Jeremy Johnstone

This is something which has been bothering me for a while now and finding a bunch more of my photos being used improperly online this weekend pushed me to write this. I license almost all of my photos under a CC license (attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works 2.0 specifically) and I have been finding that virtually _no one_ follows what I believe to be the intent of that license. As a quick briefing, the license can be found here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

The areas which are most in question are the attribution and the non-commercial parts. I’ve come to accept my colleagues’ and peers’ opinions that non-commercial simply means they can’t sell my work. Personally, I think this should also mean you can’t put my photo on a page you are making money off of (aka advertising) either without my permission (which in most, but not all cases I would give automatically upon being asked), but apparently I am fairly alone in that belief. I guess it’s something I will just have to agree to disagree with.

On the other hand, attribution, is a bit of a different story. If you pay close attention and look, you will see some of my photos are used all over the Internet, from giants like Wired Magazine and CNET to mere annoyances to many like the Silicon Valley tabloid “Valleywag”. More often than not, I don’t even get a link back to the original photo, let alone a mention like “photo by: Jeremy Johnstone”. Now in the case of my Taylor Swift photos (from when she performed on campus), I could care less really since the majority of people who use those photos are teenage kids who don’t know any better (and besides, I took the photos to share them). It’s a whole different story when it comes to professional journalists and bloggers, who should know better, especially when they use my photos in negative posts about Yahoo! or it’s various employees. While I am not sure I would want my name next to something negative about Yahoo!, I also don’t want my photos being used without at least getting credit for the effort I put in.

For the record, the two forms of attribution which I approve of are:

1.) My name near the photo or specified at the end of the post/page in which it is used. Something along the lines of “photo by: Jeremy Johnstone”. If the photo is of something related to Yahoo!, then adding something like “(Yahoo!)” to the end of my name indicating my employer, is ideal but not required. The photo should also link back to the Flickr page if at all possible. If you are an over achiever and want to get on my good side, then make my name clickable and link back to my blog or to my main Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone).

2.) If you simply want to do the bare minimum and nothing else, then just make the photo link back to the Flickr page for that photo. If for some reason that is not possible, somewhere on your page where the photo is used, indicate the original source of the photo. I really don’t feel this meets what I would call attribution, but I am willing to compromise and say it does since it seems to be commonly accepted as such.

Some say that I should be happy that people want to use my photos and I am getting free publicity (when they actually link back to me that is), but it becomes a whole different situation when you are getting flak about photos you took being used in manners not intended (like one I took of a leader of a foreign country a while back). I brought this up on an internal photography mailing list at work a couple weeks ago and opinions were all over the map. So, is this something photographers around the world have just come to accept as a fact of life, or is this something we should unite and fight against? I’d love to hear your opinions (especially if you are a photographer too, amateur or professional), so please share!

Update (12/10/2007 3:24pm PST): It would appear that I am not alone on the non-commercial part either. Here’s a post by Denise Howell talking about one of the annoying offenders, Valleywag: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howell/?p=154. Interesting to see others finding them doing it a lot too.

Update (12/16/2007 1:54am PST): It seems this topic is heating up in other circles. Check out more about the drama in the following links:
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/12/15/why-lane-hartwell-is-wrong/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/misunderstanding-copyright-law-and-ruining-everyones-fun/
While I don’t completely agree with Lane’s heavy handed approach, I can also completely understand where she is coming from and realize sometimes you just really have to take a stand.

A friend recently made the statement to me “you can learn a lot about a person by what they read”. Not quite believing in that premise, I decided today to round up the books I have read or are currently am reading over the past year. Surprisingly, I have more (at least) partially read books than I can count. Ok, I lied, I know of at least 55 books in the past year alone. That’s averaging like one book a week and mind you, many of these books are 400 pages or more (of course I haven’t finished the majority of them either).

After dividing them up into groups, I’ve found several general “themes” emerge. A big shocker to anyone who knows me I’m sure (hint sarcasm), but the biggest theme this past year was photography. I found 16 books at home alone that I have read in the past year. Interestingly, of all the “themes” this category had the highest percentage of books I actually finished reading cover to cover (roughly 60%). Not sure exactly why photography books I am more likely to finish, but could be the writing style or the fact it’s a fairly new subject for me to be reading. Of the books, about half are Photoshop books (with a lean towards photography and not graphics design) with most of the remaining falling into lighting or composition.

The next largest group (14 books, none of which fully read) is programming and technology related books. These books range from three books on OSX programming, couple ajax books, a handful of compiler theory/design books, to general stuff like Asterisk (a linux PBX software package). Something I found rather odd was the fact I don’t own a single Flex/Actionscript book, despite the fact over the past 6 months that’s been my day job (and something I had minimal experience with previously). I guess that can be attributed to how easy the language is to pickup because I feel I can hold my own against many with what I have learned in such a short amount of time (definitely not an “expert” yet though by any means).

The next group of books (14 books) in line is related to religion, social responsibility, and other thought provoking topics. The religious books cover a wide range of religions, from Christianity to Sufism to Taoism to Hindu. Several books that are also loosely related are around meditation. Other books in this group include a book on dreaming, Bill Clinton’s book “Giving”, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, “World Changing: A user’s guide for the 21st century”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (a book I have been reading off and on for several years), and the classic “A Brief History of Time” which I reread in it’s 10th anniversary edition. This group also has the second highest fully read percentage hovering around 20% and the unique distinction of having every book had at least a few pages read.

The last group of books (11 books) are just what was left, a mix of random stuff. These include productivity books like “Getting things done”, to fictional books like the classic “The Time Quartet” (a collection of books from my childhood I wanted to reread), to general fact books like “What are the seven wonders of the world?” (a gift from my mother for Christmas last year). I also have a set of three books by Orson Scott Card, the “Ender’s” series, which a good friend suggested I buy that I haven’t had time to open yet.

So that said, based on the above books (and solely the above books) what do you think that says about “who I am”? I’d be interested in hearing your comments (either publicly on the blog or sent personally to me).

Over the past year or so I have found a new hobby (some would say obsession) which has proven to be a great stress reliever and burnout preventer, photography. Sometime around August that new interest turned a bit more into a part-time job when I agreed to become the unofficial official PR photographer for Yahoo! and cover various corporate events and do PR headshots as needed. I’ve been gobling up gear, techniques, and experience ever since. Today I decided to do some headshots of myself and enlisted the assistance of several colleagues. Here is a sample of one of the photos (thanks to Angela for taking the shot for me):

In the interest of sharing knowledge (hopefully something I will do more often on this blog), here is the lighting setup used to take that shot:

As you can see, it’s a fairly typical four light setup with one key light, a hair light (which next time I will put on a boom), and two background lights. I also used a fill card to fill in the left side of my face a bit (reflected about F/5.6ish, but I didn’t measure so that’s just an guestimate). I’m extremely happy with the results and assuming my editor is willing, the black and white version (seen here) just might become the cover of my WROX book when it gets published.

Let me start off with saying, yes I have stumbled across nudity on Flickr accidentally before (just not in this manner). Suffice to say I was surprised to see it on my Flickr home screen today. I had assumed those photos were manually filtered since I never noticed it before, but I guess not. The photos weren’t appropriately flagged, so I don’t blame Flickr in the slightest bit, just surprised that it took me using Flickr heavily for over 2 years to ever have this happen (probably seen my home screen over ten thousand times).

I edited the screenshots to be “safe” (such a horrible term) for all audiences, but check out what I mean below:

So, in the spirit of catching the world back up with what’s been keeping me busy, here comes post #2 on the subject. As you might have gathered by my last post (assuming you looked at the photos, which you did do, right?) my interest in photography has improved immensely. It’s something I have always considered a fun hobby, just never spent the time, money, and effort as I have this year. Please look through my photos when you have time and leave comments here or on Flickr. I am always looking to learn new tips/tricks, so if you have something to share, please do. I’m also always looking for new gear, so if you have something to sell, be sure to contact me. Later this week, I will probably do a couple posts on things I have learned, so be sure and check back if you’re interested.

One another topic which has kept me insanely busy (sadly, I am still behind on), I’m also writing a book for WROX Press (the company with the red/yellow books, you know the ones) on PHP. Yet another book on PHP you say? Yes, yes, but at least the one I am writing has a little twist which makes it different than most (but not all) PHP books already in print. The book is very much an intermediate / advanced programmer book (you won’t find any history of PHP in the opening chapters) which takes you on a journey through building a community website from start to finish. I heavily cover best practices on various topics which are important to sites which might grow into something really big (aka, what many independent coders dream about, being the next Yahoo! / MySpace / Facebook / <insert name of site with lots of traffic and many users>). Having written the codebase (along with a handful of other gifted engineers) to a significant Yahoo! property with billions of monthly pageviews (sorry, can’t be specific obviously), I hope I can impart some of the knowledge the reader of the book will need to scale their sites appropriately. We of course knew from the beginning (since it was an existing site we rewrote from the ground up) how much traffic to expect, but many of the principals remain the same whether you start out big, or grow big. Two other areas which get significant coverage in the book are security and internationalization. I won’t go into all the details here (I want you to buy the book after all), but with any luck it will be worth the wait and something you will enjoy and learn something from.

In final parting is something I stumbled upon today which hopefully will be useful to others. I have been constantly trying to find a good solution to organizing the endless amount of email I receive as well as always have it available on all my devices (Mac Pro desktop at work, Mac Book Pro laptop when away from desk, Powerbook at home, and iPhone for the remaining times). While this isn’t an all encompassing solution (only covers part of the first problem), it definitely is a good step in the right direction. Check out this blog post on Daring Fireball which talks about a simple Applescript which automagically moves your read (but not flagged) email to your Archive folder. Yes, I know the script isn’t revolutionary, but sometimes its the simple details which make a big difference. Be sure and tell me what you think!