Making New Technologies Fit What Is Archives - Peter Sibbald's Blog About Photography and Filmmaking

…More like this at REDUX Pictures…

If there can be found to be any silver lining to such incipiently disastrous events as BP’s recent and ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is the reminder that we must be constantly vigilant of the hubris of Humankind and vigourous in demanding that our leaders and policy makers adhere to the wisdom and good leadership protocols embodied in the Precautionary Principle. After all, such man-man catastrophes have always been completely avoidable.

To reprise an earlier blog post:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

–Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, pt. xi, p.10(1776)

These have been difficult years in the photojournalism world. It is heartening to know that Fred Richin is still thinking and writing about photography; food for thought. I’m not sure I agree with him on this particular point, but his blog site promoting his 2008 book, After Photography, is a place where one can have that discussion,

Paying for Online Journalism: The Television Model

“Perhaps nothing is discussed as much as the financial future of online journalism. Without the large-scale advertising rates that were prevalent in print journalism and without subscriptions, how are news organizations going to survive in nearly any form?”

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I’m beginning to work on introducing video/film into my work and seeking great examples. Here are some really amazing things that others are doing:

Food, Inc.

and

Driftless

As one who is constantly torn between the old and the new, I came upon this newfangled equipment:

At the Art Gallery of Ontario the other week, Curator of Photography Maia Sutnik showed me Mike Robinson’s work… and then by chance, I happened to meet him a few nights later: charming fellow, with much to teach us. He had a couple of his recent Daguerreotypes in a little satchel, like gems. Photographs with heft and lasting power. Substance in a time of ephemera!

But how does one embed IPTC metadata in them, let alone PLUS?

At a CAPIC event last held night in CBC’s Glenn Gould Auditorium (and webcast across the country to CAPIC meetings and individuals), Jeff Sedlik was in TO to deliver to a nearly full house the most amazing news of the efforts of PLUS, the system he and his cross-industry cronies have been building the past decade for standardizing rights language and image licensing. The idea is to make it a no-brainer through technology so that all rights language and image licensing becomes as standard as IPTC meta data and systems like Panatone colours. It leaves one very hopeful, if also a bit skeptical about the rate of compliance and implementation that may occur, and of course presumes good will and integrity on the part of buyers which we know is far from the truth in many cases…but the ideas and method seem very solid.

According to PLUS’s website news, here are just three key items pulled from many:
IPTC Integrates PLUS Standards. The Board of Directors of the IPTC voted to approve a revision to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, incorporating a significant number of rights-related fields established in the PLUS Standards.

Adobe Announces CS4. PLUS Leadership Circle member Adobe Systems has announced Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended. Look for PLUS “File Info” panels in an update to CS4.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 PLUS Plug-in Beta. Developer Timothy Armes begins beta testing of a plug-in that allows users of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to embed PLUS metadata in image files.