Get lost!

A turtle lets me know what he thinks of him. :) Shot a Pioneers Park. This lil' guy was captive and way too busy eating lettuce to be my pal.

Northern Flicker

Today's photo is of a Northern Flicker at Pioneer's Park. I ended up using a fill flash on this one -- sometimes that works if you're close enough. Click to enlarge.

FARK.com's new old copyright policy

FARK.com has revised their legal verbage in their TOS regarding copyright. In a previous post, I pointed out that FARK.com's copyright policy, as originally worded in their TOS, actually attempted to transfer the copyright of all submitted content to FARK, with FARK then granting you, the author, back permission to use your content however you like, short of selling it, since of course they would own it. Others pointed out that, in reality, FARK's wording violated copyright laws and was thus invalid and nonbinding. (I am not a lawyer, so I can't verify this.)



An excerpt from the new copyright policy over at FARK states (emphasis mine):



Fark.com permits the submission of text, photographs, opinions, comments and/or other forms of communication submitted by you and other users ("Submissions") and the hosting, sharing and publication of such Submissions. You agree that you are solely responsible for your own Submissions and affirm, represent, and/or warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Fark.com to use all patent trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the Submissions in the manner contemplated by Fark.com. You retain all ownership rights in your Submissions. However, by submitting the Submissions to Fark.com, you hereby grant Fark.com a non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Submissions in connection with Fark.com and Fark.com's business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of Fark.com (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels/outlets



If the legal wording that this replaced were actually legally binding, this would have been an improvement. However, it is important for a sumbitter of content to understand what FARK is claiming for themselves here. First off, the royalty free license they grant themselves in the current language means that anything that you submit to FARK.com can be used by FARK all they want, not just on their site, but also in advertisements online, in print, on television, on banners wrapped around the Empire State Building -- basically, any way that they want. This extends far beyond what is required to protect FARK from lawsuits stemming from someone posting their content on the FARK.com website. As it stands now, if someone at FARK decides to write a FARK book, the owners of FARK (Drew, presumbly) is/are claiming that they can put, say, that photoshopped image you submitted to FARK in it to their heart's content and not give you a dime. This may seem trivial, but typical licensing for this type of usage is at least hundreds of dollars per image. Or, say, if you entered into the weekly photo contest and submitted an incredible image, FARK could use that image in advertisements all over the net or in magazines or on television. (Admittedly, FARK doesn't do much advertising; it's cool enough that the people who would like it just end up eventually finding it.) This kind of useage could run into the thousands of dollars, normally. Now, there are lots of folks out there who would kindly donate for free their content to help FARK advertise (I'm not one of them) -- that's not the problem. The problem is that FARK takes this right without asking you about it. And these rights serve no purpose other than to line FARK's pocket -- there is no legal protection derived by allowing them to put your photo or photoshop image on coffee mugs and t-shirts and SpikeTV. All FARK really needs legal permission is to display your content on their website.



The second issue revolves around FARK's declared freedom to sublicense or transfer the license they just made you give them. This is, in effect, a copyright grab. As I read it (and again, I am not a lawyer), FARK is saying that they are allowed to re-sell or give away your content to anyone they want to to be used for any purpose under the sun without asking your or paying you a dime. So, say, you take a kick-ass photograph and submit it to the weekly farktography contest. FARK is claiming the right to sell the unlimited rights to that photograph to advertisers or to give it away altogether. Any profits made on the content goes into FARK's bank account, not yours. Again, the license is "Royalty Free", meaning that once the license is transferred, it can be used for anything at all as much as is desired. You are, of course, free to license and sell the content yourself, but FARK retains the right to do it, too (in what would be, in effect, competition with you.) I don't know why they feel they would need these kinds of rights; I'd be glad to hear it. Anoyher difficulty is that by granting FARK a transferrable, sublicensable Royalty Free license to your content, you can never again sell that content as Rights Managed again. That will sound like Greek to a lot of readers, but it's actually a pretty big deal if you are someone who sells licenses to your content. The bulk of high quality photography, for example, is sold as rights managed and nets a great deal more money more per sale (and is more likely to be desired in a major advertisement campaign) than it would as a RF image. Again, this probably doesn't impact a great number of people, but those who this does impact will know right away what a problem this poses and will probably refrain from posting anything half-marketable to FARK.



Now, I'll be honest: I've read FARK for years and I trust Drew Curtis isn't trying to start a stock photography/smart-assed comments agency from all the content submitted to FARK. FARK's yet to try to do anything nefarious, and I doubt that under current management, they ever would. The problem with legalities like this is that by reserving the rights to do these kinds of things, FARK is both leaving the door open for future abuses and is raising the question as to why they feel they need these kinds of grabby rights to begin with. FARK may feel limited in explaining these things, since attempting to explain a contract sometimes has the effect of negating it, but ultimately I'm left kinda puzzled. Granted, Drew may just be handing this stuff to a lawyer and and not effectively communicating to the lawyer that he actually gives a crap about the rights of the content submitter (most lawyers, I think, assume by default that you don't), I don't know. But the current revision, while being a step forward (in that it isn't actually illegal under federal copyright law), still isn't a very palatable prospect for a content submitter. If this language were attached to, say, a photography contest, I would steer well clear of it. Having seen how FARK works, I trust Drew a bit more than some random national photography contest, but I still can't see myself feeling safe submitting content (mainly in the form of photographs to their Farktography contests and Photoshopped images to their photoshop contests) to FARK under these current conditions.

Church near Wahoo

A rural church and graveyard near Wahoo, Nebraska. Shot in HDR; 10 photos total, each bracketed 1 stop apart, tripoded and cable released. Combined and downsampled in Photoshop CS3, then converted to B/W sepia with the CS3 grayscale tool. I'm still not entirely satisfied with it -- I have a few toning artifacts in there that I want to get rid of, but I didn't have the heart in me to start all over again. :) Click to enlarge.

Take off and go!

We were out at Pioneer Park when we saw these two birds chilling out on a bird box. We figured if we waited long enough, they'd get weirded out by the two photographers stalking them and make a break for it -- and sure enough, they did. :) Cute lil' guys. Click to enlarge.

Photo trip!

Josh, Lanette, & I all went on a crazy-fun photo excursion this past Saturday; I'll be posting a bunch of pics over the next few days. Here's a funny one of Lanette being a goofball on a local bridge. Gotta love the wide-angle. :) Click to enlarge.

Warning: FARK.com now grabbing copyrights

FARK.com just underwent a major site redesign, and lost among the clutter is their new legal policy. **edit** It's been pointed out to me that this policy is actually not new, but has been around since 2005. For more information, see the update edit at the end of the story. One would intuitively think that simply posting a photograph to the forums over at FARK.com would not mean that one is surrendering their copyright to FARK.com for all time, but it would appear that that is no longer the case:



Fark.com is the legal owner of all copyright interests of Fark.com content. Each and every submission to Fark.com carries with it an implied assignment of the entire copyright interest in the submission. In exchange for the content and publication of that submission on Fark.com, Fark.com grants back to the submitter a non-exclusive, non-transferable and royalty-free license to republish that submission in any and all forms.



Essentially, this means that posting any of your content to FARK, be it photograph, text, or whatever, immediately and forever transfers your copyright ownership to the owners of FARK.com. If, for example, you post a photo, they are free to sell rights to your photograph to others or to use it without permission in any way they deem fit, including advertising. The owners of FARK are "generous" enough to grant you back a license to use your own photo as you wish, but you are forever barred from selling licenses on the photo, as you (A) no longer own the copyright, (B) have only been granted a non-transferable license, and (C) FARK has generated a Royalty Free license, meaning that the image can never be Rights Managed again. The owners of FARK now own your image, not you.



**EDIT** Further details and Drew Curtis' response. Looks like this was just a case of poorly written legal copy, and FARK has no malicious intent. (I never really thought they did; the problem is that the law really doesn't care what you meant to do in a contract, it only cares about what's on the face of the contract.)

Tornado damage from south of Gothenburg

Darren Addy and I went chasing (or, more accurately, busting) this past Saturday, and on the way we stopped by in Gothenburg to snap a few photos of the damage from the tornado that struck south of town on April 20th. The tornado ended up being rated an EF-2. You can see the NWS's page about it here.

The scene was really something -- it's amazing how far tornadoes can spread debris. There were front end loaders all over the place picking up sheet metal and lumber and the like out of the fields hundreds of yards from where the debris originated from. The cleanup effort was huge, with at least 30 people and 5 pieces of heavy construction equipment helping out.

Below are the photos that I shot. Click to enlarge.






A snapped tree atop a home's roof south of Gothenburg.






All the windows in this SUV were blown out.






Damaged house.










Lumber from a damaged house embedded in the window of a pickup truck. The truck's windows were shattered.






Damaged tractor trailor.






Damaged tractor trailor.






Damaged, mud-caked truck, at the edge of a field, with a debris field in the background.







Tire swing (for fun framing), with damaged house in the background. Basically, a hole is blown in the kitchen area.






Another through the tire.







This is a tractor trailer alongside I-80 near some snapped trees in the path of the tornado. I assume the driver made it out okay, since I didn't read any news stories about truck driver injuries. The cab was really smashed up, though.







While it's unfortunate that homes were damaged and people were injured, Gothenburg really, in my opinion, dodged a bullet on this one -- on a freak, unexpected supercell, no less.

Slacker!

Wow, I've been a serious slacker at updating lately! Here's a slew of crane photos (probably the last for this year, since they all start to look the same after a while). Click to enlarge in a new window:


























These were all shot on my crane excursion with Lanette. My next big photo trip is on next Saturday, when my best friend Josh drops in from Vermont for a wedding and a fun photo romp with me n' Lanette and anyone else that comes along.

Alltel "billing"

I got a bill in the mail today from Alltel:







Now, I'll be honest, my first reaction to this was to be a bit panicked -- and then I started laughing. What kind of billing screw-up results in a $1,000 phone bill? A very simple one, apparently. I pay $25 a month for a service they have called "Axcess Data Connection", which is just a marketing monkier for "Unlimited internet tethering to my laptop via my cell phone". I pay this to plug my phone into my PC and get as much broadband as I want for free. Well, half their billing system forgot that I had this on my account, and so my bill reflects what I'd be paying if I *weren't* paying $25 a month for unlimited internet. Quite a bargain, I'd say.



I thought I had it bad until I read this post over on Stormtrack by Mike (click the image to enlarge it in a new window to read -- I'd link to it directly, but that particular forum requires registration):







WHOA!! I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten *that* bill, there would have been no laughter involved. :)



For what it's worth, the Alltel tethering service is, in my opinion, one of the greatest deals out there right now for internet connectivity. At least when they're billing you correctly.

Non-HDR versions of the tree sunset

Someone asked, so here you go -- this is what the previous HDR shot of the tree against the sunsetting sky looks like sans HDR. This was exposed for the sky, meaning that the tree had to be in silhouette. This was shot slightly before the HDR shot, so the sky is much redder. (I wish I'd shot the HDR at this point in time instead -- the sky was much more dramatic! :)) Click to enlarge.

"E"

Today's photos are from an old abandoned railcar that has been converted into an antique store (seriously!). The shots are of the cracked and weatherbeaten paintjob on the side of the car -- presumably the original coat. Click to enlarge.

Windmill cranes

Cranes take flight near a windmill in south-central Nebraska. I camped on this shot for-eve-errrr waiting for the birds to take flight. :) Click to enlarge.

Craneflight

A group of cranes flying low over a cornfield. I think we spooked them. :) Click to enlarge.

The many angles of Lanette

There's a lonnnng old railroad bridge south of Kearney that runs over the Platte, and it serves for a half-good place to view the cranes roosting at sunset. (They tend to stay several hundred yards back, since people who hang out on the bridge to look at the cranes don't realize they have to be very, very quiet to not freak the birds out.) Anyhow, I was showing the bridge to Lanette in the afternoon, since I was planning on coming back there later that evening for the sunset. Of course, this bridge is also a great place for portraits; I've done a couple of senior picture shoots here. Here's a few shots of Lanette. :) Click to enlarge.

Freaked Pheasant

While we were driving near Rowe Sanctuary, Lanette noticed a pair of pheasants milling around in a field. I backed the car up and we got out to take some pictures. This freaked the birds out in a heartbeat, and they took off in different directions -- one running (we think -- it kinda just disappeared), one flying. The flying bird flew over our road and into the cow-filled field on the other side. Not a bad strategy, if I say so myself! I switched to the mode 2 panning on the 70-200 and snapped this shot as the bird flew past. Click to enlarge.

Crane Fight

Two Sandhills Cranes duke it out in a Nebraskan cornfield. This basically entails a half-minute long jumping contest -- I think whichever bird jumps the highest is declared the winner and king of the cornfield. :) Click to enlarge.

We've got cows!

I can't decide which one of these I think is funnier. :) I think I like the one with the background cows in focus. We came across these guys while looking for cranes. In typical cow fashion, they all stopped what they were doing and stared at us until we left. A grazing cow's life must be incredibly relaxing. Click to enlarge.

Wally Warbleton

While me and Lanette were driving around Crane Meadows looking for cranes, we came across Puffy Pufferton's little birdie cousin, Wally Warbleton. I don't know what it is about Meadowlarks, but they act like they can't get enough press! :) Click to enlarge.

The Cranes on the Plain

Another crane photo. I have a brazilian of these -- still trying to pick out the best ones. :) Click to enlarge. If you're in the area and thinking of shooting cranes, know that you'll need at the very minimum of 300mm lens. I shot this with a 200 2.8 and a 1.4 TC on a 1.6x crop body, and I still didn't have enough reach. Really, a 500mm lens is optimal for these birds, though it certainly restricts you to tripoded shots (for the most part).