As I’m sure you’ve heard, Dennis Hopper passed away just days ago (the 29th of May, 2010). As an actor, I personally loved his roles in such classics as Super Mario Bros., Waterworld, and Speed, though he is best known for Easy Rider, Rebel Without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and more. He certainly had a knack for the dramatic, but what I didn’t know was that he also had a knack for photography.

The “Chasing Light” blog has a wonderful post containing photos that Hopper took through the years (all of them black and white). I was very impressed with them; they show attention to composition and subject comparable to those of a seasoned professional or serious hobbyist. You could certainly call Hopper a serious hobbyist, though he was more widely known for his feature films than for his photography, painting, and sculpture.

Over at artnet, you can view (and attempt to purchase) 39 other photographs by Hopper that are held by various galleries.

Whether you are into Hopper’s photographs or not, let’s take a moment to remember a great actor and inspirational creator.

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Chris is quick to humbly share his experience and tips for aerial kite photography on his website (graciously hosted by Berkeley!)

I was blown away by the evolution of Chris’s camera rigs, which grew from fixed harnesses with rudimentary mechanical timers based on elastic bands, Silly Putty, and disposable cameras, to what he now uses, a remote-controlled, servo motor-driven, three-axis robot.

It’s definitely not commonplace for someone to possess both a grasp of electronic and mechanical engineering and a hawk-eye for artistic composition. Chris Benton has both.

Part Two: Cars

Aside from being an avid photographer, I admit to a streak of BMW fanboyism. When it comes to sports cars that are still solid daily drivers that make you feel like you’ve personally discovered the center of the universe and you’re sitting directly within it, nobody does it better than BMW.

To hype the release of their latest creation, the Z4 Roadster, BMW hired artist Robin Rhode to dip the Z4’s tires in multi-colored paints and drive it around like a fingerpainting on a warehouse scale. This was one of the most indulgent marketing campaigns I could think of.

I realize this isn’t strictly photography-related, but it is certainly art-related. If you feel gypped, go look at these photographs from the event

And here is a pretty cool video of how they put this thing together:

The next time you’re out shooting, or sitting around the house thinking about how next to use that studio space you set up in the basement, or the garage, or the attic… Think about breaking out of the box and doing something completely different. Robin Rhode did, and I think it came out pretty well.

Okay, so I missed the boat on this by a little bit, but I think it bears discussion anyway. Earlier this month, an exhibition came to a close at the Yale University Art Gallery called “First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography.” Optical confusion refers to that effect you get when you look at something and it isn’t immediately apparent what it is. The reaction is best when the subject matter is common and well-known, but portrayed in an unusual or misleading way.

For example, the photo to the right (which is from the aforementioned show) depicts a man’s chin, neck, chest, and part of his leg. The contrast and cropping, though, make it compositionally more interesting and somewhat more difficult to “figure out,” visually. I wouldn’t suggest that you run about photographing things in ways that nobody can ever puzzle out, or that high art must in some way be confounding to the general public, but you must admit that a composition that makes you scratch your head for a moment is going to hold your interest for that much longer.

The idea of optical confusion is (clearly) not new. I’m sure you’ve all seen the classic young woman/old woman illusion (shown at left), which, once you visually map out both images, seems to randomly flip-flop between the two in the mind’s eye. In photographic composition, this technique of close-cropping and creatively limiting the viewer’s understanding of what they are looking at can be a very powerful tool.

Take, for example, the image below (by Karin Rosenthal, “Belly Landscape,” 1980—which I snagged from The Online Photographer). When I first saw the image, I really thought it was a landscape; some sort of Adams-esque river valley. Of course by stating the title of the piece I’ve pretty much blown the lid on that optical illusion, but if you squint you can probably see it as a river valley again.

Certainly the specific genre of “body landscapes” is one with its fair share of avid creators, and it would be challenging now to forge new territory (no pun intended) within that space. Nevertheless, we can all take a cue from the clever way that the image misleads the eye.

The next time you’re out photographing or sitting in front of Lightroom (you do use Lightroom, right?), think about how you might add tension and interest to a composition through creative cropping, eliminating some of the most recognizable elements from a subject. Just a small tweak is all it may take to transform a solid, representative image into a thoroughly engaging work of optical confusion.

You can also purchase the official book containing selections from the collection used in the Yale University Art Museum show.

My approach to inspiration is not to chase it; I tend to walk around in a place or idly browse others’ works until the desire to create something strikes. Still, it’s nice to have a “toolbox” of tricks to get you past those creative lulls in life. According to psychologist Jonathan Schooler (no, really, that’s his actual name), daydreaming is one possible answer.

Well, if you know you’re doing it, that is.

From Boston.com (Jonah Lehrer):

“If your mind didn’t wander, then you’d be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded.”

And who wouldn’t want to time travel? The key, though, is self-awareness of your wandering mind. The study concluded that people who were able to recognize when they were daydreaming demonstrated more of a predilection to creativity than those who were only able to identify their daydreams after they happened.

When I read this story I began thinking about my own daydreaming habits. I think I can say with certainty that I absolutely know when I’m daydreaming… Because I love it. There’s nothing like taking a little break from reality now and then!

Despite photography’s firm basis in reality—capturing real light reflecting off of real objects—it is in so many ways an escape from reality, and an art form that can benefit from your daydreams just as much as any other.

So the next time you find yourself staring off into the distance and traveling mentally through time and space, don’t pull yourself back down to Earth so quickly.

Via Lifehacker, via Boston.com

Even with the best equipment that money can buy, ICC profiles, spectrophotometers, an iron-clad color management workflow, and a high-end monitor, your eyes are the ultimate judges of your work. But eyes, they don’t work alone; you can’t see anything without light, and the quality of the light will have as much an effect on what you see as the color of the print itself.

I got onto this topic after reading Michael Johnston’s overview of his Viewing Station. All these years I’ve been experimenting with lights in my studio space, let’s call it Single-Serving Photo HQ—or, as my friends call it, my bedroom—and I never once thought to write about it.

After the jump I’ll tell you how to dramatically increase your viewing conditions for about $15.

Michael says he uses one of those clip-on Verilux full-spectrum fluorescent setups. When I started down this path, I hadn’t heard of Verilux specifically, but I was sure I wanted to go fluorescent after being turned off by these so-called “daylight” incandescent bulbs that were nothing more than regular bulbs with bluish glass designed to offset the orange light they actually generate. Michael’s entire lamp, which includes the bulb, cost him around $80. We can do better than that.

Get a Bulb

I wound up sampling several compact fluorescent bulbs from 1000bulbs.com and eventually decided upon a 100 watt equivalent 5100k model. Here’s a picture of what it looks like, sort of:

There are perhaps four important considerations when looking at bulbs for your viewing environment.

1. Wattage (or equivalent wattage, when talking about fluorescent)—I like my viewing conditions to be fairly bright, so I went with 100 watt equivalent, but you may prefer to go higher or lower.
2. Spectrum—Get a bulb that is classified as “full-spectrum,” meaning that it doesn’t purposefully exclude certain wavelengths.
3. Color temperature—Anything from 5,000K and up should do fine. I prefer 5,100K, you might go as high as 5,400K.
4. Color Rendering Index (CRI)—This method of measuring the color accuracy of a light source has its flaws, but it’s better than guessing; a higher number is better, 100 is perfect.

A Note About CRI

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) is a measure of a light source’s ability to reproduce color. Those of you mathematically inclined or simply curious can read about it on Wikipedia. This particular system has its detractors, but it’s the system most widely used at the moment, and 1000bulbs.com lists the CRI value for most of its bulbs, especially the ones billed as “full-spectrum.”

The Verilux bulbs that you find in systems such as Michael’s rate around 86 and up on the CRI scale. The bulb I chose scores an 82, which by all accounts should be good enough for any normal person. Some halogen bulbs are rated 100, which is as accurate as a light source can be on that scale, but halogen is expensive, hot, and may be too bright for some people.

23 Watt, full-spectrum, 5100K CFL from 1000bulbs.com: $5.71

Get a Lamp

What good is a bulb without a lamp to screw it into? Perhaps you have a spare lamp somewhere in your house that you can use, but if you don’t, do not despair. I went down to the home improvement store and picked up a simple work light (sometimes also called a painter’s light or a clip light). Here is a pretty basic one offered at Lowe’s; I don’t remember where I got mine.

Simple clip-on work light: $7.48

Clip it onto something, such as your apartment’s fashionably painted structural beams, and away you go!

I actually bought three bulbs, three work lights, and plugged them all into a single power strip so I can turn them on and off with one switch and light my whole computer area. It’s very helpful to be able to lay prints out on top of the printer or on my desk and have the same quality of light everywhere.

You will definitely see a difference in the appearance of your prints as you move them from one light source to another. Nearly every print will have some variation in the way it reacts to light. Some inkjet inks are known to be rather more prone to this change in appearance (which is called metamerism), such as Epson K2 (the inks I use). It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as an artist you need to be aware of the possible ways in which your work will be viewed and whether you are satisfied with the work’s performance.

So there you go. A full-spectrum viewing solution for less than $15.

His works are (from what I’ve seen, at least) untitled, which is a subject for another article. I don’t know how much post-processing goes into these images, but I know that Crewdson is known for his elaborate lighting setups, which leads me to believe there isn’t much. He’s well-known enough to have his own page on Wikipedia, a distinction reserved (by the site’s own policy) for those enjoying defensible public recognition.

The subject matter of his work is, to put it lightly, creepy. Most of his images depict figures in various stages of undress, none possessing what you might call Grecian physiques, in situations of emotional distance, consternation, shock, or macabre solitude. The pools of light and the occasional volumetric beam add such a drama and intensity to the stuff that it’s hard to look away.

I’d love to see behind-the-scenes photos of his setups, but I couldn’t uncover much. Here is a neat walkthrough of a Crewdson setup in Massachusetts, though they don’t even show the final image, which was a big disappointment for me.

There are some decent views of some of the setups he’s used here on the Aperture 190 site; you can see that he works mostly with hot lights (lights that remain on, as opposed to strobes), just as though he was shooting a movie. The boston.com article revealed that he shoots with an 8×10 view camera and apertures as small as f/45, producing what must be the most amazingly detailed and tack-sharp images. After reading that, I want to see a real Crewdson print up close and personal.

Like Crewdson? Ever seen prints in person? Comment below!

First, something I’ve been thinking about lately, which I had designs to write an entire post about but that now strikes me as somewhat too unfinished a thought to deserve such treatment. It has to do with a growing trend among digital photographers that the quality of your work and of your prints can be judged if not exclusively at least primarily by some group of statistics.

~~/Places/California/SanFrancisco/GoldenGateLookout.jpg~~

First of all art has never been judged based on numbers. The moment that art is judged not for its certain craft, its inspiration, content, execution, and the ways in which it moves you is when it ceases to be art and takes on a new life as the subject of technical research. I grant that technical research has made possible many of the great innovations in the craft of photography that have opened doors for artists and made possible wonderful works. Those works, however, were to be judged on their own merits, divorced from the particulars of their creation.

I see this jaded math-lust happen the most in the process of printing digital images. Not only do you have to be a board-certified chemist to understand what inks are actually made out of these days, but debates rage among the upper echelons of fine art print makers regarding whether 9^12 bits per million in 17.2 square decileters of molar protein creates a quantization effect of 9.8383-repeating magnitude using 4-picoliter ink spots on granite tile. Or some such nonsense.

As important as some measurements, such as resolution, may be in print making, the fact remains that very well printed photographs can still suck, and very poorly printed photographs can change your life. The trick is to understand all of this mumbo-jumbo only to the degree necessary to achieve the results that make you happy, that satisfy your needs as an artist.

That may have sounded like a bit of a rant…

Edit: Perhaps it wasn’t as much of a rant as I thought at first. Here is a really cool article by Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer about over-reliance on measurements when evaluating the performance (specifically) of equipment. He also goes on to criticize people who use charts and graphs to make meaningless, subjective data appear meaningful and objective. If only it wasn’t true! Good stuff, Mike.

~~/Places/California/SantaCruz/Peaceful.jpg~~

Ranting notwithstanding, it’s still true that I’m teaching a digital printing workshop in February. If you want to learn how to soft-proof, color manage, and output your own images at a high-end digital lab, this is your big chance. I’ll be teaching alongside Chris Blake, back at Calypso Imaging in Santa Cruz, CA; read about the workshop and sign up here. You will get to print proof images and then make final prints during the workshop, so everyone gets stuff to take home with them. It’s only $599; you won’t find a better deal than that anywhere.

There are some other exciting learning opportunities right around the corner, too, including our workshop in Cape Cod in September, a fall foliage workshop in cooperation with Dan Heller in Vermont in October, and then later on that same month, our City on the Hill Boston workshop. That should be enough to keep you busy before the holidays, right? It’s sure going to keep me busy, I can tell you that much.

Of course if you have any ideas for workshops, questions, comments, rude gestures… Leave a comment!

I might have mentioned in passing that my “day job” brought me to New London, Connecticut almost two years ago. New London is a rather scenic city positioned on the bank of the Thames river—very near to its mouth—which empties into the Long Island Sound. Although not without its social and economic problems, it is a historic city with a great deal of architectural and maritime attractions.

I was absolutely floored to be reading The Online Photographer and to run across a stunning photograph taken literally five minutes up the opposite bank of my river (yes, I own the river) in Groton, Connecticut by Tom Kaszuba (check out the post in question, his website, and his Flickr page). As one would expect, he’s received over 60 comments on that photo on Flickr, probably many thanks to Mike at TOP, and all of them are well-deserved.

So anyway, here is the image.

The Lighthouse Sanctuary, by Tom Kaszuba. New London, Connecticut.

Taking a few minutes to look through Tom’s Flickr page invigorated me and inspired me to photograph the very river and scenery surrounding me here in New London. He has captured the coast of the Thames and the city of New London in a unique and flattering way. My hat is off to you, Tom; keep up the great work!

Edit: One of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, just posted a short article with a similar message, Take a Cheap Vacation in Your Own City. Therein, they suggest grabbing a guidebook for your area (you can usually find them at visitor’s centers, on your city or town’s website, at the city or town hall, or in a local library) and doing some of the suggested activities or visiting the suggested locations. This could be another great way to revitalize your photography without spending a lot or going too far.

Though paintings, sculptures, prints, and other works of fine art have been spotlighted on the auction block for many years and for tremendous money (works by Jackson Pollock and Gustav Klimt—to name only two—have sold at auction for more than $100 million apiece), the world of fine art collectors has seldom been penetrated by even the most renowned photographers.

This, however, is changing.

Some of the most valuable photographs hold their rank by virtue of historic value, such as Edward Steichen’s The Pond-Moonlight, which sold for nearly $3 million at auction and was created using primitive gum-based color photography techniques. Though sold as a photograph, it was more likely to have been purchased as an artifact.

Diane Arbus, arguably an iconic 20th century photographer, has seen her photographs sell at auction for only as much as $478,000; not a small sum to be sure, but merely a drop in the ocean by comparison to paintings that regularly sell for between $70 and $140 million.

Where’s the Demand?

So why aren’t collectors snapping up photographic prints at the same rate they snap up paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mobiles, and everything else? Why does photography carry this stigma within the confines of the fine art world? Surely there have lived amazing artists working within the photographic medium, so why aren’t their creations appreciating at the same rate as paintings and sculptures?

I can’t answer those questions, but I can say that the tide may be turning. Collectors are now starting to realize the investment potential of fine art photography, especially at the current time when collectible photography is still largely a bear market. As confidence is reinforced by annual photography fairs in New York, Paris, and now London, the value of fine art photographs will begin to climb.

Prices Are Actually Meaningless

Before I get too deeply mired in the collectible photography discussion and betray my true feelings toward selling art, let me take a step backwards and point out that selling photography (or any art) at auction, is vastly different from selling art to consumers.

From the standpoint of an artist, the final selling price of one of your works at auction should not be interpreted as an editorial on your abilities or the popularity of your work. Unfortunately for some, the fine art collectors’ marketplace is driven by people who want to make money. These people have an interest in art, to be sure, but they are looking for reliable investments, not the prettiest pictures for their palatial libraries (though the two can occasionally coincide).

Widely acclaimed Indian photographer Raghu Rai put it very plainly, “Most people are buying photographs because they consider it a trend to cash in on. For them, it is just another investment, like shares or property. It’s not because they love the art.”

Hooray for Fine Art!

Nevertheless, this is an exciting trend for fine art photography. Photographer Anay Mann says that “fine art photography has a longer shelf life and is worth collecting, since it is the work of these photographers that will appreciate in value over the years.” A true statement of promise for those of us toiling toward our own ends in the world of photographic fine art.

Whether your work winds up at auction some day (perhaps even after your death) or not is of little importance. The simple concession from collectors and the “upper crust” of art buyers that photography is a valid, collectible, and yes, valuable medium is a great boon to our artistic legitimacy and to our profitability.

Read More?

Here are the articles I referred to in writing this synopsis:

• Flash: Photos make great investments, The Times of India
• Photography looks good for long-term investment, The Scotsman
• Photography loses its negative image, The Independent
• Photographs click as great investments, moneycontrol.com

Many of these stories were triggered by the announcement of the opening of photo-london, a photography fair in London opening for the first time this year.

After the jump, more of Dan’s rantings followed by more of my rantings, hopefully to end with a meaningful conclusion… But no promises.

Dan Heller is a prolific stock and travel photographer and a somewhat prolific writer as well. His experiences with the Creative Commons began in the software and technology arena, but his latest article is very much aimed at the stock photography business world. Although it gets off to a good start and presents valid and convincing arguments from a business perspective, it soon begins to lose its footing and creep down a slippery slope into generalities. It is there that I have the most to say, so I will preface this essay with the concession that the Creative Commons licensing structure may very well be eroding the business of selling photographs, even though I think Dan’s reaction is somewhat alarmist even in that regard.

Before I begin to wax philosophical, let me examine the first concrete example Dan provides of the Creative Commons doing harm to photographers and their customers. He describes a hypothetical situation in which a photograph is misappropriated from a private photographer who has withheld use rights (“all rights reserved”). A thief (described in this case as a “12-year-old”) removes any watermarks or copyright notices and places the image on Flickr or another photo sharing site under a Creative Commons license. A business with a need for such a photo simply uses it, conforming to the rules of use set out in the Creative Commons license under which it was (illegally) published.

The original photographer gets wind of this wrongful use and takes legal action against the business, ultimately winning damages up to $30,000 in a clear case of copyright infringement. In Dan’s example, the thief gets away clean because chasing him down would probably cost more than what might be recovered from him, though he is still legally culpable. The business, having been burned in court for many times the cost of legally licensing the image, sets a policy of avoiding Creative Commons work from then on. It’s a pretty good example, except for a few glaring holes:

• Any photographer who posts his work online at a resolution that would be considered even remotely usable to a business customer is setting himself (or herself) up for disaster. As I have stated in previous articles about watermarking (Protecting Your Digital Rights), the low pixel count of an online gallery image should serve as adequate protection against any use that may otherwise be a considerable source of licensing revenue. For example, a kid who prints out your gallery image and wallpapers his bathroom with it is not someone who would have paid you fair licensing fees in the first place. Similarly, a business willing to place your photograph at web resolution into any publication of merit is not likely to be a discerning and profitable client for you. Fundamentally, you have a responsibility to police the wrongful use of your work, but from a pure business perspective, misappropriated web-resolution gallery images shouldn’t be considered a financial or professional liability, even in the cases where your watermark or copyright information are wrongfully removed.
• Dan seems to imply that by avoiding any Creative Commons licensed image, the business in question has now become a less likely consumer of photographers’ work. It seems more plausible to me that they will avoid using images off of photo sharing sites altogether and become more likely to purchase licenses directly from photographers or agencies, which is actually a benefit to those photographers who sell independently and through organizations like Comstock, Getty, or iStockPhoto. In this way, Creative Commons has benefited professional photographers even if it has damaged its own goals.
• If one of the goals of Creative Commons was to provide a more robust licensing structure for salable work such as stock photography, then they have surely failed themselves in that regard. My interpretation of their goal, however, was to catalyze the evolution of culture by aiding creative people in sharing their work with others who may be apt to build upon it or to disseminate it further. To my mind, the Creative Commons has little place in business, and to claim that they have harmed their integrity by doing a disservice to the business of selling creative work is to overlook the nature of their organization.

Dan goes on to say:

Photographs only take 1/250 of a second to make, and they can be made available online instantly. There are billions upon billions of them online, with millions being added daily. Monitoring and enforcement of CC licensing for photos is unrealistic, unmanageable, and highly prone to both non-compliance by licensees, and to fraudulent attributions by others. This, in turn, degrades the integrity and reliability of the CC system, thereby compromising confidence in it.

First off, as I mentioned in bullet #1 above, any work placed online in a form that is usable to a discerning potential customer, no matter what license or rights for use are expressed in, on, or around the image, is a gaping hole in the hull of your ship, pure and simple. Second, the monitoring and enforcement of any licensing for virtually any work is functionally unmanageable. If you presume that people are misappropriating your web-resolution images for any legitimate use that could represent lost revenue for you, then you must face the possibility that this is already happening to your “all rights reserved” images, because the only thing protecting them is probably a watermark and a bit of EXIF data. This is why technologies such as Digimarc were created; to track the potentially hundreds or thousands of anonymous misuses of your intellectual property, no matter what license was applied to them.

So Dan’s point is actually that restrictive Creative Commons licenses are harmful because they are easily confused with less restrictive ones, especially to an increasingly technology-bewildered marketplace, whereas “all rights reserved” is very clear. I say again, Creative Commons has little place in business, so if you are selling your work, don’t use a Creative Commons license. Reserve all rights and make individual exceptions where appropriate.

Dan then asserts that Creative Commons is simply adding noise to an already complicated world of digital law. He may be right about that, but his reasoning is tenuous at best. The example he uses is from a talk given by David Pogue, a journalist for the New York Times. Pogue essentially asks a group of 500 people whether they think downloading a copyrighted movie or album is “wrong,” and only a handful of people raise their hands. In a world where 1% of people recognize the legal liability of copying creative work that is under full and complete reservation of use rights, how can Creative Commons possibly make the situation any worse? Assuming that Pogue’s 500 people were a statistically representative group, that would mean that 99% of the American population will copy your photographs without a second thought, no matter what you do.

Creative Commons is meant to grease the wheels of the creative machine (notice how “creative” is in their name?), to allow your work to become a part of something more than itself, to contribute to derivative creations, to promote yourself through the spirit of sharing. Dan says that photographs “serve no foundation for anything—they are their own beginnings and endings at once, and provide no opportunity for new development, services, or growth.” Such a naive, business-oriented statement deeply insults me as an artist. Of course photographs serve as a foundation! Not only are photographs inspirational to artists in photography and in other media, but in this atmosphere of digital art, the media has become much less important than the subject matter. Photography as an art form is more pliable and evolutionary than ever before, and we would be fools to try to resist that.

In his article, Dan goes on to say that Flickr is damaging our industry by promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses and doing a fairly ham-handed job of explaining what the licenses mean and what risks are inherent in using them. On that count, I am wholly in agreement with him. I think that Flickr was originally created as a sort of “MySpace for pictures” and was expected to be populated with careless snapshots of kittens playing with balls of yarn. It surely is populated with a great deal of such images, however, as its popularity has skyrocketed it has drawn in countless very serious hobbyists and professionals with intellectual property to defend.

Now I get to quote myself, which is always fun:

It’s always, always your responsibility as a creator to understand the full extent of the concessions granted by a license you release your work under. If you decide you want to use a Creative Commons license, you should actually read it. Not just the “human deed,” but the full text. If you don’t understand the license… Don’t use it!

Does Flickr bear the burden of explaining these licenses to its users? Yes, I think they are responsible for being conscientious communicators of the message of Creative Commons and of the repercussions and/or implications of selecting certain options on their own website. Are they legally vulnerable in connection to the way they handle the licenses now? Perhaps. Who’s fault is it if someone’s photograph, posted under a free-use Creative Commons license is used in business for significant financial benefit of a third party? The photographer. As a creator, you have the last word when it comes to the use of your work, so be as cynical and discriminating as you can bear to be.

I do not believe that the existence of the Creative Commons, nor its use by photographers and other artists, is detrimental to any professional creative industry. Though it may add confusion to an already troubled and labyrinthine forest of copyright law, and may seem a target of convenience for burgeoning professionals who mistakenly allowed their work to be used without consent, the core mechanics of licensing creative work have not changed. This is both an exciting and confusing time for digital media creators, but it remains our responsibility to act with informed judgment.

Before I close, I would like to thank Dan Heller for taking the time to write such a thorough analysis of Creative Commons from the stock perspective, which was a viewpoint conspicuously missing thus far from most discourse. His article did serve to expose a lot of interesting licensing issues that are hot-button topics for professionals nowadays, especially anyone participating in Flickr as a promotional tool.