Holding Tight/Raleigh f/5 @ 1/160 sec

The Raleigh Flickr Group got out to the rodeo at Carousel Farms Arena on Tuesday. I have a set up from the trip. The rest of the group has some great work, check it out.

Also of note, my parents were out from Memorial Day weekend until last Saturday, which kept f_4_t and I very busy. Good times though. I think we got them to quite a few Raleigh and greater Triangle highlights, but not all of them.

I have another development cycle starting at work Monday. This time, we actually have some competition for one of our products, so, it's unsure if we're going to be working on the last version before the company decides to use an outside vendor or not. Since earlier versions were hamstrung by a customer with complete veto power over anything we wanted to do with the product, my team's excited that we (and they) can move on independently. And rather than worry about the ultimate decision, I'll be happy knowing that we're going to kick ass on the upcoming dev. cycle.

Finally, in some of the spare time, I'm looking at redesigning and relaunching my domain. The initial design is coming along, but I've been lazy about getting the software to drive it in place. We'll see how it goes.

The wife of the CEO of 8020 Publishing responds to Flickr's unofficial JPG Magazine group and points out that a fair amount of context has gone missing. True.

You have heard Derek’s version of how things happened, and it was detailed. And very well written, because Derek is a talented writer. But it was not a years worth of details. That would be a very long post. Conversations that happened did not make it into Derek’s version, and some that did are skewed. Some key facts are omitted. (Such as why Paul took the CEO title. Derek got to be on the board, while Paul did not. In a small company, titles don’t mean as much, it’s really just a title. I feel like Derek left this detail out to make it look more sinister. Which feels dishonest to me.) Some things are closer to the truth if you reverse them. I know this because some of these conversations happened in my living room, or over the phone while I was nearby. Our old apartment wasn’t very big, so I was there for a lot of conversations.

Suck it from Lord Jakeington

One of Flickr's newest groups is ideletedmyjpgaccount. It contains threads such as "How did you discover JPG mag?." and a stream of screenshots of JPG Magazine cancellations and account closures. I myself can't bring myself to do it yet. I guess I'm holding out hope 8020 Publishing will say something more than what they've said. There's slightly more on Flickr from the CEO, but not much. A lot of folks are reading it as spin. I think I can charitably call it tone deaf.

I'm sad now, and here's why. Flickr looks like it's going through some crap, too.

Two Leaves/Yates Millpond f/5 @ 1/60 sec

The day went right in so many ways. Even the weather broke enough for photography. Robin and I hit Yates Millpond south of downtown for a late afternoon shoot with some Flickr friends and the severe thunderstorm cells were gracious enough to stay north of where we were for a while. A few more photos from the afternoon are up now.

51/Raleigh f/4.2 @ 1/100 sec

Being accused of being a narcissist over participating in the 365 days project, I decided to take my self-portraits in a different direction for the next little bit.

Goodness: My payment for appearing in JPG Magazine, Issue 8 showed up in two parts. A lens on Saturday, a check today. Secondly, in a sign that a feature I'm working on adding to a utility script for one of our products is desired, a guy in our support dept. has promised me free bagels. Yeah, it's not hardware, but nice to work on something that's appreciated.

Other things to update on in the near future:

• Last week's concert
• Fondue
• My Technological Failures class
• Development projects

The Starseed Lure
Originally uploaded by _mpd_.

Raleigh Flickr member and aklikins cube-mate Michael Dehaan won this year's N&O [1] travel photography contest with a fantastic shot from Cape Hatteras. Congratulations.

• Disclosure. As an employee, I was not eligible for the contest.

CNet lifts a photographers image from Flickr, editor (who admits a fuzzy understanding) claims use with a news article is "non-commercial."

Somehow, I doubt Declan McCullough is aware of this.

[Edit]: Apparently, it's gone into "Fair Use" territory and the photographer considers the matter over, albeit not with the resolution I think he would like.

Sam @ Yahoo requested an invoice and said the payment process would be sped up. I emailed a PDF invoice Sunday night. I had check in hand when I got home after voting this evening.

I'm impressed.

Boylan Lanterns III f/8 @ 1.3 sec

Good news! Yahoo's senior editorial producer has agreed to pay for use of Boylan Lanterns II.

Raleigh Lanterns f/8 @ 2 sec

Robin and I carved Jack O' Lanterns after work this evening.

Yahoo responded a few days ago and I've been trying to formulate my response since. Thanks to Robin, Steve, Chris, Amber and Marc for their various suggestions and commentary. Thanks to everyone else for their words of encouragement and support. Yahoo's (not Flickr's) intial response is quoted at the end.

This was sent to Sam, Heather Champ and Yahoo's copyright agent address.

On an evening when I would have preferred to have been editing and posting additional photos from my recent trip to Toronto, night shots from the State Fair or this weekend's trip to Virginia for foliage, I wrote a letter to Yahoo's Copyright Agent.

Unfortunately, my letter through Flickr's general "I have a problem" form didn't garner any response. Hopefully, the copyright agent will be more responsive. Proofreading assistance from Robin and badger greatly appreciated.

Front page of yahoo
Originally uploaded by base10.

To whom it may concern;

I was made aware one of my photographs posted to Flickr was linked on the front of Yahoo!.

What I am interested in knowing is if there is a Flickr/Yahoo liason who can guide in me in correcting two problems.

First and foremost, my image doesn't link back to my stream, as required in the Flickr Terms of Service. Secondly, this is a non-approved use, according to my selected Creative Commons license.

I am very happy with Flickr in general. However, I am disturbed that Flickr's corporate parent does not respect either Flickr's terms of service, its own copyright policy or the licensing I have placed on my images.

I am seeking correction in the following ways:

1. A credit and link from my photo on Yahoo to the photo in my photo stream.

2. Payment for the use of the image on the homepage of Yahoo.com and a license agreement covering parameters of this image for commercial purposes.

If this is not the correct location, I would appreciate being contacted and informed as to the best person to discuss this issue with.

Kind regards,

Nathan L. Walls

bumperfish

With Halloween rolling around, my jack-o-lantern photo taken around the corner from ambermae's was blogged at Photojojo as part of a guide to Halloween photography.

That'll explain the sudden jump in views.

Robin and I spent the weekend with some of the Raleigh Flickr folks at Nags Head. Quite a bit of photographic goodness, of which I should post some samples of soon. A great weekend it was save for having some iPod troubles. See, I'd been using my older 4G as a FireWire HDD rather than save photos to the laptop drive. And the iPod started to eat itself.

Luckily, there was only a week's worth of material on the drive, but there were definitely things I wanted to keep.

A big thank you to badger for being available last night with Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory, which brought the drive back. Kind of. Files would copy off, but be unreadable. Hello physical media failure. At badger's recommendation, I kept the iPod in the fridge overnight. That tip allowed me to bring off the last 50 or so RAW files over in a readable state.

Now, this evening, the business of rebuilding the photo library.base

Nice. Not too terribly stressful. A couple of large tasks accomplished.

• Completed a six-month "extra-curricular" course at the N&O.
• Dinner w/ saspenguin and Jason.
• Moved out of Whitaker Park, along with several other people. Found out there have been a variety of dates thrown around for people to move out, such as "right now." It was claimed, however, that my apt. is being rented out until May.
• Cleaned apt.
• Discovered a headboard travels quite nicely on the roof rack.
• deviant_ was in town so Robin, myself, deviant_, ambermae and gorski got together for beer. Had Magic Hat No. 9 for the first time, and a black currant lambic. Both tasty.
• Saw Clash of the Titans with R, ambermae, gorski and badger after badger put the event on our radar a few weeks ago.
• Flickr outing Tues. 10/03.

Dead Studio/WPTF f/11 @ 5 sec

Saturday night, some of the Flickristas and I gathered in Cary for a night shoot ranging from the WPTF studio on Western Blvd. and later at NC State. I ended up with better material than I expected. See more from the group here.

Flickr activity's been high lately. We're hitting the rodeo tomorrow evening and the Sept. meet should be officially announced soon. Definitely good times.

All-in-all, a relaxing weekend. Thanks to badger and maegwynn for hosting an impromptu gathering for pizza and Eddie Izzard.

Gunrey/Raleigh f/4.5 @ 1/250 sec

More Portraits

The last few days have been incredibly busy, largely from a photographic standpoint, such that I've even been bypassing my nightly catch-up with LJ and general reading. I've not really been caught up with Flickr in weeks.

But this week, I have good reasons! You see, in addition to just being all generally spiffy with Robin, the Raleigh Flickr Group is working on a fantastic portrait project. After much anticipation, we saw each others' work, about 75 images for gallery contention, last night at Humble Pie. Amazing stuff. Check out the group for the photos.