agxphoto.info Second Edition

Service Updated

2010-11-17T19:35:00.001-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Service updated at AgXphoto.info.
Thanks.
J.

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Digging Out

2010-11-15T09:10:00.004-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Our nameserver is still bogged down, but some of our pages are more accessible. For the time being, I locked up the directories for a little while. Since I've been posting service messages about the state of the website, I don't feel as comfortable about immediately emerging from the DDOS with the crowd. I will have the website wait a little while.

We'll stay here for now. Our addresses would normally be agxphoto.com and agxphoto.info.

Thanks.

Blekko Bot Plus Spam Equals DDOS

2010-11-13T15:14:00.023-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Program: Blekko Bot "scoutjet"
Symptoms: DDOS Attack; "scoutjet" in URLs in server access logs; DDOS storm IP addresses often blacklisted as "commenter spam."
Targets: Self-contained primary content like JPEG and PDFs.
Trends: 18 month old URLs (old enough to be old; new enough to be new); violates website's Terms of Use for Service and Content; over-aggressive spider.

UPDATE: We have noticed that Blekko's bots are not only in the middle of the arriving requests in our logs during this DDOS attack, but that Blekko is in the business of providing "crowdsourced" ratings of websites for its commercial search engine.

It may be that Blekko is the core participant in the DDOS; it looks like they have a financial motive for seizing content.

Fault can't be determined just from reviewing access logs, but Blekko's bot is clearly in there. So, if they are not a part of the DDOS, at the very least they are trying to scrape data during someone else's DDOS Attack.

Once again, review your files and know your system. Blekko's bot got my attention because these guys never show up to my website.

Some of the files Blekko has tried to gain access to from our website have been registered with the Library of Congress. As our faithful readers know, some of the content files have been sold for thousands of dollars.

Blekko has not attempted to contact us for use of those files in accordance with our website's Terms of Use. We have sent them an email advising them that they are coming close to receiving our bill, should they persist.

Blekko investors have made millions on promises of commercializing "crowdsourced" search engine optimization. Effectively, it's a large popularity contest in which investors get rich and content providers, like us, get paid nothing.

The Blekko bot was easily detectable in server-side access logs. Inside a swarm of IP addresses associated with "comment spammers", the Blekko bot's URL is plainly visible.

Look for "scoutjet".

The Blekko bot seemed to favor PDF copies of our original content, like equipment reviews. The PDF, once taken, would not need to be linked back to our website to be reused.

The URLs they were using were at least 18 months old, and were neutralized by our periodic system improvements.

Blekko's website features some quaint instructions for webmasters; effectively telling us that it is up to us to keep their spider off of our website. We're told to set the rate of query and to build our bots.txt file to keep it out of there. It's not our program. It's Blekko's.

If they had put even a minimal effort into actually reading our website, they would have seen our publicly posted passwords. I hand them out on business cards to actual people interested in reading the content. I don't think I gave any to Blekko.

They would have had to read the card and adjust the bot to negotiated the password challenge; which, by the way, is just as easy to program a spider to do as it is to tell a person to do.

Instead, Blekko's bot and its cloud of surround-sound ____ decided to hammer the nameserver with a 1980s war-dialing of antiquated URLs.

Blekko's sales pitch is that they know where the good stuff is.

Well, hell, we gave them the password.

ORIGINAL:

Our nameserver has been bogged down, on and off, for the past day (12 NOV 2010 to 13 NOV 2010) with a DDOS attack. Our files are still intact.

The DDOS time frame coincided with the arrival of the Blekko bot and an international comment spammer at the same time. Nothing but love for you both.

A check of our logs shows that right in the middle of this attack, unwanted and previously unknown bots from "Blekko," a search engine from http://scoutjet.com, were hammering our website with antiquated file requests.

According to their website, webmasters can limit how frequently their bot crawls our site.

How quaint.

Coincidentally, those files Blekko's bots were looking for are available on the website for people who read it. The addresses they went along with have long since been phased out, deleted, and human readers have been referred to replacement directories. It's obvious, from just looking at the URLs, that no one actually read and evaluated these directions given to the Blekko bot. They're just grabbing whatever to start up their search engine.

A recent trip to my local public library offers some good advice on how to avoid causing just this sort of problem with your bot, if you run one. I recommend the book, "Spidering Hacks" by Kevin Hemenway. Be sure to check out the subsection on not rudely hogging bandwidth. Just a suggestion.

For the meanwhile, we're going to use this blogger site; content-wise, it is close to mirror. Eventually, someone in Silly Valley will realize that Blekko's new bot crawls right around the time this large DDOS seems to be taking place. It unfortunately seems to be the Blekko bot and an international comment spammer at the same time.

We're building a better mousetrap, regardless of what happens with the nameserver.

# # #

Blekko's Twitter: http://twitter.com/blekko
Scoutjet webcrawler for Blekko: http://www.scoutjet.com/
Blekko.com: http://blekko.com/

Reference for update:
http://www.mwd.com/2010/11/bleko-launches-human-filtered-search-engine/

Title updated.

# # #

"Suter Falls with Rock" at AVA Salon Show 2010

2010-11-04T22:25:00.013-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

We're joining dozens of our city's artists once again at the AVA Salon Show. This year, we offer Suter Falls with Rock, a 22X30" framed silver halide photograph.

The negative was made with Ilford PanF+ 120 black and white film developed in our own Plain Jane Hydroquinone Alpha developer.

The print is Kentmere large roll photo paper, developed in Kodak D-72 Dektol. The print paper is so large the photo had to be bathed in wallpaper trays.

The technique used to make this photo print was described in an earlier article.

The AVA All Member Salon Show 2010 runs from November 5, 2010 to December 19, 2010. There is a reception on Friday night, November 5. The AVA Gallery is on 30 Frazier Avenue, Chattanooga. Artworks are purchasable through the AVA representative at the gallery's front desk.

Over $1,430,000 Spent on Buying Tennessee's Federal Lawmakers

2010-11-04T02:20:00.014-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

A recent report released by lobbyists at the non-profit organization Public Citizen on their website Citizen.org lists contributions to recent political campaigns.

The report concentrates on funds which were from undisclosed sources outside of a candidate's state.

Over $1,430,000 (one million four hundred thirty thousand dollars') worth of campaign contributions, from undisclosed sources outside of Tennessee, went mainly into two of Tennessee's lawmakers' campaigns.

US Representatives-elect Scott Desjarlais($951,445) and Steve Fincher ($482,309) are listed among the nations' top recipients of contributions whose sources were from outside the candidates' state, but of an undisclosed origin.

Desjarlais Asks Tennessee for Yet More Money

Desjarlais, who is listed as receiving close to one million dollars in unnamed outside support ($951,445), had an ad on his website specifically asking voters to "Help Us Keep This Ad on the Air by Clicking Here!"

The ad featured the spoken and written words, "stop spending on wasteful bailouts!"

The hyperlink associated with supporting the ad went to a secure section of the website listed under the subdirectory of "contribute."

Desjarlais' campaign was headquartered in Jasper. Fincher's campaign headquarters had a Jackson, TN address.

"Low Funds" and "No Funds" Races Also Listed

US Representative-elect Diane Black ($1,830) also received outside the state funding from undisclosed sources, but at less than two thousand dollars' worth of influence.

US Representative-elect "Chuck" Fleischmann (TN-3: Chattanooga-area), who raced against John Wolfe, is listed as --not-- receiving funds ($0) from undisclosed sources outside the state.

Comparable to Governor's Race Dollars

Also listed were approximately $18 million dollars worth of undisclosed, outside-their-state funds of unknown origin which were applied to six governors' races across the US.

Tennessee's governor's race was not listed among those (IL, PA, WI, AR, IN, and $0 spent in North Dakota) which were associated with a partisan change in power.

Some of the amounts listed as being spent on Tennessee's US Representatives are comparable to the dollar values discussed on a recent episode of WTCI (PBS) "Tennessee Insider" as being an influential amount in upcoming governor's elections.

In Season 4, Episode 29 of "Tennessee Insider" panelists discussed how the spending of millions of dollars in advertising had become a practical requirement for running for governor.

That episode shows how this year's Governor's election campaigns already saw candidates concentrating their advertising on selected areas of the state. Bill Haslam, who later on became Tennessee's Governor-elect, was noted as having the most money to spend on advertising.

Managing equity arguably led to some candidates mutually conceding that their opponents were strong in their respective "home" areas. This led to a set of conditions in which the panelists discussed that it was plausible to conclude certain large areas (Nashville, mainly) would become the battleground between two candidates who had the most money to spend.

In these money-dumping schemes of purchasing political advertising, large swaths of the state's votes end up being regarded as a foregone conclusion.

Many of "Tennesse Insider"'s panelists predictions did turn out to be observable realities.

Given the over one million dollar amount listed as buying influence in campaign advertising for Desjarlais and Finch, above, it's demonstrable that similar sums could be applied to outright buy a future Tennessee governor by funding his campaign.

Look to AgXphoto.info's SSL site for updates and follow-up reports.

# # #

References:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Outside-Job-Report-20101103.pdf
http://www.citizen.org/outside-job
Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, 215 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003

http://wtcitv.org/video/insider/season-4-episode-29

http://www.scottdesjarlais.com/

https://www.scottdesjarlais.com/www/contribute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWki46PRR3k
http://stephenfincher.org/

AgXphoto.info on SSL:
https://guest:agxphoto@www.agxphoto.info
or logon to https://www.agxphoto.info
and manually enter username: guest password:agxphoto.

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Moving Mirrors Arrives at Libraries

2010-10-26T11:14:00.019-04:00

Upper Greeter Creek, cover photo from Moving Mirrors: Intermediate Principles of Landscape Photography with Film.

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

We're proud to announce the addition of Moving Mirrors: Intermediate Principles in Landscape Photography with Film to library collections in Tennessee.

Recent acceptances and catalog entries include:

Academic Libraries:
Southern Adventist University, McKee Library.
Chattanooga State, Augusta R. Kolwyck Library.
Motlow State Community College, Clayton-Glass Library, Moore County Campus and Fayetteville Campus.

Public Libraries:
Chattanooga-Hamilton County Public Library (Eastgate branch).
Manchester/Coffee County Public Library. Call number 778.71 OKE.
East Ridge City Library. Call number 770 OKE.

Secondary School:
East Ridge High School Library, one copy for the alma mater.

Many thanks to the Deans and Library Directors who were kind enough to reply with letters of acceptance.

Look for Moving Mirrors in your local library in southeast Tennessee. Some of the books we have donated to almost 20 libraries are still being processed and evaluated. We'll post updates about approvals as they become available.

Moving Mirrors: Intermediate Principles of Landscape Photography with Film is a monograph written, photographed, edited and designed by John O'Keefe-Odom. It is the primary product of a 2009 CreateHere MakeWork Grant.

CreateHere's MakeWork grants were made possible by generous donations from the Lyndhurst and Benwood Foundations. Both organizations are well known throughout the Chattanooga area for their exemplary, multi-millionaire patronage of arts and cultural activities.

Moving Mirrors includes discussions of: original developer recipes, film and darkroom techniques, photographic composition, Boyle's Law, Beer's Law, the Inverse Square Law of Light, Rayleigh Scattering, tonal grouping, tonal shifts and using spectra for editing images.

BISAC Subject codes: PHO023040 (Landscape), PHO006000 (Darkroom) and PHO011030 (monograph).

The book can also be searched for with ISBN 978-0-615-37152-8 or as ISBN 9780615371528.

An online copy of the text in web page format is available at: https://www.agxphoto.info. To login as a visitor and view the content for academic or personal reference use, please respond to password challenges with the Username "guest" and the Password of "agxphoto." Any subsequent updates to the challenge and reply procedure may be noted on our index.html page at www.agxphoto.info. Within the website, the book's content is available in HTML 2.0 with CSS and HTML 4.01 Strict with CSS.

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Decon Evercookie: Temporarily Shake Evercookie with User ID Deletion

2010-10-11T10:10:00.035-04:00

AgXphoto.info
by John O'Keefe-Odom

Evercookie may resist removal by the user, but it does not seem to effectively withstand removal of the user, as in, removal of the contaminated login ID.

Receiving "evercookie" also seems to be dependent upon the use of browsers with "javascript enabled."

Building a new user login and destroying a contaminated one could be done, with some additional file saving in less than 30 minutes. Bold re-creation and contaminated directory deletion seems to be something that's do-able in less than 2 minutes.

The difference in time consumed rests with the deliberation and care for preserving other files associated with the user ID affected, before it is destroyed.

Removal Time: Under Five Minutes

Predicted elapsed time to erase the "un-removable" cookie: two to five minutes of normal operation and typing by a familiar user. This would be for one affected account, manual removal, through typing commands in Terminal, responding to identified processes through inspection and education.

It's not forever. Evercookie removal seems to take longer to recognize and prepare for than it takes to carry out.

Removal takes about five minutes, if you're prepared to delete a user ID, which anyone on the Internet should be prepared to do anyway. Burning the bridge behind you only takes a moment. Sometimes it's the right thing to do.

Summary

Shake evercookie by destroying User IDs like a one-time pad.

Preventative User Behavior

Establish, maintain, and destroy at irregular intervals, User IDs used only for Internet surfing. Same as the procedure for isolating or containing actions on the computer by restricting certain activities to certain User IDs. Avoid associating User IDs with specific people, particularly if you are the only user of a given computer.

Narrative

I picked up the dreaded evercookie HTML5 malware. Used to track computer users across the Internet, this particular type of cookie is aggressive about resisting deletion. It has a special "undelete" feature built into it that stores ten copies of itself on available memory systems.

I'm not absolutely certain about what this program is or does, but I used these simple steps to detect and manually, but brutally, contain the Evercookie.

I mean "contain" as in, once the login ID is deleted, the evercookie's behavior seems to stop and not reoccur.

Procedure:

Detection through unusual processes in TOP
Containment through deleting affected user ID
Light containment with browsers initiated from within a separate volume
Manual-input protections from disposing and recreating user IDs on a system based on desire
Periodic hard-drive reformatting
Periodic system destruction and reconstruction

Detection:

I found the evercookie first a few days ago, not knowing what it was. It showed up in Terminal when I ran TOP. This command reveals the top-consuming processes running on the computer.

At the same time, history related functions in Firefox were not working properly. The browser was suddenly providing unusual warnings. Bookmarks were gone; and, simple "BACK" and "FWD" functions were not working right.

When I ran a quick check of the system in Terminal, a program I use daily, I observed a bunch of "DesktopC" processes that I do not normally see on my system. Rightly or wrongly, I notice that these coincided with the occurrence of this browser problem. For this reason, and the arrival of recent publications on "evercookie," I suspect that what I was seeing was the effect evercookie had on my system.

NOTE: I provide the following guidance for use at your own risk. Read through and decide for yourself before proceeding. These solutions work because they involve deliberately destroying or disorganizing data. Thanks.

Normally, to put a stop to a process, this simple "KILL" command followed by the process number, will stop that particular program. In the case of this Evercookie, I noticed that there were ten unusual processes called "DesktopC" which were running. Also, I noticed that for every one I deleted, another new one would appear.

It was that new-appearance which got my attention. Normally, in TOP what would occur would be that when a process is deleted, whatever next one on the list (among the top consumers of power on the system) would be displayed. Almost always, because of the great variety of applications running on a system, this would be something of another name.

Attempts to issue a KILL command for all of those processes in one line were unsuccessful in my case. It might work; but, by the time I got around to trying it the process numbers had already spread themselves out so much that I could not remember them all to get them in one easy to type line.

Notable Exception:

I noticed that this problem only infected one user ID on my system. Even though I am only one person, like a lot of old operators, I maintain several user IDs for different kinds of uses. For example, I like to write simple programs in C: that has its own user ID. Browsing the Internet? Its own user ID. And, so on.

When evercookie arrived, it infected some user IDs, but not others. To observe this, when I would switch IDs around some, and running Terminal and TOP in each, I noticed that the DesktopC processes were not all consistently appearing.

The Brutal Solution:

To contain the symptoms, and I would like to emphasize "symptoms," I deleted the user ID that was infected with this problem.

That may seem harsh to some people, but if you are in the habit of running your systems as somewhat disposable anyway, it's just healthier. If you have so much stuff under your user ID right now that deleting it seems like a bad idea to you, it might be time to clean up some stuff, archive some backup copies, and get set to take the plunge sometime in the future.

With the deletion of that user ID which was infected with evercookie, those particular "DesktopC" processes stopped running. I suspect, but do not know, that those processes were running with that name, and there, because of instructions I had given to my browser about where to place downloads.

Keep in mind that just because something is not running now doesn't mean it's gone forever.

Notice also that this problem, evercookie, arrived through using the system on the Internet with other applications in use. So this thing has already traveled through pathways deeper than a user ID by the time it is detected. For example, multiple users may draw from the same browser application which helped evercookie arrive in the first place.

Prevention:

I noticed no good all-manual directions on the Internet for removing evercookies. There were a few programs which offered or claimed to control this problem, but I was skeptical of them. Back in the mid-90s, we saw a lot of programs, particularly marketed as scanners or cleaners, which would just replicate the tracking problems and re-route the results to a different destination. Since this evercookie problem is only a week old, I didn't feel too hot about trying those kinds of solutions lest I fall prey to the same old tricks.

Of the recommendations I can make with my limited knowledge of computers, probably the more brutal ones, of disposing of user IDs and reformatting your system at will: those ideas may seem inconvenient, but will probably only offer the only real help I could suggest to you.

I mention all of this because yesterday I saw some younger girls in a coffee shop complaining about how all of a sudden their computers were misbehaving. They were really frustrated, and I wonder if they had a more advanced form of this problem.

# # #

Possible Alternate Course of Action:

It also occurred to me later that if this evercookie is detected, one possible course of action is to use "ps -A" command in Terminal (*nix systems) to locate the running processes, and then "KILL" all of those in one command-line statement.

I have not tried this particular route, but it may be possible. It would be important to destroy or confuse all of the processes involved in one action.

# # #

References:
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/business/media/11privacy.html?ref=technology

PCMag.com:
http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2010/09/new_evercookie_claims_its_toug.php#comments

"Evercookie" most frequently referenced website:

[Warning: disable javascript in your browser before visiting. Site involves evercookie automatic generation.]

[Note: the evercookie site listed makes use of, to my surprise, Google Analytics tracking cookies. Notice the Google account number in the source code for the page if you visit.]

http://samy.pl/evercookie/

Website sharing similar Google Analytics tracking ID number:
[No other coordinating information on evercookie]
http://pastie.org/pastes/1077104

Pastie.org web pages related to longevity, but not appearing directly relevant to evercookie (it was unusual that rigorous persistence was coincidental and colocated):
http://pastie.org/1
http://blog.pastie.org/2010/09/pastes-are-forever.html#comments

Commentary on a web page review, based on the code found in the "pastie.org" reference page 1077104, with code replicated in thread:
[No other information on evercookie. Located by searching Google for a set of html creating a mailto link back to code posted on pastie.org's page sharing the Google UID]
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/166499-what-language-is-this-written-in/

# # #

Time Goes Paywall: What About It?

2010-07-07T12:16:00.005-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Artists, authors and creative content providers need to be paid for their time. I understand why Time would put a paywall up on these documents. That said, if readers are going to pay, then it would make sense that they pay for content that has some lasting effects.

Paywall-printings need staying power.

That said, there's still some room for some free web content. Namely, that kind of content that's not worth preserving or conserving.

If it's on a web page, it's, by structure, temporary. W3C overhauls HTML standards every few years: already most browsers cannot read older web pages. Electronic content eventually deletes itself.

Free web pages are great for ads. Paid content needs some structure, some analysis, and some punch. If the paywall acts like the bookbinding of paper printing, then remember to put content worth binding into that package.

Will they? We'll see.

# # #

References:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/time-pulls-free-magazine-_n_637692.html
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100707/time-magazine-walls-off-its-web-site-will-you-pay-up/

# # #

Got an App for Your Content? Why You Need to Get One

2010-07-07T10:40:00.005-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

PDFs and JPEGs are the loose-leaf notebook paper of our time. Document file bundles, like .doc and .pages are actually collections of files under an arbitrary name. They are like the loose-leaf binders of our time.

In order to have a level of control over content packaging and distribution that's comparable to what artists and authors have had for centuries in libraries and bookstores, artists need to build their own applications to hold their own content.

The computer company who built your computer did. Their content is no more holy than your own.

Their content, their programs, are different only in that they're more socially expected. With the rise of the iPhone, we see that users are willing to install applications that do little other than hold content.

The main innovation: trust.

In the past, we have seen the concept of the surprise application download associated with receiving a computer virus, or malware, or any kind of instructions for the computer beyond the user's understanding and control.

Well, don't surprise them. Apple doesn't. Every iPhone user expects to download apps.

One of the innovations that Apple has brought us socially is that we now have large collections of users who are willing to download apps, and there's been a social protocol created for making this an acceptable procedure.

Imitate iTunes and application distribution if you want success. Some of the key points demonstrated over there are:

Simple registration scripts to confirm and control distribution by CPU serial number
Cocoa (Objective-C) applications, often built with Apple's own XCode, included with every Mac. [They also have an excellent support site. Cocoa uses "C", a computer language that has been around since 1961. So, decades of programmers are out there who can help you, if you are not smart enough to build the whole thing yourself.]
Establishing a relationship with the user, the reader, that they are about to download a program before they do it
Use of simple download buttons and links through web pages to establish a book "storefront" that serves as a known distribution point for authorized materials
Some type of branding or description of who is allowed to give out a copy of the material and where those sites are ("only authorized dealers at: xyz.internetsufix")
A general description of what they are about to download
No sneaky extras; give them only the content they asked for.

With some of those ideas in mind, I'll be working on some of my own applications to hold photos, photo slideshows, and of course, my book. I think these ideas are interesting enough, and executable enough, to be a part of many of my future projects.

Why give out your collected material unbound? Have you ever gone into a bookstore and bought a loose sheet of notebook paper with the writing you wanted on it? Do you buy novels in looseleaf notebook binders?

Should your readers? Should your photo viewers?

Can't you build, of have built, one of those apps? The technology has been at our fingertips for years. We just haven't seen what was before us. Good luck. Proceed with confidence.

Get out there and code some of those already made text and photos into C.

# # #

AgXphoto.info Down for Maintenance

2010-07-07T10:37:00.002-04:00

I'm overhauling the main site, AgXphoto.info. We'll have it back up in a few days. I'm looking forward to bringing back some hand-coded pages; and, a new hive model of database structure will let us expand and grow with less linear containment. We may have some articles on these kinds of structures and how they can help you grow in your blogging endeavors.

J.

Aesthetic Ethics and Photo Standards

2010-05-29T19:54:00.024-04:00

AgXphoto.info
by John O'Keefe-Odom

Detailed below are some of our policies for the content and presentation of our images. In summary, key points include:

Respect for subject
Strait recording
Image comptrollers
Rebroadcasts in accordance with copyright law
Encourage healthy body image

Click here to jump to our standards for cosmetics.

Click here to jump to our standards for models.

Aesthetic Ethics and Photo Standards at AgXphoto.info
Respect for subject is our leading characteristic in standard compliance decisions.

Carry out a general purpose avoidance of any editing characteristic which would alter the overall message content of the photograph. Reportage of observed reality preferred.

No manipulation of photographs. Manipulation in editing is defined as post-recording separate treatment of a subset of the image, without exception. Changes to the entire surface area of the displayed image are acceptable. Examples of acceptable changes include: cropping, tone, color temperature correction, exposure and contrast.

Image Distribution and Control.

All rights reserved.

Image Comptroller required.

We discourage the redistribution of our images to or public display by corporate organizations who fail to appoint and maintain a designated responsible and accountable person who controls the display of the image. This person would be regarded by us as an Image Comptroller.

Image Comptrollers would be parties designated to approve or deny the printing or transmitting of an image.

Image Comptrollers have the authority to both transmit the image and to terminate the appearance of an image within 24 hours, in all applicable documents.

The point of contact and identity of an Image Comptroller would be a common predicate to the commercial sale or reprinting of our images.

We consider our works published from the moment they are displayed for lending or advertised for any sale.

Many of our works have been registered with the Library of Congress. We retain certificates to support future copyright enforcement needs.

We patrol for, and follow up on, the commercial display of our images to ensure that they comply with our licensing standards.

We recognize that the artist, as initial creator of the recording, is the unqualified granter of license and permission to other entities in order to print, reprint and mechanically transmit our images.

We reserve the right to revoke that license at any time in accordance with US Copyright Law as described through, but not limited to, the Library of Congress' website at copyright.gov.

Cosmetics.

In studio:
We have discontinued the use of most studio cosmetics.
No cosmetic application for editing of the presentation of the figure.

Soap, water and toothpaste are acceptable.
Limited applications of unscented deodorant (armpit wax) optional.
Basic personal hygiene to maintain health required.

Hair cutting or styling without the use of additives or dyes is acceptable.

No: additional colorings, dyes, waxes, varnishes, adhesives or substances are to be applied to the subject's skin, hair or nails.

Models may wear prosthetics as prescribed by a doctor. Prosthetics include dental and optical appliances (e.g. dentures, crowns, contact lenses and glasses).

Models are encouraged to remove all jewelry excepting wedding bands or wedding band sets.

In reportage:
Persons in public will be recorded as they normally appear.
No additional studio makeups or cosmetics will be applied for the purpose of our making the photograph, in accordance with the guidelines above.

Models.

Models should be over 18 years of age to establish a minimum dimension of legal and psychological responsibility in a commercially competitive environment.

Discourage the use of:

plastic surgery (other than reconstructive or prosthetic replacement)
elective surgery to the bones and teeth requiring more than 48 hours of recovery
non-prosthetic inserts, implants, injections, grafts or similar permanent intrusions designed to change appearance more than bodily structure & function
crash diets for weight gain or loss
or any other practices abnormally aggressive to one's health.

Encourage the use of:

reasonable caloric intake (e.g. 2,000 calorie days of balanced nutrition)
reasonable physical fitness (cp. President's Council of Physical Fitness standards by age and gender or US Army APFT)
and reasonable medical maintenance (doctor's care for wounds, injuries, ailments and diseases).

Height, weight and body fat: comparable to US Army passing scores ("GO") for height and weight against age and gender. Standards are outlined in US Army Regulation 600-9, "Army Weight Control Program".

Note that the minimum weight for a six foot tall (72 inch) person is 140 pounds. At 40+ years old, the maximum weight would be 191.

Models are encouraged to surpass minimum weight requirements for females IAW USA 600-9. Models are encouraged to maintain healthy, below maximum, weight requirements. We encourage common, good physical fitness (APFT "GO").

A healthy increment of weight loss or gain is defined as 5 pounds per calendar month.

Note that USA 600-9 contains body fat standards and measurements for determining if a person outside of the guideline weights (too heavy) are considered overweight.

Our current contemporary attention is to actively discourage unhealthy low-weight practices, particularly among young females aspiring to model for photos.

Animal models are expected to have a handler on site. The animal models will be treated with a similar set of presentation standards, comparable to those outlined for humans but adjusted for species. This includes good general purpose animal health, a discouragement of unnecessary surgeries, and simplified common grooming (barbering). The handler will ensure the humane treatment and controlled behavior of the animal model.

# # #

River Swim: Open Water Workout on the Tennessee

2010-05-27T17:00:00.013-04:00

Dr. Friberg swimming the Tennessee.
Pentax K200d, 35mm Takumar,
EWA Marine UF

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

We caught up with English Channel solo swimmer Dr. Karah Nazor Friberg as she led another group of intrepid athletes through a Tennessee River workout along Maclellan Island.

How many times have you thought about swimming out there? These people do it. With kayak pilot boats to provide a more visible cordon, Dr. Friberg leads swimmers through simple paths both with and against the river current.

After the swims Dr. Friberg likes head into downtown Chattanooga and unwind to the sounds of a jazz trio over at the Market Street Tavern.

The Tavern's in the Waterhouse Pavilion; beer on tap; interior nice enough to bring a date; prices comparable to middle market.

Kayak pilot Adam Deimling near Veteran's Bridge.

Pentax K200d, 35mm Takumar,
EWA Marine UF.

If you are interested in swimming or piloting a kayak for them, look them up on the links above.

Slideshow and gallery of photos from the swim at http://agxphoto.zenfolio.com

# # #

References:
Water navigation chart, US Army Corps of Engineers, Nashville District, website: http://www.lrn.usace.army.mil/opn/TNRiver/
http://www.lrn.usace.army.mil/opn/TNRiver/charts/67.jpg

English Channel swimmers listing, Channel Swimmers Association, Ltd.
http://www.channelswimmingassociation.com/provisional_34.html

# # #

Chattanooga Tri Club Swim Practice Pics Up

2010-05-25T03:40:00.007-04:00

Swimmer. Chattanooga Triathlon Club Swim Practice,
Lake Chickamauga. 24 May 2010.
Pentax K200d, 35mm Takumar.
EWA Marine UF underwater bag housing.

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

The pics in tonight's proof gallery folder were made by putting the DSLR in an amphibious housing designed for smaller film cameras. The EWA Marine UF easily accommodates an all manual SLR like the K1000, but was tight on the tolerances for fitting a K200d in there.

We were able to get by without leaks by using a Takumar 35mm, in order to keep the Z dimension down.

Our topic for the session was a swim practice for the Chattanooga Triathlon Club. They meet weekly to swim along the buoy line in the lake. This helps the triathletes get used to swimming in open water and condition them for racing.

The rig I have been using lately has included one ugly life jacket and a pair of swim fins. I know it looks totally ridiculous. I can swim well enough without the vest, and have made photos while swimming without it. Yet, it is so much easier to swim and photograph with the flotation vest that I think it's a good idea to try out some type of float for the amphibious photos.

Strong enough to go without it; taking it easy enough to enjoy it; get down to the photos.

Some of my latest sports photos are at: http://agxphoto.zenfolio.com/
The $1 digital download charge covers the licensing on the larger sized digital images.

# # #

EVIL "Milk" Anyone?

2010-05-23T12:09:00.003-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Marketers may not like it, but EVIL is a name that sticks to cameras.

EVIL, which stands for Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens, is an acronym coined and widely used for a certain chassis structure for camera bodies.

Recent internet postings show a newly arrived acronym, MILC, pronounced "milk", to denote the exact same type of camera body structure.

It's clear: someone's trying to replace EVIL with "milk," and it may not be working. What's worse: the camera chassis designs may be such that the structures are cheaper to build, but seem to have some basic handling disadvantages.

Imagine the lens mass and volume bayoneted to a point and shoot body, with no proper optical viewfinder. That's what these EVIL MILC cameras are. I'll leave you to guess which part of the Witch those design ideas flow from.

Here's a design idea: put a viewfinder on the camera and build the body big and strong enough to hold the attached parts. Thanks.

# # #

Ride of Silence Photos Up

2010-05-20T13:06:00.007-04:00

CPD escorts a large pack of bicyclists down
Tennessee Ave. in St. Elmo.

by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Photos from Chattanooga's Second Annual Ride of Silence are up in our proof gallery. Hyperlink below. $1 digital downloads available.

http://agxphoto.zenfolio.com/rideofsilence

Bicyclists depart from the Finley Stadium area
to begin the 2nd Annual Ride of Silence

Chattanooga Police provide traffic control points at key locations
during the Second Annual Ride of Silence.

http://agxphoto.zenfolio.com/rideofsilence/slideshow

# # #

Narrators for the Story of My Life

2010-04-23T10:14:00.019-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

I woke up this morning wondering who we should nominate to do the voice-overs for the story of my life. I know many of you were wondering.

Being a dynamic thinker and noble adventurer, I always have to keep one eye on posterity. That includes who will narrate the movie about my life, after I'm dead and gone.

Well, quick up on the list were some women who had been on TV before: Dee Dee Myers, Mika Brzezinski and a scientist who I think was Doctor Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard University astronomer.

All three of those people got my attention for thinking before they started talking. I also notice that when they don't have something to say, they are quiet. Those three avoid the key problem of blathering away on TV about nothing. Like 'em or not, they're thinking chicks, so they make the list of narrators.

Well, while I was tinkering around with trying to figure out if the person whom I'd seen on television was Dr. Kaltenegger or not, I ran across these ridiculous lists of women scientists.

I say ridiculous because most of these lists were of completely fake, totally fictitious, female scientists. Apparently, a theatrical facsimile of a thinking female is preferable to some of the women who've already thought up something! At least when it comes to putting them on TV.

So, to fix this, I decided to add some of these women astronauts to my list of people who are welcome to narrate the story of my life.

I don't care if they can't read a Space Shuttle index card cheat sheet aloud well enough to make it to the morning shows on the local UHF station.

What made the list a touch more ridiculous was that

I had never heard of any of these people
The list of female astronauts was particularly long
Their accomplishments were intense in thought and broad in scope

And it took a whole 35 seconds to scroll down the list (I didn't get even halfway through the alphabet before their accolades started to wear me out) and pick some of them at random. That's right: random.

It turns out that you can't swing Katie Couric's lip gloss applicator stick without marking up one of these ladies' Ph.D's in Something Complicated.

Most of these ladies have spent more time flying through space in a week than most Hollywood starlets have spent on TV in a lifetime.

It turns out that many of them have been Chemists, have had military careers (many are Colonels and Generals), and have somehow ended up associated with labs and observatories in space (which made me wonder what the hell everyone else is doing up there).

Here they are:

Eileen Collins. Ancestral home from the County Cork in Ireland, not too far from where the O'Keefe's hail from. First female Space Shuttle Commander. She had two previous missions which involved piloting the Space Shuttle, both involved rendezvous with the space station Mir.

Collins seems to be one of those astronauts who ends up going into space because she's on The Pilot track. Eventually those people try skipping the "air" portion of aircraft and end up flying spaceships. Collins not only flies, but has been put in charge of the whole thing. Space Shuttle Commander.

Cady Coleman. Chemist. USAF. Scheduled to hit the star chart in 2010. She plays in a band, married a guy who's into art glass and she knows enough about Chem to explain this stuff to you better than I could.

Nancy J. Currie. US Army Colonel. Helicopter pilot. Four time astronaut.

Just think on that a second. Apparently her hobbies include flying complicated machines really, really fast.

Nancy Davis. Engineer. Three shuttle missions. Operated a spacelab. Degrees from Georgia, Auburn and Alabama. We're confident that football season allegiances are a problem for her, but if anybody can figure that out, she probably can. I liked it that her education was laced with land grant university credentials. You don't have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to make it to the Space Shuttle. Good going, Nancy.

Anna Lee Fisher, M.D. Chemist. First mom in space. Apparently her hobbies include emergency medicine. Like a lot of these chemists, she's studied X-rays and crystals quite a bit. Doc Fisher was one of the people who developed and tested the robotic arm on the Space Shuttle. Without that robot arm, they wouldn't have gotten much done with those satellites.

Linda Maxine Godwin. This one got my attention because she was from Cape Girardeau. Some years ago, I worked a jobsite out there. I was at the airport. It turns out Rush Limbaugh was from Cape Girardeau. They named a street after him. It's one of the access roads on the airport. The way one of the locals told the story to me: he landed in a private jet, cut the ribbon on the street named after him, and then immediately got back on his plane and left town.

Linda Godwin has walked in space twice. Four shuttle missions. A whole lotta science experiments.

Two spacewalks. Cape Girardeau, how about naming a street after her?

Major General Susan J. Helms, USAF. Eight hour spacewalk, which set a record for duration. She's flown on four different Space Shuttles and the International Space Station. You might notice she's a general officer.

General officers sure do make good expert explainers on TV shows. I wonder when we're going to see female astronaut Major General Helms on TV telling us all about space.

Guessing from her resume, with 30 different airframe types under her belt, General Helms': turn-ons include "anything supersonic" and her turn-offs are "running out of oxygen."

If you ever wondered what it'd be like to have a woman with her finger on the nuclear button, count Helms in. How about "in" as "in charge" of like, Space Command, which would be just about everything the US Air Force decides to put into, or take out of, space.

Since she's been at it for a while now, you can consider her the Chief Nuker of menstrual punch lines about putting women in charge of lots of powerful stuff.

Historically, on the serious side, being a female commander of USAF Space Command may make her one of the most important women to ever live.

Millie Elizabeth Hughes-Fulford. This one's my favorite. Chemist and first female payload specialist. US Army Major (Medical Corps). This chemist figured out why astronauts undergo certain types of health effects when they fly through space. She had to do a lot of studying about blood, bones and genetics in order to come up with a sound answer.

Somebody should give these chicks a little more time on the Tube. They apparently think more than most people on TV. Think on that next time women are on TV for makeup commercials instead of space flight or other thinking stuff.

# # #

Talkie Talk: Films and Movies Seen and Scenic Through Chattanooga

2010-04-21T16:55:00.013-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Coming up this Sunday and Monday, the return to Cable TV Channel 165 (Sundance) of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, about the Antarctic. We saw this one about a year ago in theaters. Clearly a good one for the big screen; you might want to catch it for recording.

If you get into Herzog, or haven't heard of him, I first caught him in two independent films, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (required watching at some point in life). The movie is about a college bet that Herzog loses, requiring him to eat his shoe.

Also good is La Soufrière a documentary about a volcano about to erupt, and those who refuse to leave the area.

Herzog has been doing bigger and bigger projects; the latest with some "name" stars, but his best work seems to be when he tells a documentary story all alone.

On that note, I'm willing to give Disney's "Oceans" a chance. We'll see how it does. I'm hoping it'll be a movie that uses color well.

For those that don't need color, but which were shot in it anyway, I'd have to list the here-and-gone The Last Station, a story about the final days of Leo Tolstoy. An excellent film, which should probably get Kelly Condon (Masha) and Christopher Plummer (Tolstoy) awards for something. Required watching for those of you who've read War and Peace. If you haven't read it, put it on the list.

The White Ribbon, because it's the only movie I've seen in town which was followed by someone in a row behind me calling out about the end, "That sucks!"

The White Ribbon didn't suck. It was a good German film in black and white, and it doesn't come with the usual cowboy round 'em up to justice ending because just about everyone in the entire town is guilty of at least one of the seven deadly sins.

I love black and white films, and still remember a little bit of my German. The White Ribbon was the best morality movie about the seven deadly sins I've seen since "Se7en" with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.

In an interesting coincidence, like Se7en, The White Ribbon's end credits look like a class in how to get credits done. Se7en's credits were played using an interesting device of cycling them from top to bottom; but The White Ribbon's credits are notable for their content and organization. The same for the movie posters.

The White Ribbon's crediting looks like what we expect from how it should be done. At least I thought so, when I had a look at what they did.

Interestingly, IMDB lists the film stock types for The White Ribbon as Kodak's latest color negative types in 35mm, but the film is in black and white. If it was a digital conversion, then they fooled me. I would have called it as Kodak Movie Plus-X or Tri-X, which is what I like to use in my old 16mm.

The White Ribbon runs locally until for a little bit.

To get yourself back up to speed on black and white movies, you can't miss the classic, the original, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. It's in the public domain, and available for internet download.

One film, which I chose to see twice in the same day, was The Art of the Steal about the Barnes collection out of Pennsylvania. The film clearly has a propaganda slant vilifying the Pew Charitable Trusts, but it vilifies them so well that the movie is worth seeing. Billed as a documentary, like Michael Moore films, this one's a propaganda piece for those of us not afraid to admit we like some persuading every now and then.

We get to see the face of Van Gogh's Postman. Considering that the post man was famously Van Gogh's only friend in that one village, it's worth see the movie just for that.

"[This review] will never be moved.
It will never be sold . . . "

Charlie Roses' interviews have brought two more films and filmmakers to our attention.

I don't know when or if either of these are coming to town, but you may not want to wait for them to.

The first is any documentary film by a man named Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman does cinema verite, which is what Reality TV has failed to be. Unlike the Reality shows of our time, Wiseman's films are interesting, educating, revealing, and flat out good movies. 15 minutes of his stuff pretty much smokes all of Fox's Reality Channel nonsense, along with their Big Three Broadcaster cohorts.

Try either Basic Training (1971) or Near Death (1989). I recommend these two solely because I was able to see two very short clips from those films; they're both in black and white; and, like many of Wiseman's films, they deal with institutions and matters of society.

Wiseman's films look like they could do well for their audience's chosen at random; but, it's also clear from his camera work that the films in silver are working out better than the ones that he bothered to record in color.

Finally, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Solely because this one will be the La Femme Nikita of 2010. I'm talking about the movie, not the cable series. This one will be good.

Catch 'em all. They're better than anything on broadcast TV besides PBS.

# # #

Take It or Make It? Sean Peele Photography and Infringement Allegations

2010-04-18T09:00:00.007-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

UPDATE: This article, originally published about a month before this printing, was taken down after some of the controversy died down. We were all sick of hearing about Mr. Peele's unscrupulous decisions.

Unfortunately, many of the exact same images which were used by Mr. Peele with the first website have returned under a new name. The article goes back up and stays up. While I can't say that this type of behavior is typical of the photographers I've met, in this particular instance, I think our readers will find that a significant amount of the content presented below is independently verifiable and observably true.

Subsequent discoveries revealed that it is likely that some of the infringement instances discussed in detail below were but a small percentage of the overall occurrences. The scope and intensity of the unethical practices involved may be wider and greater than those covered here.

* * * * *

Do you take pictures or make pictures? And if you didn't make them, is it right to take them and present them as though the work was your own?

Those are the questions surrounding the website of San Diego photographer Sean Peele. A recent Photo.net thread highlighted the possibility that Mr. Peele may have appropriated many images and misrepresented them to the public as being his own work.

We've been able to confirm at least four instances of misrepresentation on Mr. Peele's website. As many as 37 photographers' work may be affected.

The impact of this is that many of the world’s better wedding photographers, some of whom have scored among the top 100 in peer reviews and critiques on Photo.net, have had their work taken and published under someone else’s name.

The people featured in the photos may have had no idea that this was happening to their images. Many of the clients have contracts with their hired photographers, which in some way license or limit or specify how the wedding photos would be used in the future.

Customers for Mr. Peele’s business were recruited, in part, by these appropriated photographs, so that he could profit. It’s not entirely clear which, if any, of the photos were actually made by Mr. Peele. Some are observably not his work.

The advertisements on Mr. Peele's website appear to have been a blend of three kinds of photos: some of his own, stock photos related to weddings, and photos made by other photographers and used without their permission.

Peele advertised wedding and event photography on his website for prices beginning at $390. Several of the photographers whom he took photos from offer services at near ten times that amount.

One such photographer is Rachel Barker. We came across Barker's work when we identified someone in one of her photographs. That photograph appeared on Mr. Peele’s website.

The Soldier in Photo 19

The groom wore Army Blues and was kissing his bride as they held up their wedding rings. The rank on the uniform sleeve was Specialist. The groom was a lower enlisted Soldier in the US Army. His nametag was clearly visible.

Click a few tabs into Mr. Peele’s website, and one could see the photo. Enter > Engagements and Weddings. It was the 19th photo in the line.

By reading the groom’s uniform, we were able to track him down. He's James Dreussi. After the photo was made, he continued with his military service, progressed and completed his enlistment. He is now working as a professional actor and is represented by an agency in Ohio.

With a check against the IMDB and some other websites, we were able to confirm that he was probably the same then-SPC Dreussi that was in the photo.

We asked Dreussi about the use of his wedding photo on Sean Peele's website. Dreussi was able to confirm that he was pictured in the photo, and that he had no idea that Mr. Peele was using that picture in his advertisements.

Dreussi wrote that the photo had been made by Rachel.

Rachel Barker is a professional photographer and ordained minister in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been working as a wedding photographer for years; her pictures are good. Her recent bookings are made through Millie Holloman.com. Pricing begins at $3200.

Website Down & Some Photos Still Up

By 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, the website for Sean Peele photography had shut down. Still, several other websites were up, and transmitting his web page advertisements.

On one of them, we could still see the stock photos identified by Photo.net moderator Bob Atkins as distributed from iStockphoto.com.

When photographers submit photos for sale through a stock photography agency, they often have little or no control over who buys the photo, or what they use it for.

Some of the photos on Sean Peele's website feature brides in dresses, smiling at the camera. Two of them are clearly from iStockphoto. The photographer who made those is apparently Katrina Brown.

On one website, http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340009.htm, we can see Peele's advertisement with the stock photos there.

In a succession of photos on web pages describing Sean Peele’s services, we can see a man who looks similar. In two of the photos on the Party Pop.com page, we see a younger man. He's happy and smiling. He has short dark hair. Reclining on the grass with him is a brunette.

Two photos after this one, we see a man carrying a brunette on his back as he runs down a beach. It looks very much like the same pair of people. The bangs of her hairstyle look very much like the bride on the page a few photos later. They're young and happy and smiling.

People Looking Out For Number One

On a later page, related to a MySpace page, we see an older man labeled as Sean Peele. This man has recorded some songs. One of the songs is on the MySpace Page. It’s about Valentine’s Day. Another song is about high school. On an album cover icon, on another page about this man’s music, we can see smiling man with dark hair and touch of a receding hairline under a cowboy hat. It’s labeled as the music of Sean Peele. The song is "God Save Our Future Children If You Can."

The lyrics we can hear on the iTunes preview say:

"God, look upon our virtues

And see what we become.

There's just so many people

Looking out for number one.

Please help us give more to each other

And seek righteousness again.

God, save our future children, if you can."

The voice singing that song sounds like the voice on the recorded message at the telephone number for Sean Peele Photography.

On the website that came down, www.seanpeelephotography.com, was a photo of a man sailing. This same photo turned up on his Photo.net bio page and a Classmates.com entry linked to Sean Peele’s Google profile. It appears to be a picture of Sean Peele. Hair's a little thinner. He appears a little more stout.

Finally, on a Facebook page for a man named Sean Peele, we see one more photo that looks similar to the others. A little older still, we see a man wearing a camera and some dark clothes. He's standing on some stone stairs. There's a manicured garden in the background. Green, green grass and some water are nearby.

Below the picture, on the Facebook page, is a text box. It read, "Everything you think you know about me is wrong."

Candidacy and Being Candid

One of the facts which has come up is that on cached Google profile, Mr. Peele mentioned that he was a graduate of US Navy Officer Candidate School.

Looking over the Navy's OCS website, we see instructors yelling at candidates. There are pamphlets of procedures to read before you get there.

"PT starts immediately upon arrival," the Navy's OCS website noted. This means that the person who volunteers for a military officer candidacy will face constant scrutiny, and much of that scrutiny involves stress.

In Navy OCS the training is similar to most military schools which are candidacies. In the military, a candidacy is a time in training when the candidate is expected to show that he's already capable. It's a different kind of scrutiny. While some technical training is provided, and the training is phased, the person undertaking the training is expected to show throughout that he's the kind of person who's worth commissioning when the training is over. This pattern of scrutiny is mentally and emotionally more challenging than some other forms of military schooling.

OCS graduates aren't perfect. Yet, they have a tendency to be familiar with their own imperfections by the time they complete those courses.

The scrutiny officer candidates experience is somehow inconsistent with the behavior we've seen on Sean Peele's website.

Has Mr. Peele been pressured by something into bending some ethical guidelines? On these websites, it looks like some of them may have been bent until they were broken.

The Navy OCS website also mentions that the very large and sophisticated swimming pool that they use, all 347,000 gallons of chlorinated water held by The Combat Pool, was dedicated on July 9, 2009, to Medal of Honor recipient LT Michael P. Murphy, a US Navy Seal Officer.

LT Murphy died on a SEAL operation in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. The certificate for the Medal of Honor begins with the citation of conspicuous gallantry before the enemy. It tells us the same story we see in other posthumous Medal of Honor citations. Engaged by a much larger force, once again one man took great risks, despite wounds, led troops, continued fighting, and worked to do the right the thing.

The word "gallantry" is reserved in the military for citations like these. Medal of Honor recipients are the equivalent of knights of the realm in the United States. They’re traditionally saluted by everyone, regardless of rank, when they wear the Medal of Honor.

Lone Survivor and Two Names

The cached Google profile for Sean Peele listed key biographical details and included, under the category of "Other Names" Christopher Sean Peele. A man signed a review on Amazon.com as Christoper S. Peele "Sean Peele" from San Diego.

The Amazon review commented on the book Lone Survivor, which is about the SEAL operation on which LT Murphy lost his life. The review concluded with the words, "Thank you Marcus Luttrell, I salute you."

Marcus Luttrell was the sole survivor of the SEAL mission. At the time, he was a Hospital Corpsman Second Class. He was an enlisted sailor. We know this from the Medal of Honor documents like the Summary of Action, published by the Navy, on their websites.

Just as Marcus Luttrell was enlisted in the Navy, so also SPC Dreussi was enlisted in the Army. Mr. Peele, when he served, became an officer. His review of Lone Survivor was posted to Amazon in November of 2007.

Two of the photos on Mr. Peele’s website that I reviewed, and interviewed a photographer about, were initially uploaded to the Internet on November 14, 2007.

Nadine O’Hara made those two photos. In the technical data that accompanies those uploads to portfolios on Photo.net, the date of upload is recorded and displayed.

In an adjacent Amazon review, two years later, Peele wrote about some difficulties he had with upgrading his copy of Photoshop CS2 to CS4. This computer program is the premier image editing program; it's widely used by professional photographers to edit digital images. This upgrade apparently took place in September 2009.

In that review, we see accounts of everyday frustrations. Peele kept on hold for an hour. The paragraphs recite the trials and tribulations of upgrading Photoshop and trying to get some customer service from a large corporation. He had to cycle through those menus of automatic help and scripted service several times. It's the same set of headaches that anyone who's been on hold for a really long time might imagine.

That review was published in 2009.

Landslides Into the Ocean

The Google profile for Sean Peele listed several companies he had worked for: Pfizer, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Novartis. All three are pharmaceutical companies. He doesn’t mention in what capacity or when he worked with them. In the past few years, news stories about those corporations have included topics like layoffs, restructuring and lawsuits.

No large company could escape marketplace tribulations by 2009. By then things had gotten tougher all over.

One of the bright spots of 2009 was the success of students at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. Before it was renamed in 1991, it was Rolling Hills High School. Sean Peale went there; he graduated in 1976, according to the biography which had been up on Classmates.com.

This biography was linked to from the Google profile page for Sean Peele. That bio carried the same picture as the biography on www.seanpeelephotography.com.

Palos Verdes High School tells us a little bit about the kind of community that's grown up from Rolling Hills High School. 23 National Merit scholars graduated from there in 2009. It's ranked 89 out of 18,500 schools evaluated by US News and World Report. The school's list of accolades reads like the home room roll of really good school stuff.

They have the country's largest high school publication: their yearbook. There's probably some photography in there.

The community of Ranchos Palos Verdes also seems to have terrain that's prone to landslides into the ocean. Ranchos Palos Verdes is on the southwestern corner of Los Angeles County, which encompasses a big section of Sean Peele's described sales and service territory.

There’s been a landslide of public outcry against this specific instance of photographic piracy.

# # #

Bibliographic References:

List of photographers whose work may have been affected:

Chris Harrison

Edward Horn

Dave Gardner

Edwin Mendoza

Jerry King

Tracy Fairey

Thomas Paul

Michael Brown

Zulkefli Mohd Zain

AJ Zammit

Christine Sharp

Kevin Teachey

Vince Crisler

Arthur Yeo

Lloyd Rowson

Derick Africa

Sergey Usik

Adrian Blanco

Birte Ragland

Carlos Ramirez

Clemson Chan

Michele Rivera

Frode Fanebust

Jay Philbrick

Tim Holte

Jose Francisco Sanchez Diaz

Michael Shuaib

Elaine Vang

Regina Maldonado

Steve Skibbie

John Karamanos

Randy Douglas

Chad Lorenzana

Jerry Ting

Mike Palhegyi

Katrina Brown

Rachel Barker

US Navy websites:

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs_program_overview.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/ocs_academics.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/combat_pool.asp

http://www.ocs.navy.mil/pdfs/Updated.Gouge.Pack.OCS2.pdf

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/soa.html

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/oc.html

http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/index.html

Photo.net web pages:

http://photo.net/wedding-photography-forum/00W132

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6640660

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=6640648

http://photo.net/gallery/photocritique/filter?period=5000&rank_by=sum&category=Wedding+and+Social&store_prefs_p=1&shown_tab=0&start_index=96&page=9

Web pages about or consulted about photographers and people involved:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2830379/resume

http://rannbphoto.blogspot.com/

http://www.millieholloman.com/rachel/

http://www.millieholloman.com/

http://photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=768546

http://www.lafflerphotography.com/ [Experience to Work Quality]

http://www.lafflerphotography.com/index2.php [“Who Me”, “Weddings”, “Rates”]

Web pages consulted about Sean Peele:

http://www.seanpeelephotography.com/

http://photo.net/wedding-photography-forum/00W132

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sean+peele+photography&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340337.htm

http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340009.htm

http://www.google.com/profiles/seanpeelephotography?hl=en

[Cached] http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:uGrnqAg2tgYJ:www.google.com/profiles/seanpeelephotography%3Fhl%3Den+sean+peele+photography&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3PD2L5EF4ATHP/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1172015082&ref=ts

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sean-peele/id337777282

http://www.myspace.com/seanpeele

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/forum/topic/878684

http://www.projectwedding.com/post/list/warning-sean-peele-of-seanpeelephotography-com-is-a-scam

http://www.shared-memories.com/OrangeCounty/photographers-oc.htm

http://www.shared-memories.com/RiversideCounty/photographers-rc.htm

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3PD2L5EF4ATHP/ref=cm_pdp_rev_more?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R3GGE8P49C9IQ7

http://photo.net/photodb/user?user_id=5347899

Web pages about Pfizer:

http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10005173/pfizer-aiming-for-30900-layoffs-through-2012/

http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2010/01/11/daily3.html

Web pages about Bristol Myers-Squibb:

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2007/September/07_civ_782.html

http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?symbol=BMY&type=djn

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/companies/bristol_myers_squibb_company/index.html

Web pages about Novartis:

http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=NVS

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/business/companies/novartis_ag/index.html

Web pages about Palos Verdes Peninsula High School:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_Verdes_Peninsula_High_School

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Palos_Verdes,_California

http://www.pvphs.com/

Writer’s notes, correspondence & communications with various sources.

# # #

Originally published under this hyperlink: http://www.agxphoto.com/2010/03/take-it-or-make-it-sean-peele.html

Scout Out Those Locations!

2010-04-17T12:15:00.009-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

I had an awesome photo session this morning. I don't know how the pictures came out yet, but the session went great. It was like this:

I scouted out the camera position I wanted to use over a year ago. I wanted to photograph the start of the Chickamauga Chase. I woke up less than an hour before the race start.

Coffee. Camera bag. One camera with three frames left on the 120mm Ektachrome. Get set to drive out there. Car won't start. Wait that out. Hit the road.

The key aspect that I figured out a year ago was to use the roads outside of the park, off of the race course, but very near a desired location, to bring me to a spot that I chose as a vehicle dismount point. That's "parking space" for the rest of y'all.

I arrive with three minutes to the start time on the car's dashboard clock.

Pick up the stuff. Walk 25 feet from the car. Set down the tripod into position.

Boom! A large black powder canon, just out of sight, signals the beginning of the race.

Mount the camera on the tripod. Switch over to a telephoto lens I brought. Remove lens cap. Check the light.

Here come the runners! In a nice thick pack of moving people.

Click, click, click. Film winding. Roll done.

Reload with black and white, just because.

I look over to see if I can find anything interesting. There are about six people wearing T-shirts that say, "Run for God." They're walking.

Three more photos.

Pack up and leave. Here's the sweet part: these events normally take several hours. I wasn't having any of that. I walk back to the car. I get in it. I turn around and go back the way I came. Travel unimpeded by race course traffic! Back on coffee break in about 15 minutes after I left.

Ahhh. Yes! This is The Life.

Scout out camera positions and access paths in advance. Logistics can make or break photo shoot plans. In this case, it made a three hour wait-around turn into 15 minutes of what I wanted.

We'll see how the photos turn out, but it almost doesn't matter. It was smooth, fast and satisfying. I followed it up with morning coffee.

# # #

Medical Payment Reform: Guiding Our Leaders Into Reality and Beyond Their Talk

2010-04-06T23:08:00.010-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Commentary

It's medical payment reform. It's not health insurance reform, health care reform or any kind of health anything reform drummed up as a catchy name by any business or political group. It's medical payment reform.

No one pays for health, beyond grocery bills and the costs of operating bathrooms and kitchen appliances. We pay for medicine. That is what medical payment insurance is for.

We pay for professionals to help us because we don't understand how our own body can heal itself. We can't always set those conditions by ourselves. There are times when we need help. That help comes in the form of advice, orders, guidance, procedures and objects directed at two main goals: the control of bodily destruction and the relief of pain.

That help lets our bodies heal themselves. The help that does that is medicine.

Health is about jogging and flossing. Our health insurance doesn't pay for jogging shoes, gym fees, or anything that actually sustains a state of positive health. That's not its main function.

Our medical payment insurance, which is what it actually is, covers the payments we need to make in order to receive medicine to control bodily destruction and alleviate pain.

With destruction and pain stopped, hopefully our bodies will grow and heal into a strong state of well being.

No one needs a form of insurance to cover the fees over at "Intro to Pilates", so let's stop kidding ourselves by calling it health-anything.

We have medical payments to make, and some insurance to help us along the way as someone else profits. That would be medical payment insurance. Our recent changes in federal laws have changed how those moneys will be collected, kept and distributed.

With all the political blabbering that's been thrown around over these important laws over the payment of money in exchange for pain relief and destruction control within our own bodies, it's time we started asking some questions that will lead us to some concrete answers that don't expose us to manipulation from businesses and political groups.

Below are some of the assertions I'd like to make, some of the questions that I'd like to ask, and what and why I'd like to see them answered.

1. Avoid Penalizing Doctors, Nurses and Technicians for These Payment Changes.

These people who are going to do the work of actually trying to help us heal ourselves probably don't deserve to be slapped with another huge bill. As it is, we've already charged them astronomical amounts of money so that they can have the privilege of being the person who will see us when we are at our worst.

In exchange for this investment, the truth is, we provided them little or no help when they were going through their hardest years of investment. It's clear: they've already paid and will continue to pay, enough of a high price for being our healers.

The doctors pay out about the cost of a house per year of education. They're going to need about five of those to get started, and the same house to live in that the rest of us need.

The nurses aren't much better off. They may need to make less of an up-front payment to get started, but they're on a different payment plan. They have to pay as they go, to sustain their education and training. Since everything gets more expensive as time goes on, this means that they, too, end up paying enormous fees just to keep working.

It's a wonder the lot doesn't sue us all for these payment schemes.

The technicians? Probably the most necessary jobs of the medical care industry, the technicians are probably routinely ignored and dismissed even though they have to keep the whole thing rolling.

None of these people need to pay more of anything as a result of medical payment reform.

There are some things we can do about it, which could include:

Substantive Educational Debt Relief. Every one of these people bought into a system that was based heavily on laissez-faire capitalism. It doesn't take a genius to see that medical payment insurance companies will push off profit losses onto everyone else in the chain. Since we have not made adequate provisions for trapping those medical insurance payment companies into accepting the burden of responsibility, we should see to it that they cannot effectively profit from billing the people who will help us in our times of need. One of the ways we can end-around this problem is by making a relieving effort to accept the financial burdens those doctors, nurses and technicians assumed when they went to school.

Realistic Tax Offsets and Credits. Namely, to the doctors, nurses and technicians to, again, end-around these lawyerly financial ploys that will be used to trick us into billing the medical professionals so that medical payment insurance companies can profit and can continue to increase their profits at everyone else's expense.

Encourage Pro-Bono and Volunteer Support. As in, stop billing doctors, nurses and technicians for providing help to people who cannot pay to receive help. When these people move to help us, as volunteers, they lose. There's some kind of loss of payment or income or progress of some sort that doesn't get accounted for. Each day of this that goes by will still be a day when medical payment insurance companies will attempt to seize and exploit this absence of liabilities they must assume.

2. Understand What Medical Care Is.

If there's one thing we've learned, it's that no one has managed to get on TV and tell us anything substantive about the actual procedures for providing common forms of medical care. We have no idea, collectively, what medical care really is. What does it take to really support and carry out some procedures over time?

Like procedures to counter:

heart attacks

cancers

strokes

AIDS

motor vehicle related traumas

What about basic injuries and ailments, like:

broken arm

broken leg

lacerations requiring stitches

sick babies with nondescript flu-like symptoms?

Truth is, we haven't heard anything substantive about how those treatments go, what kind of support do they need, what that support costs over time. What kind of tests will these people order, and typically how much do those cost and why?

Can we not get a realistic estimate for a hypothetical case based on realistic experience?

We have had more than enough sick and hurt people in our society for someone to finally tell us, what does all this really cost? Not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but a real, practical estimate realistically presented over time: what does that cost?

3. Identify and Ignore Obvious Manipulations

From "death panels" to "this won't change your health care", we've seen our political and business leaders make some of the most dumbfounding and unrealistic statements as part of selling their points of view to us. How gullible would we have to be in order to swallow any of these arguments?

It's important for us to identify and ignore some of the obvious manipulating tactics at hand:

Two Half-Truths and a Horror. A straw man syllogism or something like it: we see a pattern of speakers telling us two extremely limited truths and then following those with some horrific statement. Then, we're invited to agree with their opinion to deny this horror.

Parroted Talking Points. Six people in the same day using the same phrase to sell us a bill of goods we don't understand. Have decided on our own to believe in their point, or are they drilling us into accepting what they say?

Persuasive Phrasing. The speakers are setting the terms of the arguments, and making themselves the sole definer of the words involved. Health-anything is just one example.

Is it global warming or climate change? And, which persuader was speaking when those terms were used? What were they trying to persuade us into believing by picking those words?

Is it health care or medical treatment?

Identity Denial. Every lawyer's favorite trick, it's plagued us since before Plato's Republic, this path involves denying that something matches a description. Plato went on and on about what's a table, and the Bush administration tried to sell us on the idea that Prisoners of War were actually Detainees.

Once an identity or basis for an argument is denied, then the terms can be redefined by the next speaker as they wish. Identity denial often lays the groundwork for persuasive phrasing. We're sick of this, and it's not been fooling anybody for a while.

Invitational Clothing. Some of our nation's most important speakers are making wardrobe decisions that are one step short of a clown costume. Ask yourself: does this person look like their held office? Our news readers and commentators aren't doing much better.

These speakers are deliberately wearing or modifying their clothing to encourage us to identify with them and make the jump to agreeing with what they have to say, whether we understand it or not.

Excessive Color Saturation in Theatrical Staging. Our TV programs have fallen victim to the circus-style color schemes and corporate logo text placements. They come in a few main varieties:

i. Saturated simple shapes

ii. Complex designs with saturated colors, usually alternating warm and cold colors

iii. Excessive logo backdrops: lately, we've moved from repetitive logos to discretely placed logos.

iv. Catch phrase placards on podiums

None of these presentation aspects will control bodily destruction, relieve pain, or build sound laws.

4. Identify and Understand Our Current State of Medical Need

Anyone who's ever looked at Department of Labor figures knows that it's next to impossible to determine how many people are unemployed in any given area. Why? They parse the figures down so far that any and only positive arguments could be made based on them. We have a similar problem with facts about medical care in our communities.

How many people are in need of medical care right now, of what kind, and how much will that cost? What, exactly, are they going to have to buy?

The old, the indigent, the insured, and the emergency victims: what's a community really going to need to provide?

That is, what are people going to have to pay to care for themselves? Really.

Just as we've seen people sold on credit and financing when what they needed was savings and sound spending, so also we don't see the public being told directly what an individual will pay to stay alive during those times he really needs standard, quality, help.

We have yet to have anyone lay out for us just what these bills really are. Who pays what, for what, when, how does that cost increase over time, and so on.

All of this talk about medical care, and no one's told us about the actual medical care and its cost.

# # #

Supercollider Physicists Save Political Commentators from Apocalyptic Adjective Deficit

2010-04-01T10:49:00.030-04:00

Increase in Potential Effectiveness of Really Big and Really Bad Apocalyptic Adjectives Coinciding with Recent Developments in Physics.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Recent developments with the Hadron Super-Collider at CERN may have saved political commentators from crushing deficits in apocalyptic adjectives, experts say.

Swiss and French scientists were finally able to turn the large machine "on," prompting an immediate work shutdown and 14 day celebration vacation in the Canary Islands.

Dr. Lisa Straight-Teeth, one of three good looking women with an actual Physics degree from an American Ivy League University, was interviewed on PBS about the situation.

"One of the things we're learning," she said, "is that if we can create and sustain a black hole here on Earth, then political commentators can accuse others of even greater mistakes."

"It's got insult potential like they've never before imagined," she said.

Another commentator tried to say something on the program, but no one was really interested in looking at him. The camera went back to Dr. Straight-Teeth.

"Now is the time for politicians to finally gain something from Science class. It may lead to funding for more smart stuff that doesn't necessarily blow people up. Insults are the new frontier, when it comes to getting politicians to pay for something."

She then said something profound and smart, but no one was able to understand it. We were too busy remembering the other two good looking female physicists who had been on PBS documentaries.

"It's a good thing they were able to get that supercollider working," said Marten T. Brown, UHF Channel 60 political commentator, "we were starting to have to re-use some of the descriptive modifiers from the Spanish Inquisition."

With recent under-performance in outrageous condemnations, political groups have been struggling to adequately vilify their opponents. Vast conspiracies were having trouble distinguishing themselves.

Decline in Green Party Apocalyptic Adjective Effectiveness

"We've been trying to make ourselves look as large as possible," said Green Party expert describer Morten T. Sorensen. "It's been nearly impossible for us to look bigger than we are, what with the side-stepping of Howard Dean and the inappropriate seizure of really great hyperbole by the Tea Baggers."

Decline in Tea Party Apocalyptic Adjective Effectiveness

"It's a socialist plot," said Harold T. Sorensen (no relation), of Tea Bag Special Interest Manipulating Consultants, Incorporated. "They've been trying to keep the American people from seeing the truth. The truth is, everyone has a right to cloak their neighbor in doomsday slander."

"I'd like to step in here and shake 'em up a little," said Democratic commentator Ms. Orville B. Townsend.

Decline in Democratic Apocalyptic Adjective Effectiveness

"We've been trying to cover up our lack of apocalyptic adjectives with lots of footnotes and bibliographic citations," she said. "The Tea Baggers have sucked up the cutting edge insults about unimaginable quantities. It's probably from their hiring of political consultant word marketers."

"That, in itself, is another case of a fake grass roots organization perpetrated by right wing conspiracies," she said. "We all know that Tea Bag Consultants has been funded for years by the Republican Lunch Money Pool."

Decline in Republican Apocalyptic Adjective Effectiveness.

Republican Lunch Money Pool spokesmen declined to comment, as they had not yet received permission from Argument Entertainment News executives in Australia to say anything that was not covered in this morning's talking points email.

"One guy did comment on something last week," said an anonymous source, close to The Cubicle, a nationwide condensed buzzword source publication that generates the Official Answer for All Republicans. "We had to fire him. We can't have people helping us to promote freedom by acting independently. It might accidentally suck up another hyperbolic modifier, and then we would have wasted blood and treasure on a minor issue."

"There's only one way to control our people," he said, "and that's through reigning in their paychecks. We have to spend our remaining apocalyptic adjectives on making up for the political losses of the last Presidential campaign, which set our coffers back a fair amount.

"Those candidates are still having to act outrageous and embarrass themselves on TV in order to pay off those bills they generated by losing the last election."

"Hopefully, that will stop before the next campaign starts," he said, although he admitted later, off the record of off-record comments that "things look dismal without at least two more major embarrassments and five firings before the mid-term elections."

"And no, we don't have a good way to describe the real badness of it now, either," he said.

Recent Trends in Arts, Math and Hard Science

Political Commitments Versus Actual Support

After the Spotlight Dies Down

Orville T. Harold, FermiLab coordinator for the use of really big words to describe really big stuff, said that for years their own supercollider has been working just fine.

"Our real problem has been trying to find a way to pay for the thing," he said. "We can't keep it turned on if politicians strangle the budget. Maybe they didn't realize that this thing generates really big, horrifying words that can insult others with high school cafeteria efficiency."

FermiLab is the US's leading stockpile of under-used and under-funded equipment operated by really smart people. It was a leading generator of shocking words about really big and really small stuff in the 1980s. It's been on the decline since the Reagan administration defeated the Soviet Union in the really bad words to describe unimaginably horrific futures race.

"We just can't find a politician who's passed freshman college science classes who also won't want to strategically block his opponents' access to really big words," Harold said.

"It's a lose-lose-win-lose situation," he said.

We asked him about the implications, but declined to comment, as he didn't want to have to borrow a word from the Swiss. "The interest rates on adjective bailouts are just too high," he said.

# # #

Sprechen Sie? Chattanooga's Invisible Business Communications Gap with the Germans.

2010-03-29T06:30:00.031-04:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Commentary

Note: I had initially promised this as part I of III, yet found later that I had said enough. This will be the only installment. On to the next topic!

Chattanooga's got a communications problem with the Germans. If we don't start realizing what this problem is and fix it, then we might blow it.

As a matter of practice, we're blowing it slowly already.

Important tasks which need to get done now are getting bogged down. We're getting behind enough to begin growing a bad reputation by the watercooler.

Keep this up, and German executives will start to perceive that getting sent here will be like a trip to Siberia and her gulags.

That's only going to go on for so long before things grind to a halt. Once they grind to a halt, bad stuff happens next.

We need to get our act together a little more, so it's time for some German Business-Speak 101.

Shame and Speaking:

Or, Would You Like Your Shame With or Without Speaking, Please?

Everyone knows that Chattanooga's partnership with the German automotive industry is our chief hope for pulling ourselves out of an economic mud bog, but not everyone sees some of the problems with it that are right in front of our collective faces.

As the son of a GI Bride, I can surely tell you that there is a huge difference between American and German cultures. One of those leading differences is the concept of shame.

Americans are totally shameless. Hang on, because we'll go over that again. It means a little more than some people might think.

Germans come from a culture where people are raised with the concept of shame. It's not quite the same as what Americans might think of shame. In American English, shame is like a really strong embarrassed feeling, kind of like sadness mixed with anger over not getting accepted.

In German cultures shame is more like a heightened and very restrained consciousness of what the rest of the village might think. It's not only about social acceptance; it's also about starvation prevention.

That's right: starvation prevention.

Attention to, and the prevention of, shame comes from hundreds of years of warfare over the face of terrain that was restrictive. Societies which lived on that land were also largely agricultural. So, keeping a timetable was not only important to agriculture and trade, that same trading timetable was often habitually pressed by constant, impending war.

Don't get the seeds planted in time, and not only will there be no food, but there will be war and no food. A few hundred years of this, and the culture learns to keep a timetable. Germans have encountered this so much that keeping a schedule has become intensely internalized by almost everybody.

Massive business treaties and guilds have been carved out, historically, by dividing up social responsibilities for tasks in villages, in advance. The very survival of individuals has depended on how people buy and sell things, and that buying and selling has had a lot to do with how communications and social relationships are managed within the village.

Potential shame is a very strong influence on what people might say and do, or not say and do. It is very similar to the concepts of shame as they are handled by East Asian cultures.

East Asian cultures have also had long histories where warfare devastated large areas not just through direct violence, but also through the impact that war had on agriculture and trade.

In America, war had its biggest impact on farming and village life around the Civil War. That impact stopped affecting everybody in the nation sometime around 1890. With only about 30 years of that under our collective belts, it was easier for us to forget.

Imagine 500 years of a dozen nations each cycling through a constant stream of The American Civil War and Reconstruction. That'd be European History in a nutshell. It's affected those societies, permanently.

Remember that World War II Axis? Guess what? The partnership between the Germans and Japanese was not only of strategic importance at the time, it was also a partnership among cultures that were very similar in some characteristics, like daily village life.

Who cares about shame? We don't, because we're Americans. We're shameless. We're raised to believe in freedom, particularly freedom of expression. We're defiant; we're proud; we're boorish. More power to us.

We'll say anything. We've had the comedians and politicians to prove it. A list of the Presidents of the United States alone is a long line of totally shameless people who would say and do 'most anything at the time.

Yet, in German-American business negotiations, this disparity over how we perceive our neighbor perceiving us can create a huge, and sometimes very important, communications gap.

Like, our German partners may be silently suffering through a crisis which would cause our American brothers to explode in a fit of what Mom calls, "Army cursing." The Germans might just sit there quietly.

How May I Help You?

When Americans hear the words, "How may I help you," we usually expect that someone is going to take our order for burgers and fries.

When Germans speak the words, "How may I help you," it may very well mean, translated into American, "Hey, _____! We are in deep @#$%^&* over here! If you do not get off your _____ and get this ______ timetable completed, then @#$%^&* @#$%^&* @#$%^&* _____ _____ _____!"

You can see how that might lead to a communications gap.

It could mean that someone doesn't understand how important it is to get a certain something done. Like a large project with many, many specific goals: that could be an example of a situation where each one of those goals not met might generate an offer of help from the Germans. Meanwhile, that offer might not be recognized for what it is, a reminder that something needs to be done now.

While Americans have accepted for a long time that German culture is repressive, they often haven't really understood how this might manifest itself. There's a touch of stereotype in our imagined Repressed German; but, because he also loves beer, we can see ourselves getting along with him when he loosens up.

One of the ways this repression, which is cultural and not sexual, manifests itself is in what the German will or won't say.

In America, when someone won't say something, it must not be that big of a deal.

Oh, yes, it is.

The big deal on hand is money, or time as money. It's often an actual deal, a business plan or agreement. Here in Chattanooga, we might have noticed a recent increase in those, particularly those involving Germans.

Concepts of how people socially manage shame: that would be our first, most basic level, of observable misunderstanding.

# # #

Making Simple Digital Illustrations From Photographs

2010-03-11T21:59:00.011-05:00

A cartoon of looking through The Furies, a sculpture by John McLeod.

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

How hard can it possibly be? The drawing functions are built into a lot of digital illustration programs. The demos make it look like anyone can make a great drawing from a digital photo.

Given it a try lately? If you have, and you weren't super-great at drawing to begin with, maybe you figured out in the first fifteen minutes why you weren't doing this all the time. Here are some tips:

The basic premise is simple. The digital illustration programs (I used Corel Painter) often have some kind of function which will allow you to import a digital photo to a layer of the drawing. The idea is that you draw on top of this, and voila, a masterpiece!

To make it a little easier, this is what I picked up along the way.

1. Use a high contrast photo.

If you are into photography, it's probably no surprise that this was my lead suggestion. It comes up all the time in experimental processes for one simple set of reasons: black blacks and white whites. There will be a few grays inbetween, but they'll often be limited in number and surface area. You can find where the edge is easily, if you have a bright white surface bordering a dark black.

2. Check the image parameters before you begin.

In the digital drawing programs, you can often set the size of the drawing area. Also, in your computer, you can review what the dimensions of the photo are before you import it. Make some notes. Do the proportions match up? Do the sizes match up? Instead of getting in the application and stretching or reducing, sometimes using up computer power, check out the size limits on the photo and the drawing area before you begin. Set up the photo and the drawing area to go together. If you need to reduce the size of the photo, do that before you crank up the illustration program. Once you've got the photo's image file set the way you like, then import it.

3. Do not draw directly on the photo file.

Take advantage of those layers in the image programs. Import or place the photo in one layer, and do your drawing in another.

A drawing of John McLeod's Primitive Aggression

and the shadows it casts.

4. Use the layers to contain your mistakes.

I usually add two or three layers on top of the photo. I use one for digital paintbrush tests. When I change the drawing tools around, I flip up to the test layer and make some lines or spots. In drawing programs it can be easy to outrun the memory buffer of the "Undo" function. Just do your tests in another layer to avoid clogging up that buffer.

5. Pick a simple scheme and save variations.

In the cartoons I drew for this article, I didn't try to redraw La Giaconde, The Mona Lisa. I kept the line scheme simple, by following borders. When I was picking colors, I picked the ones I wanted according to a scheme that I thought would work. I also saved some of the variations along the way.

# # #

Pricing Fine Art Photos: $30, $300 or $3,000?

2010-03-03T00:49:00.016-05:00

$30, $300 or $3,000?

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

After putting myself through the wringer a hundred bazillion times over what to charge for a print, it turned out that the model I use is comparable to what National Geographic charges for a picture.

They'll charge about $5 more for an 11X14; but, theirs is in color; and, hey, it's National Geographic.

I had settled on my pricing model some time ago, but every day is a day when you can feel challenged over where you stand in the grand scheme of things. Is it the price list, or the sales, that's keeping you from your Wall Street fat-kat rooftop party?

Pricing can be an emotional meat grinder for someone getting set for their first sale. These are some considerations I recommend:

How Much Does It Cost To Make The Print Itself?

Add up the price of the materials involved. In black and white, I count the cost of the chemistry, photopaper, negative, packaging, mounting and matting materials.

The cost, as an idea, includes tax, shipping and any fees that you paid along the way. Since everything comes in different units, with different rates of consumption, you may have to do a little figuring to come up with what your material costs are for printing.

This is the cost per print. It's not the cost of the photography.

What Does The Buyer Get For That Price?

The photography, the field and processing time, is the big kick in the gut. There's a lot of overhead there. Ask yourself: do you believe that the person buying the print also bought the photography, the activity, that created it? Yes or no?

If they did, if you believe the answer is "yes," are you also going to provide them with licensing for the print that is comparable to what they would have received if the job had been work for hire?

Since I will not sell the licensing of my prints beyond their immediate display, I charge per print.

At $30, I was once told my prices were so low that my work ought to be displayed not in a gallery, but in the men's room of the gallery. I shot back, "Be sure to put it over the urinal! Just like the sports page, in a bar!"

We were only joking, but I could see my gallery operator's point. Everyone else charges more. Yet, I would submit, that those higher priced plans are based more on the cost of the photography itself.

Those types of plans should also yield, for the purchaser, more bang for their buck. Commercial licensing of a photo, for example, is more expensive than just buying a print.

So, there is one of the main differences.

If you seek to charge someone for your photos, are you selling them the photo or the photo with usage rights? The right to reproduce the image, particularly for commercial applications, will be more expensive.

How Much To Charge For The Photography?

The act of making the photograph itself: how much does this cost? It's more. Often, it'll come in at the cost of about five or six of those common prints, per hour. Which, if you think about it, is roughly the rate at which they would be made, during a productive hour.

What about the other costs? Materials, as they come in. Transportation, as it's used; maybe a charge for transportation time or other standby-type work. Those hours when you are committed to the project, but not actively producing a picture (not "shutter time"), will have their own fee. It's common for this fee per hour to be similar to one print sold, per hour.

One Last Factor: Can You Live With It?

There's a lot of advice out there. There are some good books to read on the subject, and every market will have a different relationship to its services.

The cost of a print is about ten to twenty times more than what a microstock agency will bill for its download. It's also about ten to twenty per cent of what an egregious bill would look like.

As I was pressured sometimes to charge more, per print, it would occur to me: Could my own family have afforded this work?

I found that when the answer was, "No, they could not have bought it," I was already upset and angry with that pricing model anyway. When the answer was yes, I knew that the profitability of the work would often be poor, but that I felt better with what I was offering.

Just my opinion on pricing.

# # #

References:

National Geographic Photo Store.

http://gallery.pictopia.com/natgeo

Ansel Adams photographs, originals and reproductions,

at The Ansel Adams Gallery. http://www.anseladams.com/shoponline.html

Collusion, Pride and Lies: Miss Evers' Boys at The Ripple This Weekend

2010-02-24T04:57:00.028-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Miss Evers tells her patient some kind of truth.

Just how much should you tell someone about the pain before they get their first spinal tap at the hands of an inexperienced doctor?

Would you tell them less if they were an illiterate farmer? How smart is the stupid man? That man we look down upon, what is his life worth?

Miss Evers' Boys, a play about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, challenges audiences with some timeless questions about the value of the life of a man when his contemporaries might count his life as worthless or expendable.

The play is set in the deep South, long before the Civil Rights Era. There's evident racism. We see the Tuskegee experiments happening. We know that since then, many societal changes have occurred. The play is not a news flash. We've heard of these events.

Yet, those events are the foundation for presenting some ancient problems and conflicts. We see arrogant people, full of themselves and selfish, doing what they think is good, manipulating others to death.

Miss Evers, is she a protagonist coming to grips with a struggle? What's her tough choice? Or, is she a villain and appeaser, who ignores and excuses the corrosion of humanity that's thrust in front of her face every day?

So Happy to Receive Their Treatments

If a man risks his life to conserve yours, is it right to pay him little if he begins the race to save you by being poor? How close to the trash pile should we bury someone who is expendable? How much are our lives worth if we choose to treat someone else as an experimental animal?

How are we lied to, to death?

Miss Evers' Boys explores the story of some poor black farmers from Macon, Alabama, who were given not just experimental, but placebo, treatments as they suffered from syphilis.

Perhaps we forget just how destructive and lethal syphilis has been. It's the pain, the mortality and the horror of slow decay unto death that Destiny reminds us of in this history play.

There's some dark humor in there. Watch for men with syphilis flirting with nurses. Do we notice? The flirting or the syphilis?

If we heard someone with a sexually transmitted and lethal disease flirting with a nurse, but we gave that disease and that man who had it a name that was more in contemporary vogue: would we notice this flirting more?

Did we forget the value of life because it was past due or unfashionable? Ask yourself: what dominates these scenes? Men being men, or men carrying the pall of lethal disease?

How much have we forgotten about syphilis and how we treat the diseased? Do we just rationally dismiss their natural desires and normal feelings with our conclusion that they are doomed to die?

Pride and Options.

In one scene we hear the pride of naming this great scientific study. Destiny shows the academic gloss given to professional hubris. Meanwhile, the welfare of the men in the study goes unaddressed beyond the most meagre compensation.

Three generations after slavery, has the poorest made a step up?

Have they progressed far? In the play we see the poor black farmer not considered completely worthless: he merited being buried next to, not in the pile of, the community's trash.

One step away from trash. His corpse given a thrifty burial in a reused sack. Was mankind as fair to these men as it was to others?

How high, how noble, must a man's birth be, in the eyes of his contemporaries, before we owe him the respect of candid truth?

Destiny Theater Company shows Miss Evers' Boys in honor of Black History Month at the Ripple Theater on Brainerd Road. The Ripple is a few doors down from The Comedy Catch. Tickets are $16; performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

http://www.destinyentertainment.org/

Chattanooga, Tennessee.

# # #

Photographing John McLeod's Point of Departure at Covenant College

2010-02-18T03:27:00.032-05:00

"Primitive Aggression" with its grain and shadows.

Pan F+ 32ASA, Green 58, Bulb one minute.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Hydroquinone moves like a flash fire across the highlights.

When I got there, to the gallery,

I knew that one of my main ideas would involve portraying these delicate shadows cast upon the gallery walls from the track lighting. Those delicate shadows needed to be strong, contributing elements in order to hold up in the role as subjects of the photographs.

This called for severe contrast compression and long exposures.

Severe compression to get the range down to a few tones; and, long exposures in order to render those few tones as blacks and whites, not just a few soft grays.

That is, we want the tones compressed into a few forms of gray; yet, we want those grays to be distinctly different. Overall, there is a severe expansion throughout the whole contrast scheme, but within each of the available tones, there is strong compression.

A few, diverse, tones build the photos. Those tones will make the shadows their own tone, even if it is at the cost of greatly flattening and compressing the tones which show the forms of the sculpture.

Heavy blocking contrast filtration to put local colors into tonal groups to which they would not ordinarily belong; followed by long exposures to light and chemical energy to re-expand those groups into diverse tones which would still yield the subject's support (shadows on the wall) tones as middle gray.

Heavy filtration & long exposures.

It needs severe contrast compression because I knew I wanted those shadows to be a strong contributing element to the photograph. The contrast range of the sculptures themselves was much wider than the range of the shadows. The shadows had two, maybe three, tones in the gallery.

The lighting for the shadows was delicate. This called for the longer exposures to burn them in. If a more normal exposure and contrast scheme had been used, then the delicate shadows would be a delicate detail of the final photograph.

"Orbit" and its shadows.

Ilford Delta 3200 at 1000ASA, Green 58,

Bulb one minute. VCII print at 90 seconds.

I didn't want someone hunting for the subject. I wanted those shadows to be a part of the photo, the main part, the subject.

Why?

The sculptures are in this gallery. Those shadows on the wall are part of the sculptures' presence. It's part of they're being there. The shadows on the wall are a part of the exhibit. The shadows were specific to the exhibit and the lighting there.

If the sculptures had been photographed elsewhere, those same shadow patterns would not be there. Showing the shadows was part of showing the exhibit.

This called for a very harsh contrast and exposure pattern. Heavy filtration before camera and in printing. Hard moving developers during negative and print processing.

Almost all of the photos were made with a Green 58 filter. Bulb exposures a minute long were common. Print times, too, often came in at a minute or more.

There were two other influencing factors:

I had photographed some of the sculptures, in color, with ringlight before. This had yielded rounded, largely shadowless, color forms.

I had spent the night before baking some negatives of a test strip for six hours, and was in a flavor of falling in love with long development times. The test strips had been left standing for about six hours.

Like another roll I had done recently, the films for this session were all developed for 30 minutes, regardless of film type. This yields hard, dense negatives. It provides the compressed contrast range. In the higher speed roll (Ilford Delta 3200), it yields very strong grain.

There were a few photos in which I wanted to achieve a silhouetting effect for part of the photo, but still wanted to reveal some contours and textures of the wood.

For those, I switched over from the contrasting green filter to a CC85C, an orange filter, which would emphasize the tone of the wood by matching its local color.

Since I still wanted to achieve a strong silhouetting effect, the rest of the contrast and exposure schemes for the photos remained the same.

These pictures, too, had a lot to do with the sculptures and their environment. Again, it was a play of local lighting and shadows.

Nails of a small Fury, its shadows, and the tone and texture of surrounding sculptures.

Ilford Pan F+, CC85C, Bulb exposure.

Nails of the small Fury and The Shield.

Pan F+ 32 ASA, CC85C as orange contrast filter,

allowance for drop in exposure as tungsten for film

sensitivity to non-daylight exposures (even in black and white); bulb exposure of one minute.

This photo was made while looking through The Furies. It uses the tall wood forms to create the stripes of tonal patterns that form the verticals in the photo. The silhouette and the curved form of The Shield are a break in this pattern. They also have a different grouping of tones. Compositionally, it's a break in two kinds of pattern.

While the flavor of these compositions is strong, I have little worry over them. We're scheduled to photograph The Shield and The Furies by themselves in early March. So, I have confidence in these more radical compositions because I know that before and after they were made, there were and are other chances to make different types of photos.

# # #

References:

John McLeod's exhibit, "Point of Departure" at Covenant College.

www.johnmcleod.net

Concept Sketches: Preparing to Photograph John McLeod's "Point of Departure"

2010-02-14T22:03:00.024-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Taking a small risk, I'll go ahead and show some of my concept sketches for an upcoming photo session at Covenant College, which is proudly featuring John McLeod's "Point of Departure" sculpture show in its library gallery.

McLeod had an opening last week; a big success. We had a chance to see the sculptures in the gallery; and, John got a chance to speak to an audience of college students. The presentation was coordinated by Jeffrey Morton, Associate Professor of Art at Covenant.

Covenant College is hosting McLeod's show for a little while longer; and, we've made arrangements to photograph it in situ.

That's Ivy League talk for "on location."

If you ever get a chance to photograph a sculptor's work, I recommend it. Thanks to some advance coordination, we have some great objects for our photographs' topics; and, they're already staged in a great location. Time to get ready to make some photographs.

Here's where the concept sketches come in.

Normally, I usually make a few diagrams and some lists for myself. Of the sketches that I made for this session, the most complex overhead diagram would be a big part of my functional planning for heading on out there.

It reminds me of what I want to photograph, how I want to set up; and, because the sketches and lists can be reviewed after I make them, they can be used to generate a reasonable inventory of equipment to bring along.

Just sitting down to think things through from the standpoint of visualization can really support the photo session's planning.

Before I started planning, a few things happened:

I saw some of the sculptures before they got there, so I already had some rough ideas
I coordinated with McLeod and the College to arrange the photo session
I visited the gallery opening, with an eye for what I might want to photograph later

Process-wise, this covers a lot of before-camera work:

Topic familiarity & research
Interpersonal coordination
Location visits
Visualization of compositions

With those basic points in mind, I was able to draw up these concept sketches.

A copy of the concept sketches is available as a PDF file (1.3 MB). Click here.

After the session is over, and the pictures are in, we'll see how I did. In the meanwhile, I'll be able to proceed with more confidence because I have spent some time planning. Particularly, planning with respect to the design of the photos.

It's the composition ideas that drive the other steps, like what equipment to bring and how we want to process and display those images later. I know that equipment list is sexy; but, let's remember that the photographing is about making photos.

I'll provide an update once the photos are in.

# # #

The Dynamic Power of the Starving Artist: Art, Innovation and Saving the Economy

2010-02-13T15:56:00.027-05:00

By John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Commentary

Watching Meet the Press the other day, I noticed former Secretary Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan talking about economic innovation.

"Innovation," Greenspan said, "by definition, is not forecastable."

They've got a point. Most economic forecasts are based on what has happened in the past, and what's known about what's going on at the time a prediction is being made. If something has never happened before, how can an economist or businessman predict how well it's going to do?

Which brings us to art.

Yes, art. Art, in my view, as actually a specialized form of manufacturing. We usually have either one person making an artifact, or one artifact being made by a group of people. Each artifact is different. Each one doesn't have a good precedent in the marketplace for its value.

Make something nice and try to put a price tag on it. What's it worth? It seems at first like that might be a simple matter, but after we study the problem for a while, we can see that the answer may not be so easy. The artifact is rarely worth just the sum of its materials and labor. What's worse, if it's not holding up well under scrutiny, it may actually be worth less than what it cost to make it.

There's an arbitrary characteristic to art pricing, but the item made is an example of traditional wealth.

Investors seemed to be hitting on this back before the housing bubble. For a while there, more and more fine art was selling well. Rich people were using them as investments. Admittedly, it was the Big Name art that was moving for outrageous prices. Yet, as a normal commodity, the value of art is somewhere between what the buyer was willing to pay and what the maker was willing to spend on it.

I mention this because we're in a slump. Big time. You may have noticed.

One of the first things "Hank" Paulson said about this in that interview was that we don't know where the innovation is going to come from.

Well, we can see where it hasn't come from so far. Let's take a look at some of that:

The Economic Stimulus Programs. Not to knock 'em, but I don't know anyone who has been hired as a result of these. I have seen one, count 'em one, job advertisement in my local area that was specifically listed as an economic stimulus package job. It's great that there's one available for somebody, but that doesn't counteract the current or past problems.

Past problems like, hundreds of people laid off before the rich people started losing money on the housing market. By rich people, I mean primarily, large investment banks which are not looking much better than upper class versions of casinos right now.

I haven't checked the odds, but at the observed rate of losses, we might have been better off playing blackjack with the money. Who knows.

When the large investment banks started taking heavy losses, trickle down economics kicked in fast. Trickle down economics does work. It seems to be at its most efficient when it comes to passing the buck on paying the bills.

We sometimes say the trickle down effect doesn't work; but, that's primarily when we're discussing the benefit of profits at large. When it comes to losses, it's a rocket ride to the bottom floor.

The stimulus plans simply haven't been able to counteract this. They may be able to cushion it somewhat; but, if The Tooth Fairy did show up with a million bucks tomorrow, minimum wage would go up to a million and a half per hour.

It's just human nature. It's the negative side of what should be, in a balanced market, a healthy form of greed and progress. Greed can be good; it can keep us going. Who doesn't like reward? Too much of it, or too little of it, can be destructive. A stimulus plan won't help us if it's not joined to the concept of noblesse oblige.

The wealthy can help. They can do good, and be noble. Right now, though, many of them look like they are disregarding the whole situation, or are scared, or are interested in exploiting their workers by pressuring them even more. Overall, no big life preserver on the horizon from the upper classes of politics or finance.

I recognize this point strongly because I have received patronage from an important local arts grant program. However, I can't reasonably suppose that such a program, in and of itself, could be effectively mimicked on a wide scale. We'd need such help on a wide scale. Like, lots of cash falling from the sky.

The Existing Surviving Businesses. God help anyone who has kept their day job through all this because have a look at what kind of anxiety just got hitched to the pressure people were under before. They were already doing quite a bit of work as it was; now, many appear to be afraid to lose that work that they have.

Just how anxious? Look at their behavior. It's socio-pathic. I know that's strong: yet, have a look at it. Need an example? Brace for impact. Here it comes:

"Thank you for choosing ___ [Business Name]."

We have otherwise intelligent, full-grown adults who will say this to us every time we walk into that room. Give it a test. See how many retail outlets in your area make their employees do this.

It's crazy behavior.

It's a widespread crazy behavior, which implies we've got a lot of people who think it's now normal to parrot platitudes as part of normal commerce. 95% of the speakers are probably just saying whatever they have to say to keep their jobs. Yet, who is the financial whiz who believes that polite platitudes figure into economic success, when applied with this breadth and intensity?

We've got the Law of Supply and Demand. Is there a Law of Polite Platitudes to Profit? If there is, we may be inching up on one of its limiting factors: it makes people look crazy and anxious.

Keep in mind, I don't mean someone who says this as a part of normal conversation. Someone somewhere might genuinely mean it. Okay. More power to them.

Thank You for Choosing Insanity

I mean we've got people saying this 200 times a day, even when no speaking at all would be a normal part of human interactions.

Thank you for choosing ____. Thank you for choosing ____. Thank you for choosing ____.

It's corrosive to normal social relationships, and if it happened in any other setting for any other reason, you would probably think that person was crazy.

If you had a roommate who told you, "Thank you for choosing Apartment B-12," every time you walked through the den, after about six hours, you'd want to evict the guy. What kind of crazy person acts this way? And does obsessive amounts of work? People afraid to lose their jobs.

Okay, now, it's not just the craziness of the anxiety that these people are manifesting which makes them an unlikely source of economic recovery. It's the nature of the work that they're doing. Namely: assumption of social stress.

That's right. We don't labor much anymore, do we? We do have some people who labor for a living. We do have some people who refine goods and provide services for a living. Yet, even among those who provide services, and increasingly large portion of the population is not concentrating on the material matter of providing the good or service. Instead, they are employed, at least in part, for the assumption of social stress associated with making that sale.

These people are getting paid to be punching bags.

This doesn't mean that they're getting actively beat up or abused on a day-to-day basis. It does happen, but most of the social stress they're assuming is not a direct assault on them, most of the time. Instead, what they're having to do a lot of is disguise the sale.

Disguising the problems of the sale, even if it is passively disguising it, may make for a happier customer, but it does not increase wealth. At least not when a majority of the economic system involved is about the disguising, the assumption of social stress related to the transactions.

The traditional wealth of the community is still made the same old way: refinement or making of goods and the providing of services.

The disguise jobs are about refining the provision of services. It's another degree removed from traditional wealth. It can help a company that's doing okay do better. Yet, it cannot make something out of nothing.

Making something out of nothing is a point worth concentrating on right now because we don't have a whole lot of cards in our hand. We're low on options. We have to make some options.

Best way to make some options is to make some stuff. Art.

From the perspective of traditional wealth generation, the gambling that Wall Street was doing doesn't make any wealth. It doesn't create anything. It may inflate the cost of something or devalue spending power, but in and of itself, it doesn't make any goods or provide any services. At best, it may refine the providing of services, but that's back to the disguise jobs.

It's our own fault. We let them do whatever they wanted for a long time. Things got out of balance. They went crazy with it; and, we let 'em. Now we have a big crash, and there's an imbalance problem.

What to do about it? Make art.

Economic Leaders Quibbling With Us

Meanwhile, Mister Greenspan went on to say that the recession is over.

Okay, I checked right away. I noticed immediately that nothing seemed to radically improve as he spoke those words. I looked around; I had the same problems I had before he started talking.

If Mr. Greenspan is right, and the recession is over, why aren't things better?

Brace for impact, because here it comes again:

Greenspan was quibbling. Quibbling? That sounds somewhat diminutive. What's quibbling?

Quibbling is when someone tells you a selective truth. Particularly, when someone tells such a narrowly limited, specific, truth for the purpose of skewing an overall judgement and persuading others.

Army Officers have been admonished to avoid quibbling ever since General MacArthur took control of West Point. While I'm not a big MacArthur fan, he was right about quibbling. In military occupations, quibbling can cause some catastrophic failures; in business it happens all the time, and is normally only an inconvenience.

Yet, Mr. Greenspan's quibbling on Meet the Press is actually some really, really bad news.

The Recession, to people like Mr. Greenspan, is a recess. It's a break in activity; normally, profitable activity. They stopped making profits, so they think, and were eventually forced to admit, that we were in a recession.

A Great Recession, judging by its social impact. We have yet to have anyone adequately explain to us where all these evicted and foreclosed-upon people have gone. After about six hours, they're going to start to want access to another building.

I didn't hear about a big Free Foreclosed-upon Hotel for these people to move into. I imagine it would be about the size of Nebraska, if it existed.

For normal people, "The Recession" as a phrase means bankrupt, economic hell. To businessmen, a recession means a state of taking a break from profits. Uh-oh. We're not speaking the same language. And, the leaders of business are not speaking a language that even begins to imply that they have any interest in doing anything but making profits for themselves. We've got to get the whole town out of the slump. Making profits for the leaders is not, by itself, good enough.

So, Recess is over, for our investment gamblers. What does that mean?

Well, dramatic ethical overhaul didn't seem to be on the top of their to-do list before, and it doesn't seem to be now. So, if their recess is over, and their profits have resumed, and there have been no major changes, just what are they up to?

The same stuff that got us in this mess, all over again.

In which case Mr. Greenspan's statement, "The recession is over," is not real good news. It is, instead, a dramatic and horrifying warning that we are making the situation worse, not better. If we are doing the same bad stuff that we were doing before, and all of that just got lots of people thrown out of their jobs and evicted, doing more of that is some real bad news!

Companies are profitable again, right? All of those laid off people didn't get brought back, did they? No. They're still out of work. Those foreclosed properties did not magically fill up overnight with successful and strong businesses.

So, we have the same set of aggressive and negative conditions, but we're forcing profit out of it again. This is real bad news. It implies fragility. It's like a broken beam that was pressed before, but which is now being stretched: some of the flavor of the force might have changed, but it's still a broken part that's being used under great strain.

Yet, We Have the Tools to Save Ourselves

Meanwhile, we don't see any increase in the good stuff that will help us to power through the tough times.

You can tell me all about invest in this or invest in that, but artists know: we've got two main tools at our disposal: the toolbox and small savings. That's it.

Everyone's willing to help us if we have another $1000 to spend. Not much to blame about there, but that only goes so far: like, until you run out of thousands. What's left is the toolbox.

And, okay, here's the blessing:

Using the toolbox is something you can do without Wall Street's blessing.

You don't need someone big to descend from the heavens and fix all of your problems if there is something you can fix or do yourself. Chances are, there's something you can do or make with what you have already on hand which is just as good as what anyone else would do or make. Maybe better.

Do that. Make that.

You yourself won't save your community this way. Look around. How many other people are just like yourself, with respect to those making capabilities? Everyone has their own talents, of course; but, look at who can make something. Pretty much everyone can.

It's not going to turn Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution into a good idea for America, but it could sustain an arts revolution in your hometown which can keep something moving.

What looked worthless before, that starving artist's work, is traditional wealth. Nationally, we need to build up that traditional wealth base as much as possible as part of fixing our way out of this mess.

You don't have to be a fine artist. You don't have to be a great artist. If you are a doer or a maker, you are an artist. Create some traditional wealth. Make something. Sell something. Buy local art. Sell local art. Don't wait on a rescue.

If you'll excuse me, I have to fix up some photo fixer.

# # #

References:

Meet the Press Transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35270673/ns/meet_the_press/page/3/

Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. Putnam, 1995. ISBN 0-87477-824-7.

Fixing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

2010-02-01T22:20:00.010-05:00

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Political Commentary

As a veteran of the US Army, in light of the recent Presidential attention to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding homosexuality in the US military, I would like to offer these points for consideration:

With the President's statement in the State of the Union address that it's time to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the military will be motivated to make some changes to their laws. Hopefully, those changes will modify the Uniform Code of Military Justice's punitive articles to set policy square with the law.

In the past, and today, we're burdened with Presidential directives on the matter of homosexuals in the military which are perceived to be at odds with the letter of the UCMJ. If it were to be modified, and if I were to advise anyone interested in modifying it, I would ask that these three points be kept in mind:

1. Create A Comprehensive Sexual Battery Law. A quick look at the UCMJ's few pages on Sodomy and Rape shows that the current law is not only out of step with contemporary sexual standards, but also unfair across genders.

No one should be the victim of sexual battery. An over-arching article, preventing and punishing sexual battery should be created. Regardless of the mechanics of how a sexual assault is carried out, sexual battery is not only a physical crime but a psychological manipulation of the victim. It's more than ordinary battery. It deserves its own over-arching legal control regardless of the sexuality or genders of those involved.

2. Applicability. Specifically, the law should be focused on sexual conduct not only within ranks, but also between those within the military and those not in the military. While the homosexuality policy seems to lead our focus on how Soldiers might have sex with one another, the punitive articles also protect against sexual misconduct in theater. As the existing laws are reviewed, new laws should not be put in place which would rescind that aspect of punitive control.

The Rape and Sodomy punitive articles, as they exist now, not only govern how Soldiers behave amongst themselves, but also how they behave among others. This should continue, in order to prevent and punish sexual crimes on the battlefield.

3. Administrative Timeliness and Fairness. The law should not be retroactive, or in any way overturn a standard which would rescind or negate an a punitive action already underway or completed. Soldiers should be held to the standards which were in place at the time that they engaged in an action they may have been punished for. Just as it would be unfair to retroactively punish someone, so also it would be unfair to grant clemency or reward to someone based on a later change in standards.

Since the examination of the current policy may apply not only to the UCMJ, but also to other regulations and policies, policies which would be affected by a change to the UCMJ should be identified and also adjusted accordingly. That is, there should not be an administrative policy in place which contradicts the UCMJ. So, not only should the UCMJ concerns be addressed, as above, but also policies respecting the entrance to service ("chaptering in"), exit from service ("chaptering out") and standards for fitness while in service (any medical fitness standards not immediately related to healthy consensual sexual conduct).

If those three points were followed as a limiting paradigm, it's more likely that any changes to the policy which would be proposed would be more likely to be fair, free of religious and social bias, and durable.

From Baptist to Buddhist, if we build the policy to be fair and equitable, and free from apparent hypocrisy, the Soldiers will be more effectively led by the law. Contradictory policies only cloud the moral issues the UCMJ should clarify in war.

# # #

McLeod Showing "Point of Departure"

2010-01-27T20:52:00.005-05:00

Chattanooga sculptor John McLeod will have an opening show at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain at 7:00 p.m. 10th February 2010.

The event is sure to be jam-packed with college coeds! Bring a friend.

# # #

UPDATE: What a success! The opening went really well. We're scheduled to go back next week and make some studio photos of the pieces in situ. We'll follow up with some photos of McLeod's latest works.

Photo: Firefighters After MVA 11 January 2010

2010-01-12T22:43:00.006-05:00

Firefighters Meet After Ambulance Departs.

MVA, 11 January 2010, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar, 1/20, f/4, ISO 1600. AP2.

# # #

Photo: Exposure for Sky Matched by Fill

2010-01-11T13:15:00.008-05:00

Nandina Berries

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar.

VIV 285HV, umbrella, camera left.

1/125, f/4, ISO 100. AP2.

Exposure was measured for background sky at 1/500, f/8, ISO 100.

Dropped two stops on shutter to hit the camera's max synch speed.

Opened up two stops on aperture to accept flash fill.

Doubling of the normal two stop underexposure for fill occurred because of distance from flash to subject and also an allowance for bouncing from the umbrella.

Since the apparent area of the emitted area is larger from the umbrella than it would be for a point emission from strait flash, an allowance had to be made for the distribution of light. In this instance, it was two more stops. [cf. Inverse Square Law of Light]

Rule of thumb would be a stop lost for the bounce and a stop lost for the spread. With film, there would have been an additional approximate half-stop lost for the gold of the umbrella, a change in temperature relative to daylight silver film sensitivity. [That specific loss would have been determined by the formulation and response of the specific emulsion used.]

This allowed us to make up for the four stop difference in the light from the sky and the light from the backlit leaves. If it had not been made, the plant would have appeared much darker.

# # #

Coaching Yourself: Exposure By Complexity

2010-01-10T01:29:00.003-05:00

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

If you are coaching yourself through photography, and you are having trouble getting into manual exposure calculations, try this pattern below. It proceeds from least to most complex, for teaching yourself or coaching someone else.

Straight hot shoe flash exposure using guide numbers (100ASA, X-synch speed)
Sunny 16 daylight exposure
Incident light metering
Center weighted average metering through the viewfinder (ambient only)
Center weighted average with a simple overall tonal shift +/- 1 or 2 stops
Spot metering
Spot metering for tonal shift
Flash plus ambient ("shutter drag") based on spot metering
Flash plus ambient by flash & spot metering with a tonal shift
Flash plus ambient by guide numbers and center weighted average metering
Flash plus ambient by guide numbers and sunny 16 or other estimate
Any metering method with flash involving bounce, gel or light modifiers against spectral sensitivity of films

Give that course a try, and see if it helps you better.

# # #

Photo: Pine Cone with Red Ribbon

2010-01-09T13:12:00.002-05:00

Pine Cone with Red Ribbon

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar

Vivitar 285HV, CTO, snoot & boom.

Vivitar 285HV, PL, snoot.

Processed AP2.

# # #

Photo: 08 January 2010

2010-01-08T18:25:00.004-05:00

Woodpecker.

Pentax K200D, 645 A* 300mm, 645 Adapter K.

1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 400. Processed AP2.

# # #

Test a Real Piece of Junk For a Change

2010-01-07T17:56:00.008-05:00

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Camera reviews don't tell us everything. They can be written by sitting down with a sales brochure, or they can be a summary of some pretty sophisticated testing. The main ingredient that's missing is our own experience. For beginners, the reviews can be a mystery of fantasies.

If you are a beginner out there, looking over reviews to buy your first "real" camera, or stepping up to a new DSLR, I recommend you write your own little review before buying that new camera.

Write a review of a real piece of junk.

I mean, garbage or near garbage. Review a camera yourself that's been fished out of the trash. Borrow one from that distant cousin who gave it to his toddler to chew on. Pull it out from between the cushions of the bench seat of a minivan with parched paint; wipe the snack crumbs off of the scratched plastic exterior, and use that camera for a week.

Corroded batteries? Replaced with whatever AAs you scavenged from something else.

Operating system? Windows 95 compatible, at best. Anything "barely usable" with your favorite computer is a plus.

If you are looking to buy a DSLR, fish out that really bad, but digital, point and shoot camera. It should look so bad that everyone else in the world believes it is useless, inoperable plastic junk.

Then use it, with vigor, for a week. Establish your sense of new lows. Recognize what's still good about the camera. Note those inconveniences you experience as you try to get the thing working.

Pay no more than $25 for this little experiment, all in. Borrowed equipment might work best.

Then, head on over to your favorite source of camera reviews. Often, there will be a summary of criteria used to judge the camera. Build one of those same lists for your piece of junk under testing.

Then re-read those camera reviews that interested you before you started your own testing. You might notice a few things:

The stuff you noticed about your junk camera might not be on the summary list in a way that fits into a neat category. Isn't it important for you to avoid those problems? This can help you identify sins of omission in reviews.

The good stuff about the camera might not be listed in the newer reviews. Why not? Superior technology? Or, was part of the good stuff not in the camera, but in the photographer?

If your junk camera did not fit your specifications for your preferred uses, why not? Was there a part that didn't comply with your needs? How so? This can help you identify which specifics are important to you in a camera.

Were there acronyms of specific tests which showed off one feature that's in your desired camera that are somehow not in other cameras? Why is that? Was the equipment special in its design, or is that acronym a marketing ploy?

Then, consider reviewing the camera you normally use, if you have another one. Run through this the same way. See how it stacks up. Do you really need a new camera?

If you want to make photos of wildlife, and all you have is a point and shoot, at least by now you should begin to specify what field of view you would like to have against what format size.

All in, this simple exercise can help you gain some experience with the equipment, and keep you from getting suckered as quickly by marketing schemes.

Photo: 04 January 2010

2010-01-04T22:19:00.003-05:00

Vapor.

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar,

f/2.8, 1/6, ISO 1600; processed AP2.

# # #

Photo: 03 January 2010

2010-01-03T21:28:00.004-05:00

Cartop Kayak in January.

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar, 1/6, f/2.8, ISO 1600.

Processed AP2.

Photo made at night; light from a nearby street lamp.

# # #

Unlocking White Balance Problems: The Three Layers of White Balance Adjustments In Editing

2010-01-03T02:39:00.028-05:00

Church Roofline at Beginning Evening Nautical Twilight.

Counteracting Rayleigh Scattering with White Balance

and Attaining a Coloring Influence (Light Blue) From

Deliberate Discrepancy.

Original photo showed the sky as gray,

when it appeared to be blue, with a sunset behind the camera position.

Light temperature, approximately 4200K.

Recorded as D50, 5000K.

Processed as Tungsten, 3200K.

Pentax K200D, 1/90, ISO 400.

Lens and aperture unrecorded.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Sometimes the concept of white balance is confusing for people who have just begun to gain experience editing in color. To make matters worse, sometimes our advice or directions sound convoluted or confusing.

The directions will sometimes be what sounds like a one step summary. "Set for 5000K," they'll say, or something like that. Meanwhile, that's a one-step answer to a three step problem.

White balance is a three layer problem. It's not one answer. In the final image, it's the result of at least three phases of editing, not including any deliberate additional tinting or filtration of light.

By the time we get to the final image, we have had at least three chances to edit what is regarded as white light.

White balance is a three layer puzzle.

For reflected photos (prints):

1. The color of the light striking the subject.

2. The definition of white by the recording media.

3. The definition of white in later processing.

This is why sometimes coaching our way to better white balance, or deliberately edited white balance, is sometimes confusing. Each subsequent stage can emphasize or neutralize the effect of the stage before it.

Further, discrepancies in emphasizing or neutralizing generate a new, observed color of white. If the effect of coloring or defining white cannot be adequately counteracted in later phases of processing with standard white balance temperatures, it is often because the preceding layer's temperature was not accurately observed by the editor. Hunt down the discrepancy by accepting that the light was recorded as the media observed it, which may not have been at a common temperature.

If the photo was made during daylight, then the apparent color temperature of the sunlight will serve as the basis for subsequent edits of an available light photo. This is because the influence of the sun will almost always overwhelm the influence of other light sources during daytime.

Sunrise, Sunset, Rayleigh Scattering and White Balance

The apparent temperature of daylight shifts during twilight. Daylight 5600K is the balance for many color films. At sunset, the apparent temperature is often very close to the white balance value for tungsten, 3200K.

At the onset of nautical twilight, the shift towards tungsten white balance values will accelerate. This is another description of the golden hour's yellowishness.

Why? Why does this appear to be so? The amount of heat the sun emits does not change. Yet, the light becomes more scattered by the atmosphere, in a way that is similar to a change in heat. This scattering of light that causes the goldenness of sunset is called Rayleigh scattering.

By making adjustments in photographic white balance, we can edit some aspects of the light to simulate or counteract Rayleigh scattering.

Rayleigh scattering means that the yellow to blue wavelengths of light will scatter more as the atmosphere is thicker. At sunrise or sunset, the red to yellow wavelengths of light keep on traveling, but the yellow to blue forms get scattered.

By making a white balance adjustment to emphasize or neutralize or simulate a sunset, we are addressing the loss or desired addition of those yellow to blue rays that would be lost in nature by Rayleigh scattering at sunrise or sunset.

To check the apparent shift in white balance values at sunset, record two test photos: one in daylight and one in tungsten. Make the tests an hour before sunset, half hour before sunset, and at sunset. The shift in white balance of the light will be observable, and easier to understand in terms of white balance, with those six photos on hand.

Projecting Images with Light and White Balance:

Digital photographers and presenters, note:

If the photo is a digital image, seen on the web or computer monitor, there is at least a fourth layer to the problem:

If the final image is seen with a source of incident light,

like a slide projector or a digital photo on a monitor:

4. The definition of white as transmitted by the

final viewing lamp (slide projector or viewer's computer monitor).

That fourth layer of the problem is an element often beyond the photographer's control in digital photography. It contributes to the appearance of the final image, as the telecommunicating viewer sees it. It influences his view of the photo, even though it is beyond the photographer's normal control.

A discrepancy between that fourth layer, and preceding layers, has an orange/blue coloring influence which can affect the photo in the same way as a discrepancy within the first three stages.

Remember the layers of the problem when editing white balance in photographs.

# # #

Photos: 02 January 2010

2010-01-02T18:58:00.004-05:00

Icy Red 401.

Ice on a wall fountain covers building numbers and reflects the red taillights of cars waiting at a nearby stoplight.

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar. 1/750, f/2, ISO 1600.

Yacht Approaches Walnut Street Bridge.

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar, 1/350, f/5.6, ISO 400, PL.

Musician in the Cold

A musician warms his hands as he takes a break from playing his guitar in 30F January weather. Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Pentax K200D, 55mm Takumar, 1/90, ISO 400. PL.

Photo: 01 January 2010

2010-01-01T18:27:00.005-05:00

Statue outside of "Flowers by Gil and Kurt."

Pentax K200D, Takumar 50mm, 1/20, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Post: AP2, centerlined adjustments.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

# # #

Continuous Lighting for a Two Mile Radius

2009-12-27T21:59:00.011-05:00

Movie Theater, Chattanooga.

Pentax K1000, 645 55mm; Pan F+ 32 ASA, D76 1+1; VCII printing on Ilford MG IV RC.

The street was dry as this photo was made; the bulb exposure of a high contrast area helps the street appear wet and slick, but it was actually dry and cold that night. The variance in brightness of the asphalt is actually the result of the angles of reflection; the family of angles between the camera, the lamp, and the surface of the street.

Autoviewer Slideshow. Click on the pictures to play the slideshow.

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

If we asked someone to spend untold millions to string up thousands of lights in a sprawling pattern so that we could illuminate a two mile radius every night, they'd think we're a bunch of crackpots.

We do it every night with street lamps.

Streetlights are one of our most common and overlooked sources of continuous lighting. Individually, we probably couldn't tote or afford to operate a single one of them by ourselves.

If you carried one of those lamps out there, maybe with a generator or a bunch of batteries; even if you had the electrical know-how to get the thing going, we wouldn't expect you to last long.

Street lamps operate almost all night long; sometimes with subtle differences based on day of the week, or time of night; but we use and ignore them all the time.

Every small town in America has unrolled the red carpet for you and your tripod. They installed street lights.

Some tips:

Get past the headlight thing. We all know those make trails. What other lights do you see?
Look for shadow patterns. Those lamps cast direct light, but that means they are also casting shadows. Use those shadows to your advantage.
Is it damp, drizzling rain, cold and miserable? Good! Wet concrete is more reflective; poor weather conditions can enhance some of the street lamp lighting effects. As long as you can operate the camera without it fogging up or freezing, you are good to go.
Compose the photo; exploit geometric lines and shapes. Manmade objects are one big gallery of Euclidian geometry. Approach photographing them from a slightly different angle, and those straight lines (like sidewalks and curbs) can become effective diagonals to lead the eye of the viewer.
Check exposure. A lot of these exposures for film speeds below 1600 will work out to be 30 seconds to a minute at f/8. At 32ASA, I find many fall in around one minute at f/8.
Digital imaging: exploit that white balance adjustment, and consider recording in daylight and processing in tungsten, or vice versa.
Consider selective flash use; maybe snooted flash directed at an important detail.

Nighttime is a great opportunity for one of the world's largest displays of continuous lighting.

Pentax K200D, 28-80 FAJ.

# # #

Snowy Roses and Fall Leaves

2009-12-06T22:10:00.008-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Your browser does not support iframes.

Click on the Autoviewer slideshow to play.

Photos made after some recent snows; leaves from this past fall. One of my favorites was the snow that had built up on the roses.

The blue tone to the photo came from setting the digital camera's white balance to tungsten; the images were later post-processed at the same temperature as daylight color film (5600K). This brought a touch of yellow back into the lighting scheme.

The ambient light was an intermittent yellow sunlight; the sun was emerging from behind the clouds after things warmed up after a night of snow. The yellowish color of the morning sunlight would negate some of the blue effect generated by recording the image as tungsten.

Eventually I settled on an exposure that had part of the area in shade (bluish) and part of the area in morning sun (closer to normal appearing white balance). As a sample, the photos below were all made at the same location, within a few moments of each other, with the same camera settings. You can see how the blue's influence varied with the presence or absence of the yellow morning sun.

The "Snowy Rose" photo that begins the slideshow was cut from the middle frame, below.

# # #

33¢ Neoprene Snoot For Hot Shoe Flash

2009-12-06T20:53:00.010-05:00

The 33¢ Double O Dark Snoot, in action.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

How much would you expect to pay for light shaping tools?

We found prices on snoots which ranged from $29.95 to over $150. Flash accessories sure can rake in the bucks; particularly, your bucks.

The amazing new "Double O Dark Snoot" is available for the cost of a 33¢ sheet of 2mm neoprene foam and a piece of duct tape.

Factor in transportation, tax, and time, you may have to spring a whole dollar for it, but it's still about $30 less than its nearest competitor.

The "Double O Dark Snoot" is an all-weather, flexible, crushable, reusable light shaping tool built to fit most hot shoe flashes.

It's a sheet of neoprene foam wrapped around the flash, snugly, and then secured with duct tape. It works great!

No loss of power, function or adjustability with the flash. No special brackets. Need to restore the original configuration? Simply remove the duct tape.

Need a custom size or shape for your beam of light? Utilize the on-site customizer kit, which consists of one more small piece of duct tape; and, simply tape down part of the front of the snoot to close off unwanted area.

This holiday season, before you give that $150 piece of plastic all of the budget, give a 2mm thick piece of neoprene and some duct tape a try.

Our field tests showed that the neoprene snoots were also CTO/CTB gel scrap compatible.

By using common materials and some common sense, you can improvise accessories for your flash which can operate safely, efficiently and effectively.

Unit may not be compatible with full frame snobs, what you tell your stock agency, canon vs. nikon debates, or celebrity photo equipment shop and tell sessions.

# # #

Foreclosure Video

2009-11-19T21:26:00.002-05:00

Lauren Greenfield's "Foreclosure: Death of the American Dream" from Frank Evers on Vimeo.

Is It A Photo?

2009-11-17T16:44:00.003-05:00

Is it a photo? What do you think?

# # #

Stephen Colbert Helps the Economy!

2009-11-01T03:06:00.003-05:00

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Yes, he's done it. Stephen Colbert, of Comedy Central fame, has probably just done more to help the economy than most politicians. He's actually had the guts to recommend someone for a job!

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Job Recommendation From Stephen Colbert

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Religion

Embeded video courtesy of www.colbertnation.com

Colbert's spot on his website is one step up from the weblink marathons that so many job applicants encounter. Tired of being referred to a web page by a web page when you need real help?

Well, then send Colbert's reference on to the web application that requested you fill out their stinkin' forms 96 times without even getting a rejection email!

A big fan of the show, I can't help but endorse The Colbert Report's humorous move. It shows, through comedy, what a lot of us really need: a chance to cut through the bull and get on down to brass tacks with a face to face interview or maybe even, gasp, a face to face rejection, during the job search process.

I don't know about you, but if I had ever received a candid, face to face rejection, that business would be a step up in my book.

So, next time you receive a crass dismissal through ignoring, remember your reference from the Colbert Report. And, maybe consider it in that next month's round of re-completing employment applications.

# # #

Reference website:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/250968/september-29-2009/exclusive---backstage-with-frank-bruni

Order Up Your Official Rejection Today!

2009-09-28T14:37:00.021-04:00

Trailer for "Official Rejection" from the

You Tube Channel for Tentilnoon.

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

If you've ever submitted anything, you've probably been rejected. If you thought making a movie was a circus, wait until you see what these people have got to go through to get someone to watch it!

How hard could it possibly be?

This documentary is about people breaking into independent films; what they expect versus the reality they'll encounter. Probably quite a bit of truth in the humor to it.

I've seen the trailer and met some of the people who worked on the film, and I know it's going to be good.

I saw my first shred of evidence that this movie existed when I met Joe Kraemer, a composer who works in and around Los Angeles. He was wearing a black baseball cap, done in quality fabrics, emblazoned with a large gold wreath around the words "Official Rejection."

Ya gotta have confidence to walk around with one of those on your head. Sure enough, he had confidence and a good sense of humor, and he was apparently damn good at what he does with music.

Around that time, I was lounging in sunny California, having finished up a trip along the Pacific Coast Highway to make some landscape pics for a follow up to a project that I've been working on here in Tennessee.

I had driven several hundred miles over the week, and had pretty much learned that a lot of California bears a strong resemblance to some parts of Iraq. Considering some of the items on my itinerary for that Iraq trip, I wasn't exactly overjoyed to be looking at that type of terrain again, but I came back with some good pictures.

Molera Point, Central California Coast

Thanks to some connections and local contacts, I ended up at the Skirball Center for a cancer benefit with the Elixir Fund. I had a chance to meet some nice people, many of whom were in showbusiness of one sort or another. All of them were smart; all of them seemed to be hardworking and dedicated. These were a bunch of people that I thought should be doing well, and I hope they do even better.

So, I'm hob-nobbing with Hollywood in the bosom of this fantastic architecture when Joe Kraemer fired up his band, Gum, preferred by four out of five dentists, for the evening's entertainment.

He had some good ideas for music; he worked on Official Rejection; I'm sure that's going to be good.

While I was at the cancer benefit, I met this attractive brunette, dynamic and smart, who had an interest in rock climbing. Having just come back from Pinnacles, I was trying to come up with whatever I could say that would get the job done. Meanwhile, she mentioned that she was working in production for a reality TV show; and, I managed to blow it by talking about how I don't like reality TV.

Rock face with trees, Pinnacles, National Monument, California

I got Officially Rejected, right there, once again. She was nice about it, but next time I think I might get more milage out of talking less. Maybe I'll just take my shoe off and start snacking on it right there like it's a hamburger, so that I can eat least get some comic value out of putting my foot in my mouth.

Some time later, I got to hear what Joe Kraemer had to say about life in general over there in Hollywood. I came to the conclusion that he knew what he was talking about when it came to music and movies.

Since he worked on Official Rejection, I recommend you check it out.

# # #

Reference websites:

http://www.joekraemer.com/biography.html

http://www.elixirfund.org

http://officialrejectiondocumentary.com

Habitat for Insanity with The Rayons

2009-09-20T17:12:00.013-04:00

The Rayons at J.J.'s Bohemia during Habitat for Insanity, a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity in Chattanooga.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Contact sheet review from the night before showed that the typical hot-shoe flash lighting plan wasn't going to provide the illumination we needed to fill out the photos. A lot of times, the trend in bar band photography will lead us to push for higher sensitivity (1600 ASA, plus), slower shutters, and faster apertures.

After reviewing a contact sheet of Ilford Delta 3200 developed at 6400 ASA in D-76 stock, I knew it was time to add another point of light. The subjects and venue were accommodating. To improve the lighting plan, I added an old strobe with a CTB gel on an optical relay, and put it on a lightstand about nine feet high (3 meters).

Even though there were many other cameras using flash in the audience, I had no noticeable problems with other people tripping the flash.

Preparations for installing the lightstand included a review of the exposure math. Careful attention to the optical relay's orientation was something I experimented with. I simplified the setup after a few trials, and chose a strait hard flash with gel and optical, pointed directly at the subject's area, from above.

All of those tests were done in a garage, before the event. Since I ran the tests, I was able to cut my kit bag of carried items down to only what I chose to use. I was able to install the lighting quickly and with confidence.

That night, I carried a Pentax K200D, a 645 55mm all manual lens with K mount adapter; my Vivitar 285HV gelled and corded up; a ligthstand with old strobe and optical relay, and my Pentax K1000 loaded with Ektachrome.

That's right: two cameras and one lens. I swapped and shared between them.

The night before, at another one of The Rayon's sets, I shot the test AgX with Pentax 645 and handheld single point flash.

During the trials after the first night's set shots, I had reviewed and discarded options for warmer gels in the background; split gels on my handheld Vivitar 285HV (I went with plain CTO instead); and the use of umbrellas and bounce. In the day before's setup, my highest failure rate had been in photos related to the use of bounce. In tighter interiors, usually backwards bounce does me well. This time, it was time to throw some hard light.

The blue rim light on Courtney's hair is from the CTB on lightstand, which happens to backlight her from this angle. The golden tones on the skin of the subjects are from light cast forward with a handheld Vivitar 285HV with 6' (2 meter) coiled PC cord between hot shoe to PC cord adapters. The gel on there was a full CTO (color temperature orange).

The pattern of closed eyes in the facial expressions of the singer and the audience made "closed eyes", something a lot of us want to avoid in photos, into a compositional technique to help tell the story. Here, we see the audience connecting with the singer.

High CTB backlighting for rim and general illumination; warm CTO thrown forward. A careful inspection of the drummer's face, on the left frame's edge, shows the interplay of the thrown blue and orange gels.

Drummer and bassist of The Rayons.

She's so shy. Courtney, lead singer for The Rayons, reaches deep inside, piercing her quiet, withdrawn exterior to get in touch with her feelings for a change.

# # #

Get a Background: Get Your Subjects On Location

2009-09-20T15:57:00.020-04:00

Actor Anthony Robinson, on location at Greeter Falls.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

We didn't fake it. He's not standing in a studio; that's not a still photo or computerized background behind him. Actor Anthony Robinson was knee deep in water when that photo was made.

The tripod was in the water. The lightstands were in the water. The photographer was in the water. The subject was in the water. That's where we had to stand to get that photo made.

You don't need digital wallpapers or custom-painted backdrops to make good portraits. Sometimes, you just need an old-fashioned travel plan.

Notes, notes, notes: field and labwork notes make later reproductions successful. The strip of contact sheet is actually a form of record keeping, because we know under what conditions it was made. It's now a set of visual notes.

All of these photos were achieved by bringing the subject to the location. The backgrounds aren't from fancy photo editing tricks, or computer hocus-pocus. We brought the subject to the location, and made the photo.

100% real, all-natural background. Get out there, and get it.

Get a plan before that trip begins. This successful outing was based on repeated trips to the location. I built several pages of diagrams like this one, outlining my ideas, before departure. Scout out those locations. This was another instance when repetitive visits paid off.

"I want to put you in this photo," I said. I knew where I wanted to place my subject for the photo session. Having some prints on hand and diagrams for explaining the plan helped to boost confidence. They help the subject to visualize success.

Pre-trip inventories were important. It was over 100 miles by road to the photo shoot's primary locations. No two days of photographing end up being the same. Make a bedsheet layout of the bag contents a standard practice before you leave, and you'll be more successful.

Key doodads. These small items made the lighting kit happen. If any of them had been left behind, the planned session would not have worked as desired.

35mm backup roll shot on location. While most web users want or need digital images, I prefer to shoot at least some film because I know that's how my most successful images have been made. Safe-side the plan, and don't risk everything. It's a hundred miles back out there, if you fail.

# # #

One Lens & Adjust for Tungsten: The Dylan Kussman Band at The Riverhouse

2009-09-13T01:37:00.013-04:00

Vivid colors captured indoors with a simple white balance adjustment.

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Subjects can really twist your arm sometimes. This last bunch, a rock band, forced me to overcome obstacles and challenge my wits by making me face one of the greatest photographic difficulties of all time: photographing the band, while they were inside a bar packed with cold beer and good looking women.

I had to take several breaks.

Dutifully, I managed to get some pictures. Of the band.

I travelled light with two lenses; I believe I ended up using a 645 55mm at f/2.8 most of the time. It would come in around 70mm on the DSLR, with a horizontal angle of view similar to a 100mm.

The second lens got out of the bag long enough for an angle of view check. It went right back in the bag. I only needed one lens.

A quick exposure check showed that 400 ISO wasn't going to cut it, unless I was willing to break out the flash. I was planning on firing up the scene with Ye Olde Vivitar 285, but the stage was lit pretty well by the house lights. I scrapped my plan, and moved to catch what was there.

Pumped up to ISO 1600, I was skeptical. Yet, as soon as I slapped on the Tungsten white balance adjustment, I knew I was in. Vivid colors filled the files. I knew I would pick up a lot of motion blur, with common shutter speeds at 1/6; but since my subjects were in motion, well, why not?

As with many motion blur photographs, motion within a portion of the frame is often acceptable, if it's part of the story. Motion in the subject works. Motion from camera shake doesn't. Use your judgement.

While it's tempting to focus on the lead singer of that rock'n'roll band, there's a whole band! Photograph the other musicians! This band had plenty of interaction; they played their music together. That's part of the story. If it was all about the frontman, by himself, he'd be a soloist. The show is put on by a band. They're a group of people. Photograph the whole group, sections of the group, individuals, people and objects; what is that band doing? The whole band.

Since they're all playing, they all count. If I had directed my attention only to the lead singer, I would have come back with about 25% of what I photographed that night. Get photographs of the whole band.

If subject motion blur is part of the story, let it roll. Why fight it? These streaks were caused by movement faster than 1/6 of a second. If the subject is moving that fast, why not show that motion? Let them draw with the light sometimes.

Here's a classic problem with people and instruments or tools: how are we going to capture them, and get it all in? My answer: don't get it all in. Focus on a subject for the frame of the photo. It's really not that different from how we might photograph people in other instances. For example, when was the last time we insisted on photographing someone from below their shoes to above their head, all the time? Full length portraits happen, but we're often willing to make photos at 3/4 or tighter, if that tells our story.

In the case of musical instruments or other large objects people hold and use, why feel pressed to show the whole thing? Cut the frame of the photo so that it has a clear subject. If you're getting it all in to have a nice, overall view; then it had better be a great enough view to displace the concept of a subject in a photograph.

Get a subject. It helps.

Don't stop the rock. If you grab a lot of motion while catching motion, go ahead and use it. This bass guitarist sprang into a bold pose for about half a second, and then hopped back into a traditional stance for most of the rest of the show. It was a one-time capture of stage attitude. Catch it if you can. The motion blur is part of the story.

Split Gels: Packing Aerial Perspective Into Single Point Flash

2009-09-11T08:48:00.011-04:00

Yellow jacket in orange and blue;

gels on strobe to accentuate depth.

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Lighting diagram for the shot. One flash handheld on the left, above the subject and away from camera; pointed slightly back towards camera. CTO warm side closer to camera to throw the colder blue into the background.

Flash face covered with both CTO and CTB gels; each has half of the flash face. With the CTO towards the camera, and the CTB towards the background, this layout can bring a touch of aerial perspective from painting to the photo.

In aerial perspective, objects which are farther from the viewer are represented in blues; objects that are closer will be represented warmer.

Gels over the flash this way will still provide white light; because the light fans out; a fair amount of the surfaces close to the centerline of the strobe axis will be illuminated by both halves of the flash. Those areas will have a good amount of the traditional white light power of the flash, particularly at flash to subject distances that are within the first half of the thrown light's range at that power.

With the flash cast directly on the paper,

we can see the warmer parts close to us; and,

the colder light away.

With simple attention to the flash's axis of illumination, we can throw the colder light behind the subject. The warmer gels are used on the closer half. A close look at the penumbral edges (where the half-shadows meet light surfaces) will also show traces of the warm and cold gels.

Those penumbral edges are the primary disadvantage of this otherwise handy trick. If the flash is cast through cucoloris (any deliberate shadow pattern projected by a light before it gets to a subject), then all of those shadows will show that warm and cold fringe. The closer the cucoloris is to the strobe, the wider the penumbral fringe will be.

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