weeks: hardly probable. I also managed to shoot a fair number of good photographs (including two of the goals) and finally resolved to upgrade my Flickr account to “pro” level in order to be able to upload most of them. You can see the results in my Ajav vs. Inter set. I must say that my Panasonic DMC-FZ20 performed very well, thanks to its long zoom lens and incredibly useful image stabilizer.
Technorati Tags: ajax, football
It’s been snowing like crazy since early this morning. I wanted to go out and buy some stuff we need, but I’ll have to postpone it, hoping this afternoon or tomorrow it gets better. No need to get stuck in traffic for that.
In the meantime, I snatched a couple photos out of my office window. By systematically overexposing, I managed to do some interesting shots, like the one above. Hope you’ll like it.
In case you were wondering why I had posted nothing in the last two weeks, well, I was simply on vacations in Mexico and forgot to write about it before leaving. Now I’m back, fully relaxed even if a bit jet-lagged and ready to dive into about 1500 new items in my aggregator and countless mail messages.
I also have about 200 photos to download, process, print, etc. I’m seriously thinking about upgrading my Flickr account to pro level, so that I don’t have to worry about maxing out the meager bandwidth limit of the free account. The places and their colors were so beautiful that I’d really like to share them with you.
Actually it's not a forest, but a small patch of land in the heart of the Po river's valley, in northern Italy. Onto this patch of land, a thick grove of bamboo trees, several meters high, has inexplicably grown. Inexplicably because bamboos are not typically found growing wildly in this part of the world.
Some might say that this is the effect of the tropicalization of our continental climate due to global warming, but in reality the grove has been there since many years ago. Probably some seeds were carried there by a flood of the nearby Ticino river and found an apt soil and climate. Being in the lowlands near the river, the place is quite humid.
Like invaders from an outer planet, the bamboos have colonized this patch by killing every other plant. Nothing grows between bamboos and, finding no limbs strong enough, birds don't nest there. Given enough time, they will maybe expand to the whole wood, up to the limits of the river on one side and the cultivated fields on the other one.
For your viewing pleasure, I've uploaded some photos to this Flickr photoset.
