So, about that whole “thou shalt not steal” thing…
May 7, 2017, 11:50 AM
Sometimes the level of hypocrisy shown by those in organized religion just makes me stand back in awe. They preach Christian values, and then don’t follow them in real life. In this instance, it involves the church that I used to attend from 1992 until 2003, and where I am still technically a member, albeit inactive. Through a recent interaction, I learned quite a bit more than I expected as far as where things stand with them.
For those who aren’t familiar, I work with a company called Pixsy to recover royalties for cases where my photographs are used without permission. I routinely search for and submit cases where my photos are used without permission in hopes of recovering license fees for that usage. Basically, I have no problem with downstream usages of my photos. But I am a professional who deserves to be paid for those usages in a professional setting. Basically, if you expect to take in revenue based on materials that contain my work, then you need to pay me for the usage. My take on it is that if you were going to hire a photographer to do a shoot for you, there’s no question that you would pay them. But by using photos of mine that I have already created, you’ve essentially hired me as your photographer, and as such, I should be paid. Using my work for commercial purposes without even so much as asking me is a major no-no as far as I’m concerned.
In this case, I was skimming through the Internet looking for potential infringement cases, I found this:
Continue reading…Categories: Copyright infringement, Religion
Photo licensing returns in a new form…
December 16, 2016, 12:00 AM
You may recall back in October, I announced that I had removed Pixels.com as a photo licensing service, and that an in-house replacement would arrive in the relatively near future. Well, the future is now:
This is The Schumin Web Photo Licensing, codenamed “Finch” (after another JMU web server) during development, which does the same as what Pixels did, i.e. licensing content from The Schumin Web for third-party usage. However, unlike Pixels, this site is completely in-house.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta
Trying my hand at planespotting…
November 18, 2016, 11:02 AM
On Tuesday, November 16, Elyse and I went down to Gravelly Point in Arlington and photographed airplanes taking off from National Airport. In the past, I had photographed airplanes casually, usually when I’m over in Rosslyn, i.e. near the airport, while doing other things (the raw photo set for Urban Demolition II is peppered with random airplane and transit photos, if that tells you anything). However, this was my first dedicated outing for planespotting.
So I put the big lens on my camera and took it out for a spin, putting the camera in sports mode and going to town with it. My first takeoff, however, left something to be desired:
Categories: Airplanes, Arlington, Elyse, Photography
A “lost” photo set of sorts…
November 6, 2016, 10:10 AM
In doing the writing for an upcoming photo set for Life and Times about a trip that Elyse and I recently made to Pittsburgh [update: photo set published in January 2017], I quickly realized that much of the discussion about the trip up builds on a photo set that I shot in May 2006 with the intention of publishing in Photography, but that I ultimately never completed.
In this case, the subject of the “lost” photo set was Breezewood, Pennsylvania. For those not familiar, when one travels to Pittsburgh from the DC area, one of the places that you go through is Breezewood, a settlement best known for a quarter-mile stretch of US 30 that carries Interstate 70 traffic to the Pennsylvania Turnpike – a stretch of road that is loaded with gas stations and motels and restaurants. I first traveled through Breezewood in 2003 during the LPCM trip to Pittsburgh, and it piqued my interest – even more so when I later learned that there was an abandoned stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike nearby, including two tunnels. I discussed a potential trip to Breezewood for a photo shoot in 2005, and then made a trip from Stuarts Draft to Breezewood – a three-hour drive each way – on May 2, 2006. About the only bit of evidence of the trip on here was five photo features showing Breezewood, a short Journal entry with no photos, plus a few things here and there on Wikipedia and Panoramio, as was my practice at the time. The intended Photography set, with the working title “Town of Motels”, was never made. Kind of a shame that, for a trip that was that far away and entirely dedicated to photography, so little was actually published from it.
I’m pretty sure that I never published the set because I didn’t feel like the photos were up to par, even for the (lower) standards that I operated under at the time, and thus couldn’t find the inspiration to complete it. Most of the photos had a yellow cast over them, and I clearly didn’t take enough time in composing my shots. In hindsight, while I had fun doing the shoot, the idea was something of a loser. After all, it was, for the most part, just a clustering of chain businesses along a unique stretch of highway. The road configuration, created due to regulations in place at the time that precluded the use of federal funds to build direct connections to toll facilities, was what was unique, but that wasn’t the focus of my photography. I focused mostly on the chain businesses themselves, which weren’t particularly unique. The chain businesses looked a lot like “Anytown USA”, i.e. they were much the same as you would find anywhere.
Categories: Breezewood, Photography, Roads, Schumin Web meta
A look back on an old photo shoot…
July 7, 2016, 11:06 AM
July 7, 2001 was something of a milestone date for me. It was my first full-on photo shoot in DC. The result of that photo shoot was a Photography set called “The Schumin Web Salutes America”. I pulled the set during the WordPress conversion in 2012 because it was somewhat low quality, but you can still find it in the Internet Archive. Looking back on the set, it was clear that I didn’t know what I was doing, both in the photography itself as well as the post-production, but it was a start.
The set really embodied the way the Photography set started out, which was more like the modern Life and Times, but more subject-based. Photography didn’t take on its current form until 2008. In that, it started out showing my coming up to the area, traveling in on the Metro, it showed the things that I observed on that trip, and also showed a few landmarks in between.
Looking back on this day, fifteen years ago today, it’s funny to see how much has changed since this set was made. I was 20 years old. The camera was a Sony Mavica FD-73 – that means that I was toting a box of 3½” floppy disks around DC to save my photos. Buildings are now here that weren’t in 2001. Some buildings are gone now. This was also my first time riding past Smithsonian on the Blue and Orange Line, and my first time transferring to the Yellow Line, at L’Enfant Plaza, and going over the bridge. So here we go…
Categories: Arlington, Fire alarms, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC, WMATA
“Wait, isn’t that…?”
May 12, 2016, 1:01 PM
Imagine my surprise to sit down at my computer this morning to check Facebook, and be greeted by this image from ABC affiliate WJLA:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Weather, Wikipedia
A few more thoughts about “Scott’s House”…
April 24, 2016, 8:05 PM
Today, I released the “Scott’s House” set in Photography, which covers the visit that Elyse and I made to the former home of Scott Alan Bauer back in March. While the photo set gave a somewhat dry presentation of what Elyse and I found in the house, the preparation of that set raised a lot of questions that I will likely never get answers to, mostly revolving around the mystery of what exactly happened to this family.
From what I could tell, the house, in its final form, was home to only one person: Scott Bauer himself. Only the master bedroom contained a bed, one bedroom had no furniture in it to speak of, and the third bedroom had clearly been converted to an office at some point. In the bedroom-turned-office, some of the paperwork made me think that this home, leading up to its abandonment in late 2002, was not as happy as it once was. One of the documents was a statement from Howard County social services regarding past due child support. So it would appear that a divorce had occurred, and things had not been going well since. Likewise, on an MVA notice, Bauer had insurance and emissions violations regarding his truck. Makes me wonder if he had major financial problems in his final years at the house.
In any case, what caused Bauer to ultimately abandon the house and all of his belongings, as well as what happened to him afterward, remains a mystery.
Categories: Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
Exploring an abandoned house…
March 20, 2016, 7:21 PM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I explored an abandoned house in the Elkridge area of Howard County. This was my first “real” venture into urban exploration, and also the first “operational” photo shoot with the new Nikon SLR. I have had at least a casual interest in urban exploration for a long time, but never did a full-on exploration before. The closest things to urban exploration that I had done prior to this were visiting the buildings on Afton Mountain on several different occasions (but not penetrating them very much, if at all, on any of these occasions), and also that relatively brief visit to Lorton Reformatory last year. Elyse, on the other hand, has a good bit of experience over a number of years with urban exploration. So I was in good hands here. After all, Elyse clearly looked and acted like she knew what she was doing in Lorton, while I was more the clueless sidekick, as I didn’t know what I was doing, and was more or less unprepared for that one.
This time, I was ready. I had a headlamp like Elyse had at Lorton along with a few other flashlights, plus, remembering the strong smell of mold at Afton Mountain, I brought a respirator that I used to carry in my backpack to protests back in my activism days, but never used in that context. I also brought some rubber gloves so that I wouldn’t have to actually touch anything with my bare hands. I didn’t know what had been growing on anything at that house, so the gloves gave me more freedom to actually touch things that I wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do.
We had to do a short, but mostly uphill, hike to get to the house, and here it is:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
Testing out a new camera…
February 28, 2016, 2:44 PM
So I finally got a new camera, with its arriving at the beginning of this month. I got a Nikon D5300, and got a zoom lens along with it, as well as a new camera bag (i.e. I’m not going to use Big Mavica‘s old bag anymore). I didn’t test a D5300 when I tested a whole bunch of cameras with Elyse, because it wasn’t available. But I tested a number of different models around it. While this one did everything that most SLRs do, this one also had a fliparound screen like the D5500 that I tested, but being an earlier model, didn’t have the price tag of the D5500. It also had built-in GPS, which I find extremely useful, and that none of the cameras that I tested earlier had.
In case you weren’t aware, I contribute quite a bit to Panoramio. You know how you see photos in Google Earth and Google Maps? Panoramio is how a lot of those photos make their way in there. You upload photos, and then you tag the location on a map. The problem comes when I’m shooting a lot of photos in an area that I may not be very familiar with. I’m talking about things like my trip to Richmond in 2013, various trips to Chicago, High Rock, and the like. In those cases, the way I would typically shoot photos would be to take whatever photos with my real camera, and then grab my cell phone and take a quick reference shot. The reason for this was that the phone had GPS, but my real camera didn’t. That worked well enough, but it created extra work both onsite and in post-production. Onsite, I had to take an extra photo with a different camera, and ensure that GPS had gotten a lock on the position. Then in post-production, I had to coordinate the two photos, reading the tag on one photo in order to manually place the photo that’s actually getting published in the right spot. If it sounds like a pain, it’s because it is. Now that my real camera has GPS on it as well, everything has a location tag on it, which makes my life that much easier.
Also, since it’s come up before, a point of clarification: just because the camera has onboard GPS does not mean that the camera will give you directions. GPS is a network of satellites operated by the United States government that provides location and time information to users with a GPS receiver. It is not inherently a navigation system, though the way most people talk about it, you would think that it was. Just thought I’d put that out there.
Categories: Amtrak, Baltimore, Cameras, Elyse, MTA Maryland
Getting a “big boy” camera…
January 20, 2016, 1:44 PM
Last Thursday was a lot of fun. I got together with Elyse, with the intent of getting some sample material to evaluate for the future purchase of a new camera. This new camera will be a digital SLR, as I am quite confident that I have outgrown the “prosumer” level of camera that I have operated on since Big Mavica in 2002. I discovered that in 2014 when I photographed Brighton Dam and Triadelphia Reservoir with a borrowed Nikon Coolpix P510. The photos with that camera came out well enough, but other than a few extra pixels because of the higher resolution on that camera, I didn’t get any better features than my existing camera.
But first, after Elyse and I got together, we had lunch at Jimmy John’s. I had a sandwich, and Elyse just had one of the day-old rolls that they sell:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Food and drink, Maryland, Shopping
I feel like I was shooting the photos for those motivational posters…
October 25, 2015, 11:12 PM
This past Thursday, I went up to High Rock, which is a rock outcropping on South Mountain in Pen Mar, Maryland, in Washington County near the Pennsylvania border. It reminds me a little bit of both Humpback Rock in Virginia, and the Aqueduct Bridge stub in DC. Like Humpback Rock, it’s high on a mountaintop, however, unlike Humpback Rock, you can drive up to it and park right next to it, rather than parking down below and then hiking a mile straight uphill. Like the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s covered in graffiti and a popular overlook point, but unlike the Aqueduct Bridge, it’s a natural feature rather than manmade. I went up there with the intent of scouting out the location for a potential future set for the Photography section on Schumin Web. I knew it had a view, but I wasn’t so sure about it. I arrived just before 5:00 PM, and stayed for about an hour and a half. While there, I let my curiosity lead the way, as I checked things out at the site and just kind of followed what I found interesting. I don’t know which intrigued me more: the formation itself, the view, or the graffiti.
So here’s what some of the take from this outing looked like:
View from High Rock facing approximately north, towards Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. The bit of stone in the foreground is actually manmade. As much as I can tell, this is some of what remains of an observatory that once stood at this site.
Categories: Maryland, Photography, Walmart, Waynesboro (PA)
“He offered her the world…”
October 14, 2015, 11:50 PM
I’m always surprised to see how some of my photos are used. I recently got a membership with Pixsy, which skims the Internet for potentially infringing photo usages, and then allows the user to go after infringing users to get them to pay for their usage. One photo that surprised me as a frequent candidate for infringements was this one from 2003:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Roanoke, Schumin Web meta, Television
While hunting for a photo…
August 29, 2015, 9:29 PM
Yesterday, I was hunting through my archives to find a photo to show a friend. My photo archives are arranged by subject and by date. If I took a bunch of photos in a single day, then all of those photos typically go into a folder marked with the general subject of the photos and the date. One-off photos usually get dated, marked with their subject, and get put in a folder with all of the one-off shots for the month. The photo that I was looking for depicted a bus sign after the normal text for that route had changed. So I knew what it was, and knew what the photo looked like. I also knew that the photo was a one-off, since I took the photo at Glenmont on the way home from work. However, I didn’t remember exactly when I took it. I had an approximate range for when I took it, but didn’t quite know. So that meant that I needed to hunt.
First of all, I was successful in finding the photo. Here it is, dated September 24, 2012:
Categories: House, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC, WMATA, Work
“I am always so thrilled when people realize how much better a place can look with just a few simple changes!”
October 12, 2014, 12:07 PM
This past week, I finally finished the work that I’d been doing at my house for the past two months. The way I figured, since there was a period of time while the various processes related to onboarding at the new job were still coming together, I might as well take the time to finish a few things on my to-do list. It’s funny, however, what inspires a person to decorate. Back in July or so, my friend Suzie described my house as “a hot mess”. I thought about that over the next week or so, and came to the conclusion that she was right. And I admit – it was looking a little bit too “lived in” at the time, with a lot of unfinished business all over the place. The closets were not being used to their full potential, I had a pile of stuff on the counter between the kitchen and the living room, the table was full of junk, and there were things in visible locations when they should have been in closets.
I started out on August 5, doing what I called the “demolition” phase. This was where I cleaned out the closets and determined what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to get rid of. It’s amazing how much junk can fit in a one-bedroom apartment. I ended up getting rid of a ton of stuff. I had long-outdated information about the 2008 Democratic National Convention from the Unconventional Action consulta that occurred in January 2008. I had the banner from the black bloc at the National Equality March from October 2009. I had an expired bottle of generic Solarcaine from the time when I got sunburned at Splash Down Waterpark in June 2008. I also had a carton of fabric softener from 2007 that I had never opened, where all the liquid had been absorbed by the carton itself, leaving a blob of whatever solids were in the softener at the bottom. No, seriously. Take a look:
Categories: Fire alarms, House, Mercury Sable, Photography, Power Rangers, Schumin Web meta, Today's Special
Back to Cumberland…
October 11, 2014, 7:56 PM
On October 2, exactly a year and a half after my first road trip to Cumberland (where I produced a photography set), I was back out that way again. The purpose of this trip was to explore the downtown area a little bit more deeply, make some photo spheres, and check out a few things that I had missed the last time I was out there for one reason or another.
I had two planned stops on the way out. The first was at the westbound South Mountain rest area and welcome center on Interstate 70. Besides its being a logical spot to take a break, I wanted to get some photo spheres while there, plus I wanted to get updated photos of something that really bothered me on the last trip to Cumberland. In the Journal entry for the April 2013 trip, I discussed an errant apostrophe on the signage directing motorists to parking, where “RV” was pluralized using an apostrophe. The rule of thumb when it comes to pluralization in English, by the way, is that an apostrophe is never used to form a plural. Ever. I filed a request about this with SHA, which became case #SR-0198410, in early May of this year, to get it fixed, referencing the photo from 2013. I heard back from SHA a few days later, where they promised that they would have the apostrophes removed by the end of the month. When I was through that area again in mid-June, I swung by the eastbound rest area (opposite side) to check to see if they kept their promise. They did, as they scraped the apostrophe off of the sign. This left a somewhat inelegant result:
Categories: Cumberland, Photography, Railroads