40 Things

I’ve just found this on facebook. One of my flickr contacts/facebook friends posted his and I liked the idea. I like these things because I feel it’s a snapshot of who and where you are at the time you complete it. Often, when you look back at it  much later the answers surprise you (well me).

It’s not as easy as you might think! Copy and change the answers to suit you in a note on your profile. It’s really hard to only use one word answers. Be sure to tag the person you received it from!

1. Where is your cell phone? hall

2. Your significant other? Rik

3. Your hair? grey

4. Your mother? dead

5. Your father? dead

6. Your favorite thing? camera

7. Your dream last night? busy

8. Your favorite drink? wine

9. Your dream/goal? NZ

10. What room you are in? lounge

11. Your hobby? photography

12. Your fear? loneliness

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? NZ

14. Where were you last night? home

16. Muffins? cooking

17. Wish list item? health

18. Where you grew up? London

19. Last thing you did? flickred

20. What are you wearing? jumper

21. Your TV? on

22. Your pets? none

23. Friends? far

24. Your life? stalled

25. Your mood? hopeful

26. Missing some one? yes

27. Car? no

28. Something you’re not wearing? bra

29. Your favorite store? M&S

30. Your favorite color? red

33. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday

34. Last time you cried? birthday

35. Who will resend this? Kerry

36. One place that you go to over and over? Kew

37. One person who emails me regularly? Kerry

38. My favorite place to eat? Taipan

39. Why you participated in this survey? snapshot

40. What are you doing tonight? splashy

I’ll elaborate on a few of the replies or I won’t understand them when I come to review it.

3. Hair, grey: no Ihaven’t grown it out again but my roots need doing and, as I am not working at the moment I am short of money and cannot justify the expense of the hairdresser. I have an appointment booked for 7th February as I am going to a party that day.

12. I’m not afraid of being on my own. I like my own company. But I am afraid of loneliness which is a different thing and can happen even when you are with other people.

16. Muffins? Cooking. No there are none int eh oven at the moment. But I enjoy cooking (and eating) muffins andhave lots of recipes from a book loaned to me by a bus friend.

17. Wish list item? Health. Well I’m relatively okay right now. There are many things that could be on a wish list, but most can’t be done (or done well) without health. Currently I have pains in my arm which the doctor thinks is carpal tunnel syndrome; I had my first mammogram last week (having turned fifty) and am waiting for the results. I have no reason to think they will not be good but, having had cancer (not breast) 21 years ago and having both parents die of cancers, it remains a worry in the back of my mind.  But I had a medical and chest x-ray for emigration purposes back in November and passed that.

20. Wearing? Jumper. It’s cold in the house. It’s cheaper to put a jumper on than leave the heating on all day. But I notice a draft from somewhere and can’t track it down, It’s irritating.

23. Friends? far. I have only one local friend. Priya is a young mum and so often too busy for socialising. Others are in London, where I lived for 43 years, or in other parts of the UK or ont he other side of the world. Emails and phone calls are not the same as seeing people in person. Occasion weekends or meals and shows are not the same as the ‘popping in’ that I was used to for most of my life.

24. Your life? Stalled. We are waiting for the New Zealand Immigration Service to decide if we can emigrate. We wont know for at least two months, maybe four. Once they decide, and assuming we are granted visas, we have twelve months to activate the visas (ie, actually arrive in NZ). We might go as soon as is possible or we might stay in the UK till the later this year when it is late autumn in the UK and spring in NZ. Otherwise we would have two consecutive winters without a summer. I quit my job last August and looking for a new one is difficult with such uncertainty about how long I am available for, not to mention the lack of suitable jobs here in Milton Keynes. It’s not like London!

26. Missing someone? Yes. My daughter, Barbara who stopped speaking to me without explanation and will not reply to contact I have tried to make.

27, Car? No. Well we have a car, a Renault Clio called Sapphie Nicole (SAP in her number plate, Nicole from the TV ads for Clios). I bought it when I sold my London flat and then took driving lessons. But I can’t ‘do’ roundabouts. The traffic here in Milton Keynes is very fast and stays fast around the zillions of roundabouts. I’m okay if I don’t have to stop. If I have to stop and wait for a gap I’m stuck. If a gap appears by the time I have convinced myself that it really is a gap – it’s gone.

2008: A Year in Pictures

Inspired by a mosaic made by one of my flickr contacts, I’ve chosen a photograph for each month of last year.

January: Flooded footpath, Milton Keynes
A wet start to the year. I was determined to get out of the office and walk each lunchtime if I could. I suffer from SAD and the sunlight will help lift my mood. When the river flooded it limited the places I could walk to in a lunch break but increased the opportunities for intersting photographs.

February: Chinese New Year, Soho
The start of my final Open University course, Film and Television History, saw me back in London once a month for tutorials. Officially, I was supposed to go to tutorials on the far side of Oxford but that’s too difficult (expensive and time consuming) to get to. Much easier and more interesting to go to London for the day. Of course, I took the camera. As it was Chinese New Year I wandered into Soho and to Trafalgar Square to take some photographs.

March: Friends with Kew
We (my OH and I) both love the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and are ‘Friends of Kew’. We love sharing this with friends. Our friends Karl and Magna wanted to see the exhibition ‘Moore at Kew’ and so did I. It finished at the end of March so we wouldn’t wait for better weather or we’d have missed it. It was bloody freezing. I did take lots of photos of the sculptures but I think my favourite of the day was this one of Karl, taken in one of those ‘out of the way’ parts of Kew you only find if you wander away from the main thoroughfares.

April: Ideal Sofa?
The OU Club arranged incredibly cheap travel and entry to the Ideal Home Show in London. Rik and I went down for a day out. I worked at this show, selling membership of a bookclub, for four consecutive years in the 1990s. We looked around the show houses, something I’d never had time to do when I worked there. I loved the colour and depth of this sofa. I’ve always been disappointed by sofas and suspect that I will have to spend serious amounts of money to get one that wont disappoint. I had a lovely, deep, comfortable blue sofa that became lumpy after a very few years. The one I have now is not as big as I thought I was buying (way too small) and wont be coming to NZ with us.

May: Eiffel Tower
Rik and I went to Paris to celebrate having been together for (over) ten years. We had a fabulous long weekend (almost a week – Friday to Tuesday) visiting the art galleries and wandering around. I had seen, but never been up, the Eiffel Tower. I expected to be disappointed by sucha a hyped up tourist attraction. I needn’t have worried, I loved it. Definitely a different experience by night!

June: Deep North
In June I travelled to the Scandinavian part of the Arctic Circle. It was a fabulous trip and my fellow travellers on the tour were a great buch, very friendly. I timed the trip to ensure I was there for the longest day. The sun didn’t set on me for over a week. It only set because I had travelled further south. There’s about six weeks of the sun being constantly in the sky in the far north. It was great being able to wander around in the daylight in late evening. I love the space and clean air. The colours of the buildings are traditional.

July: Kew again.
When we lived in London we tried to get to Kew Gardens at least once a month, even in the winter. Now we are in Bletchley it is more expensive to travel down but we do try to get there several times a year. On this visit Iplayed with the macro setting and the metering on my camera a lot more and took some photos I rather liked. We took two people who were, at the time, new friends. Unfortunately, that friendship turned bad, something that has never happened to me before. Not nice.

August: Walpole’s House, Strawberry Hill
In an effort to ensure I had a chance of pasing my course, and therefore getting an Honours Degree, I attended a study weekend organised by the Open University Students’ London Regional Arts Club.
It was held at a college in Strawberry Hill, an area of London I had never heard of. I met some interesting people, had a good recap of the course (took reams of notes) and enjoyed the break away from the distractions of home. The buildings were interesting and Walpole’s House was next door. I discovered this when I took a walk in the grounds before breakfast and found myself at the back of the house.

September: Henna Heart
In September/October I took another coach tour (I’m trying to see as much of this side of the world as I can before I move to the other side of the world). This was a ten day tour of the ‘Highlights of Morocco’ and was fabulous. I photographed this little girl’s henna-painted hand in Fes. Her mother didn’t speak English (why should she?) and I don’t speak Arabic but we exchanged a few words in my broken French. I thanked her for allowing me to take the photograph and told her how beautiful her daughter was, and gave her a few coins. I didn’t feel comfortable with the way so many people just crowded round this tiny little girl taking photographs and ignoring them as people. I found my broken French useful later in the tour when kids were insisting on ‘helping’ my tour-mates over the stepping stone’s against their will. I couldn’t think of the French for ‘go away’ or ‘leave us alone’ but finally came up with ‘ne touchez pas!’ (don’t touch!). I was amazed at the reaction as they immediately sprung away as if burned.

October: Salamanca
October was a busy month. Six days after I got home from Morocco I was off on another trip, this time to Spain for the fourteen day ‘Spanish Panorama’ tour. In the few days in between I recovered from Moroccan tummy; was reunited with my luggage (I flew Casablanca to London, it flew Casablanca to Paris I gothome on Sunday, the luggage got home on Wednesday); and took my final exam. It was my first exam for years as most of my recent courses have had an end of course assignment rather than a three hour timed exam. One of the things I really like about tours is that you get to see places you might not have visited if you were setting your own itinerary, and they can be brilliant. A very short walk from the hotel brought me to this gorgeously lit square.

November: Unexpected Beauty
I was ill in November. A particularly nasty lurgy, not quite full blown flu but pretty close to it, was doing the rounds and I caught it. We had tickets for the BBC Good Food Show that I ordered months ago. We were going with friends and I had their tickets so I had to go. I could hardly talk, couldn’t taste or smell anything (a serious downer at a food show) and spent the day dosed up with Strepsils, paracetamol, etc. On the way back to the car park, walking along with two friends, I spotted this view. I set the camera on the settings I wanted, rested it on a fence post, set the timer (so It wouldn’t suffer from camera shake / photographer shiver) and got this. I loved it.

December: Bletchley at 3.58pm
The month of the shortest day. If things go to plan, this may be the shortest day I have for the rest of my life. Why? Because their are more hours of daylight on the shortest day in New Zealand than there are in the UK. Wellington has about an hour and a half more daylight than Bletchley. This year I also had my longest longest day – in the Arctic Circle. This photo was taken near the shops just over a mile from my home, before 4pm. Yes it’s pretty, but it’s way too early for a sunset.

Where are your details?

A couple of entries back I wrote about copyright infringement. That was merely annoying. Since then I found a more worrying example of the use of my photos and the associated data.

The flickr stats for this photograph of a Parisian shop showed that some of the views were referred from http://www.tightwaist.de. I checked it out. It’s a site run by a guy in Germany who likes to see women in corsets. As well as stories (I’m not sure how salacious they are, I don’t read German), he has a photo gallery. Or, rather, a flickr gallerie. That’s what he calls it on his site.

But, here’s the worrying thing. Below my photograph on his site he had reproduced the descriptive text, all the tags and my full name, my flickr name and my location as shown on my flickr profile!

I emailed him (once I was able to find an email address on the site) and told him very clear terms, that I wanted my photographs removed.

Then I found, via a link on his nasty corset site, that he has a flickr account in the same name so I flickrmailed the same message to him. He didn’t get back to me but my photo on his site was replaced with words in German that babelfish translated as ‘This picture is subject to rights third and may not be indicated from there’. But he still had the rest of the details there.

He ignored my request to remove my info so I contacted flickr. They told me they could do nothing about stuff on an external site so I uploaded the photo again and deleted the original so that all my info was removed from his site.

I am not a happy bunny.

Copyright infringement – it’s bad manners (and illegal)

© All rights reserved = don’t use this without the owner’s permission. That’s not such a difficult concept to grasp, is it?

The other day I was explaining to a friend how to set up a Google alert to see, among other things, if your photographs are being used by others without your permission. I explained that it isn’t foolproof and it’s wise to occasionally do a Google search (and Yahoo search, etc) to see what it turns up. I’d not checked myself for a while so ran a check.

Now, before I go on, let me say something about me and photography. Almost all of my photographs are on flickr. I’m not a fantastic photographer. I’m keen and enthusiastic. I enjoy it. I am rather proud of some of my photographs. Most of them are for memories, or fun, or other non-artistic reasons. But they are mine. I keep an ‘all rights reserved’ copyright on all of them, because they are mine. Occasionally I get a flickr mail from someone asking me if they can use one of my photographs for an invitation, or an exhibition about bicycle parking or some such. These people usually tell me they can’t afford to pay for the use. That’s fine. I’m just pleased they respected the copyright and were polite enough to ask. I tell them they can use the photograph so long as I am credited as the photographer.

I was also approached by a UK university who wanted to use some of my photographs (of Beamish) in an educational video about the building of nineteenth century houses. They offered to pay and, as they clearly had a budget for this, I took the money. They got the photos for less than it would have cost them to travel from the West Country to the North of England, and I got a little bit of money and the thrill of being paid for my photography.

So, I ran a check on my flickr name and found that some guy who runs a French website about Pink Floyd was using this photograph of Camberwell College of Arts:

It’s mine and it is clearly marked ‘© All rights reserved’ on its flickr page. Apparently this means nothing to the guy who stole it. I know this because when I mailed him and said

‘You have used one of my photographs (of Camberwell College) without my permission. Please remove it from your site.’

He replied telling me

I’m sorry for the inconvenience. I can’t write a mail for all the photos that are on my website. I think it’s fair use to put a low resolution version with a link to the author’s website. Lots of webmasters don’t even credit authors… Anyway, I’ve removed your photography. That’s a pity ’cause it’s a beauty !

What nonsense. If he can search for the photos, he can drop a flickrmail asking if he can use it. Just because others also break the law doesn’t make it right. So I replied with

‘Fair use’ is to respect the legality of ‘all rights reserved’. If a photograph has a creative commons license then you can use it in accordance with the license.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED means just that. Just because other people also break the law does not make it right.

Thank you for removing it, and thank you for the comment.

It might interest you to know that I have never yet refused a REQUEST from any one who wanted to use one of my photographs. Just ASK in future.

The cheeky so-and-so came back with

‘I think you should write an email to the english Wikipedia, they have tons of copyrighted matérial on their pages… qualified as “fair use”
They also have lots of my content stealed directly from my own website. But that’s what Wikipedia is : a giant copy-paste of the World Wide Web !

Well… you’re absolutely right, and I was wrong. Please excuse me, again.

I’d like to ask you something : can I use your Camberwell College photography on my website?

Apart from my not having seen any photographs on wikipedia that weren’t either ‘creative commons’ licensed or had some other indication that permission had been given, he seems to be complaining that someone has stolen from him the images he has stolen from others. No, I will NOT be giving him permission to use my photographs. Cheeky sod.

Today, I found this, even more annoying, instance of photography theft. Some woman, who has a design company making notecards and calendars (so she should certainly understand about copyright – not that it’s a difficult concept to grasp) has a blog about ‘places she’s never been’. There is a link from her blog to her website and online shop – so she’s making money from this. Her entry for the end of February includes three photographs including this one of mine

They are not linked back (ie, clicking on the photograph does nothing, doesn’t take you to the original on flickr) and the only way I knew it was there is because she put, at the end of her entry

‘The above photos (top left, clockwise) are via flickr by XianRex, saltybullfrog, & Jacqi B.’

Well, Ms Hill, that is NOT good enough. I’ve mailed her and left a comment on her blog. I’ll see if she has the courtesy to get back to me.

My flickrstream is now set so that my photos can only be printed, downloaded or shared by my ‘friends and family’. I can’t remember how recently I did that so don’t know if these people have got round that somehow.