Friday Happy Hour: Going “Head Over Heels” for HD Video & More

Friday Happy Hour: Going “Head Over Heels” for HD Video & More

We had a lot of photographers who wrote in this week to share their latest photo projects, media coverage, and blog posts. That and a few stories we picked up makes for a full Friday Happy Hour, so take a look at what made it on our radar this week.

Photographing track & field – the world’s most dangerous sport?

Turns out track and field isn’t as passive a sport as you thought. Brigham Young University photographer Jaren Wilkey was out on a perfectly beautiful day photographing BYU’s Katy Andrews in the 3000 meter steeplechase race (think running but with jumping obstacles and water pits) when she tripped over the water barrier, flinging herself head over heels into the shallow pool. “I just happened to be there with a GoPro HD Hero 2 waterproof camera shooting video…and it caught the whole crash,” says Jaren.

What do you do when you happen to catch someone totally biting it? Slow it down frame-by-frame, of course! Fortunately Katy was a good sport about the whole thing, and Jaren posted the video to the BYU Photo blog, as well as the images that he shot at ten frames a second – gives you a “different perspective on the crash.” Ouch.

Crowdfunding a trip to Syrian refugee camps

Collaborative photography duo Zin Chiang and Benedicted Guillon have been traveling and photographing together ever since they met at a hostel in Morocco. Their latest project, Side x Side, is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter with the ultimate goal of financing a trip to the Syrian refugree camps in Hatay Province, Turkey. The photographers aim to document stories from the refugees’ point of view, using their own unique perspectives as a way to juxtapose how we all see the world differently.

Chiang and Guillon

The campaign has just 9 days to go and aims to raise $3,270 to fund the trip. Backers will receive specialty prints and photobooks. Check out their Kickstarter project to learn more.

Ben Lowry on cellphone photography

iPhoneographer and prominent photojournalist Ben Lowy is a Hipstamatic lover. So much so, that they’re naming a Hipstamatic lens after him. An interview by The New York Times Lens Blog this week says, “Mr. Lowy does not shrink from controversy. For the last four years, he has been ardently defending cellphone photography…As he sees it, shooting with cellphones and Hipstamatic is no different than picking black-and-white film over color…”

Some photographers believe that once you alter an image, it’s no longer photojournalism – it’s photography as an art. That might be all fine and well, but then what do we say when images taken with Hipstamatic or Instagram win prestigious awards for photojournalism? Ben Lowy says he’s still just photographing what’s in front of him and not doing any post-production. It’s definitely a hot button issue these days, so check out the full interview.

Oh, and be on the lookout for The Ben Lowy Lens on Hipstamatic.

Photo by Benjamin Lowy/Source: Lens Blog

Co-founder & CEO of Hipstamatic Lucas Allen Buick will be speaking at Luminance, PhotoShelter’s photography-technology-business conference this fall. Check out the full list of speakers and learn more about Luminance.

Photos of shelter dogs help people consider adoption

Dallas-based photographer Sylvia Elzafon has been photographing what she calls the “Shelter Series” since 2005 in an effort to get potential dog buyers to consider adoption. Now she’s reaching out to mainstream media to try to spread the word that shelter dogs are just as adorable as any other pup. The Huffington Post put up a full slideshow of her work – here are a few of our favorites.

Photo by Sylvia Elzafon

Photo by Sylvia Elzafon

Photo by Sylvia Elzafon

Photographer could win $120 million in case against Agence France-Presse

Freelance photographer Daniel Morel claims that in January of 2010, Agence France-Presse (AFP) uploaded his images of earthquake-devastated Haiti without his permission and transmitted them to WAPIX, Getty Images, and ImageForum. Morel was under a distribution contract with Corbis when the earthquake struck and he happened to be photographing in Port-au-Prince. After photographing, Morel immediately uploaded his images to Twitter; soon after, another Twitter user claimed the images to be his own and that’s when AFP Photo Editor Vincent Amalvy downloaded nine photos from that account.

Amalvy later became aware that the photos were in fact Morel’s, and he changed the captions to reflect that. Still, Morel argues that this is a case of internet piracy and that AFP is liable for copyright infringement. AFP argues that it had the right to distribute Morel’s images based on Twitter’s terms of service, which grant license to third parties to rebroadcast his photos.

Morel’s representative writes, “Such sophisticated content providers as AFP and Getty Images, known for their aggressive protecting of content, should be held to a higher stand of care…” If the infringement case goes through, Morel could be awarded damages upwards of $120,300,000, reports the British Journal of Photography.

But what do you think? Twitter has since updated its terms and conditions, but do you think  AFP would be protected by Twitter’s new terms of service? These are the extreme terms-of-use cases of photographers’ nightmares.

Wowed by Blackberry 10’s new camera app

The Blackberry World Keynote this year included a demo that wowed photographers and consumers alike. The new camera app, a rebranded version of Scalado Rewind, lets you select someone’s face and scroll through framers captures before and after you hit the shutter button. RIM, which makes the Blackberry, has apparently been working with Scalado on camera technology and has licensed some for the Blackberry 10, reports PetaPixel. Is this enough to make the Blackberry compete with the iPhone in terms of cellphone photography? Looks like we’ll have to wait and see.

Source: PetaPixel

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There are 2 comments for this article
  1. Jeremy Nicholl at 4:02 pm

    Lauren, there’s an awful lot of confusion and misinformation around regarding the Morel vs AFP/Getty story, and you just added to it.

    Firstly, AFP grabbed Morel’s images in January 2010, not as you say 2012. Worse, you invite people to opine on whether AFP is protected by Twitter’s ToS, and guide people to the WRONG terms. The terms you refer to were brought in after the AFP incident and therefore do not apply to that incident. The ones that apply are the ones that were current on January 12 2010 and are quite different.

    If it helps I have a pretty comprehensive – and accurate – series of posts over a two year period following the story. The most recent went up today, quotes extensively from newly available court documents, and is an eye-opener as regards business practices at AFP & Getty:
    http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2012/05/04/agence-france-presse-vs-morel-%E2%80%9Cafp-got-caught-with-a-hand-in-the-cookie-jar-and-will-have-to-pay%E2%80%9D/

    • Lauren Margolis at 4:07 pm

      @Jeremy – Thanks for the heads up, I updated my notes in the post. Also thanks for linking to your obviously more extensive coverage; it’s good to know that we have members who are following these kinds of cases more closely.

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