Bright Orange Cloud

It is sad that people around New Orleans are facing flooding again. People sometimes want to ignore reality and pretend the natural disasters will never happen again. No one can stop weather from happening. So levees are built and dams are built and people claim land that doesn't belong to them because it really belongs to rivers and oceans and wind and rain. When the water goes the building starts all over... The same happens in forests and dry lands that face raging fires...here we are hoping it never happens to us...

 

This evening my son, David, saw this wonderful cloud and told me to look...I got my camera...what else would I do?

 

The moon isn't full yet...Darn!...it still makes a good picture.

I walked accross the yard for a different view of the cloud and the palms.

The cloud is fading soon only the very top would show bright color.

Yucca

My mother had a beautiful yucca in her back yard. It took a few years before it ever bloomed. She painted a picture of it...I've always wanted a yucca growing in my yard and a few years ago on a trip over to Borrego Springs we stopped at a plant nursery and bought one. There are almost fifty kinds of yucca and I have no idea what kind mine is. We planted it and watched it grow. More plants grew and now there is a clump of them crowded into the space. One shot up quite tall and this year it bloomed. I still don't know what kind of yucca it is. I've looked at photos on the net and can tell what it is not...

http://www.dotcombs.net/desert/desert6a.html Photos of wild yucca taken in 03.

 

The sun was setting so the light became golden. The hummingbirds love to sit on the yucca and watch over the feeder. They zoom passed us as we sit with our coffee in the mornings and afternoons.

 

 

Looking at information on yuccas reminded me that the Joshua Tree is also a yucca. I was a child the first time I saw Joshua trees. We traveled up US 395 on our way to Washington state. The route goes through The Mojave Desert. Somewhere I have an old black and white photo of my mother standing next to a Joshua Tree. The great thing about digital is that I can remember a certain photo and can pretty quickly go find it. At first I numbered my digital albums starting with the number 1. That worked great for a few years. Then I had to invent my own system. It got hard to remember where to look with so many albums. Now I put everything into albums named for the year and then into folders named for the month and day plus a description of the photos. So if I want an old photo I can go back and find it.

 

My old print photos are not organized. URF. I was going to scan my negs and old photos and keep them on the computer but so far haven't...that is for another day...

August Sunset

This is the evening sky on the hills on the other side of our valley.

 

A close up of the same scene with my zoom to 200mm

 

Humming Birds

Yesterday morning we had several hummers visiting our feeder. The sun in the morning shines on the side of the house. That is why the background is what it is. Sort of bland...

Orange Moon

I saw a lovely orange moon and ran for my camera...well these days I walk...anyway when  I got out to take the photo a big cloud came down and had it half covered. I managed to shoot the photo and then waited hoping the cloud would pass...only to see the moon totally gone behind the miserable cloud.

Shooting in RAW

The camera set on vivid to take photos in jpg can take some very pretty picturess. Still I like to hedge and also set my camera to shoot in both jpg and raw. A good example of this being a good idea...

This is the jpg just as it came from the camera...size reduced for the web. I also like to take my photos as large as the camera will let them be. You can see that the snow is blown out. I could have had the camera adjusted for that but Hailey doesn't stand still.

Same exact photo in RAW. Yes I did use the sliders and I think I got a much better photo because that option was available to me.

Bottom line...if you have a camera that takes both jpg and RAW take advantage of it and do both. If you have to choose one then choose to shoot in RAW.

And if Hailey doesn't look like she knows how to walk in snow...this is So Cal...

American Kestrel Baby

The kestrels also called sparrow hawks nest in our driveway palms. Once in awhile a baby falls from the nest. Often they are killed or they die from the fall. This morning Hailey saw one on the fence along our drive. I took photos and got a pet carrier so ER and Hailey could take the baby down to Project Wildlife. They were very glad to get the baby at Project Wildlife. I hope with care it will grow up and fly.

Stolen Graphics

This is a scan of the original print of my famous rose. The photo is about 20 years old by now and was taken back when I was planning to become a real artist. I took three views of this rose. This one was the best. I had already taken classes in using computers. I took a class in CorelDraw and then a class in digital art. Back then the digital camera we had in the class was a black and white camera that the students shared in the classroom. Mostly the class consisted of working with scanned photos and photo editing all done in black and white.

Then I began to take art classes, drawing, water color, design, acrylic painting...no oil allowed, etc. My classes came to a halt once I had Hailey. I put my paints away. So computer art once Hailey was asleep seemed to be a life saver. At first I worked with CorelDraw then I got my own scanner and began to scan my rose photos. The scanner came with a nice little photo editing program and then I found that after it had been bought out by Adobe I could upgrade to Photoshop.

One of my earliest at home photo edits was the rose. I took away the background and brightened and sharpened up the photo. Then I did the same for the other photos of this rose and in one of the versions I placed all three together into one picture.

Back in the mid 1990s when I first began to post my work on the web it never occurred to me that anyone would want to take my work and post it as their own. This rose was copied onto pages all over the web. By the late 1990s I was not a happy camper. I often wrote to the offenders and asked that my rose be removed from their pages. I sometimes had to contact servers. Some servers insisted on forms being filled out an sent by snail mail. I used image searches to find the photos. After awhile the old collection sites shut down and there were better photos on the web than my old rose scans. I also got a digital camera and my photos seemed to get better. I have a series of rose photos that at one time I used image protection on now they are just posted on my web pages...as a sort of history of what I did in the past.

Anyway I thought that the old collection sites had pretty much gone. Photo sharing sites like Webshots began to insist that posted photos be the property of the poster so things seemed a lot better. Now there is a web server called Pinterest that has made image stealing easy and seemingly the thing to do. Pinterest encourages people to re post anything they see so users can quickly violate copyright and make it easy for other people to do it too. Pinterest says flat out that they are not copyright violators and that anyone uploading images is the only one to blame if the image owner objects. Pinterest is pandering to people that want to take credit for the work of others. Why else would anyone want to make web albums full of other people's creations? Image thieves are just no talent pinheads looking for approval with nothing of their own to show.

Last of the Lilies

They have been a splash of color for the last couple of weeks and now the last blooms are falling. So these are the last for this year...

Copyright

I saw post on my fb page about copyright, and I made this comment that I wanted to re post here:

"Your post was shared to my fb page. I read her blog and am happy she learned something about copyright. She is an author and even then she couldn't see that photographs like any other creative art are property of the photographer. I'm not a pro but have had my work stolen and learned the mindset of people that think a photograph is not art. One person even told me that God created a rose I photographed so I had no right to claim it as mine. URF! I wrote a lot of emails to people and contacted web servers getting my photos removed. They made me feel like the bad guy in all this. Thanks for letting me vent on your site."

Web collectors would surf the web and snag photos and graphics to re post in their own collections. These collections gave visitors the feeling that the graphic they saw were free to use. Some of my photos were added to web collections and used on other web sites. I did as I said above. I wrote letters and contacted web servers. Some servers insisted that I fill out a form and snail mail it to them. I did it all. I used a program to protect my rose photos and I also used Digimarc. After a few years it seemed that web servers were getting better about respecting copyright and there seemed to be fewer web collection sites. Servers like Webshots insisted that posters be the owner or copyright holder of anything they posted.

What was the purpose of these web collectors? It always seemed to me that they were no talent posers that wanted to use the work of others to gain some fame for themselves. Why else would they want to display photos and art work that was not their own.

Now I have learned about Pinterest. This web server is using the same mindset used by these early web graphic collectors only now to make money for themselves. They distance themselves by saying that any copyright violation is on the person doing the pinning. Yet they are enabling this practice. I looked through the boards containing sunset photos and there is no way to tell who owns the photos. Some are pinned to several boards. I tried to find the source and so far it is not possible. I cannot imagine that anyone who owned some of these lovely photos would ever pin them for anyone to use and to keep on pinning until the original owner was forgotten. The site was clearly created to eventually sell. Why anyone would buy a web site based on copyright theft is beyond me. It is time photographers checked out pinterest and sued the socks off them.