Today on Single-Serving Photo I’m bringing you something a little bit different. Instead of news stories about amazing photographers, press releases about equipment you can’t afford, or overbearing pontifications on the usefulness of HDR as a medium for artistic expression… Drumroll please… Graphs.

To be more specific, graphs of modulation transfer functions. Dry-sounding? Absolutely! Exciting? I sure hope so!

As the title suggests, today’s episode is concerned with lens quality. To be more precise, metrics that measure lens quality. To be yet more precise, metrics that measure sharpness, which is universally regarded to be a major factor in lens quality.

In this day and age, though it’s useful to hold equipment in your hands, to hear the sounds it makes, to feel its controls and its weight, nobody buys a professional camera or lens on the basis of a visit to the shop. That is, unless they’re quite wealthy and don’t mind making expensive errors in judgment.

No, no, this is the information age, the age of silicon and fiber optics and space travel and ray guns and… Well, not ray guns. But computers and cell phones and quartz watches and, oh yeah, that other little thing called the Internet.

That’s the Internet with a capital “I,” the one that connects computers worldwide, that connects my incoherent ramblings to you in the comfort of your own home at this very moment, and not least of all, that allows you to meticulously research every purchase you want to make, no matter how insignificant.

When it comes to researching lenses, if you’ve ever been down this road, you’ve probably come across one of my favorite sites, dpreview.com. Digital Photography Review (as it’s formally named) is probably the most technically thorough camera and lens review site in existence. They aren’t going to give you a whole lot of aesthetic or subjective fluff. Instead, they’re going to give you boat loads of data, and if you’re reading their lens reviews one of the first things you’re going to notice is the interactive lens sharpness tool.

What dpreview has done is created their own interactive tool for viewing the data points produced by many, many combined modulation transfer function graphs, which allows you to choose different focal lengths (on zoom lenses) and f-stops and observe the sharpness performance of the lens based on their measurements.

By looking at MTF measurements made by reviewers, you can determine the “sweet spot” aperture setting and focal length for a given lens and use that to produce images of a sufficient sharpness that you will be able to print them out at obscene dimensions and wave them around in front of your friends boasting about the clarity and detail you’ve been able to achieve.

After all, that’s what friends are for, right?

Now, if you want to know more about the mechanics of MTF calculations and how these measurements are taken and what they mean (which is truly interesting stuff), I highly recommend that you take a look at Camera Lens Quality: MTF, Resolution & Contrast written by Sean McHugh on the awesome Cambridge in Colour site. This is one of the more detailed explanations I’ve seen with attractive and understandable illustrations (which is the only way I can ever understand anything; you have to draw me a picture).

If you want to peruse some lens reviews and play with interactive MTF graphs, start by reading dpreview’s announcement of their new lens reviews and how their interactive tool works: Dpreview launches lens reviews.

That said, everyone has a different threshold of charity, and that threshold seems to be linked to their success and recognition. Completely unrecognized people give things away to gain exposure. After achieving success, they often stop giving things away to maximize their gains. Then, if they become very successful, they may begin giving things away again because they can afford to.

Because there are so many nuances to the ways in which creators may wish for their work to be used by others, the Creative Commons emerged, creating whole new gradations within the copyright system. Now, rather than saying “all rights reserved,” we can easily say “some rights reserved” and call upon a pile of pre-written legalese. Good idea?

Understanding Copyright

Fundamentally, copyright is an agreement among the people to treat creative works in specific ways. Historically, copyright established a monopoly over a creative work that its creator could wield to derive (usually financial) benefit from it, thereby coercing others to create works of their own. Without getting mired in the specifics of copyright law, the intricacies of which have been explained at length elsewhere, the whole shooting match was designed to safeguard creativity in modern society. In the words of Lawrence Lessig¹:

The owner of a still live copyright, that is, one that has not yet expired, controls the rights of others to produce derivative works. … At least until that copyright expires, though the idea of copyright expiring seems itself an expired idea.

Under copyright law, the creator of an original work automatically receives full rights to its use. Only through a specific exception can certain rights be surrendered and others retained, at least until the copyright lapses. In America’s litigious climate, even such a simple thing as stating “you may use this song of mine to make remixes but you can’t charge money for them” requires pages of legalese to avoid ambiguity. That’s where the Creative Commons comes in.

Understanding the Creative Commons

Creative Commons “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.” Their chief contribution is in the form of “licenses,” which are basically rules of use for creative work stated in defensible legal terms, written by lawyers. Using their handy license selection questionnaire, you can simply choose the rights you wish to yield to others and the appropriate Creative Commons (or “CC” for short) license will be provided to you.

There are three major categories of rights that CC licenses allow you to control:

• Attribution
• Commericial use
• Derivative works

Attribution means receiving credit, or some indication of ownership. Typically that means a piece of accompanying text containing your name, and possibly the same information in the metadata. Attribution is polite and it appears in the license only because you may wish to waive it, and for completeness. I hope that all of you out there give credit where credit is due without being forced to by a lawyer.

Commercial use is exactly what it sounds like. A work tagged for commercial use means you don’t mind if someone uses it to make money on their own somehow, and one tagged for no commercial use means the opposite.

Derivative works is an interesting twist on copyright law. Under US copyright law, derivative works are almost always permitted, and disputes over whether certain works are suitably different from the originals to be considered “derivative” or whether it’s plagiarism has typically been a decision for the courts. This right permits or denies end users from deriving new creative works from yours, period. In my opinion, denying derivative works is contrary to creation as a whole, but CC leaves the ball in your court.

There is another license attribute used in two of CC’s six major licenses called “share alike,” which means that work based on yours must carry the same (or suitably similar) license as yours. This is much like the idea of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) for open source software.

Each of these categories can be toggled “on” and “off” using the CC license selection questionnaire, and each combination of desired rights has its own CC license, presented in full, specific, defensible legal jargon. They even give you pretty little buttons to use on web-based copies of your work that link to the license’s page on CC’s website and announce that you have released some (or none) of these rights to end users.

In addition to the buttons, there is a “deed” page on CC’s website for each of their licenses, which spells out in very simple and easy-to-understand language what you are permitted and not permitted to do with work carrying that license. Each deed is then linked to the full text of the license for the hardened lawyers among us.

If You Love Something, Let it Go…

I believe in sharing. In my Web Rules for Photographers article, I stated that “sharing is caring,” and I stand behind that. I am not anti-capitalist, nor would I deny anyone the fruits of their labor, but sometimes a little bit of giving goes a long way.

Let me break this down from a photographer’s perspective. I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to photograph the abandoned and decrepit Mansfield Training School, which was a hospital for mentally retarded children in Mansfield, Connecticut from around the turn of the century until about 1993. Of all my photographs, the ones I took inside that place seem to be the most popular, and generate the most traffic from web searches simply due to the scarcity of photographs and information about the place. I have been contacted by several people looking for directions to it and more information about it.

People who search Google for “Mansfield Training School” inevitably find my gallery, and I think that’s pretty sweet. Some time later, as someone was editing the “Mansfield, Connecticut” article on Wikipedia, they thought to mention the Mansfield Training School in its “Places of Interest” section, and linked to my gallery page, undoubtedly found in a search.

When a friend of mine pointed out that I had been linked from Wikipedia, I immediately thought two things simultaneously: 1) that’s really cool, and 2) can I make more out of this? Contributing to Wikipedia is one of those things that can be helpful to you and to others at the same time, and I like helping myself at least as much as I like helping others, so I decided to contribute more. What I actually did was to select a photo from my Mansfield Training School gallery and place it on the Wikipedia article page.

Wikipedia requires a fairly comprehensive copyright history for items submitted to its site, and for good reason: used as a reference, Wikipedia’s media items should be at least as free (as in speech) as items published in traditional print encyclopedias. To that end, they require a selection from a fairly long list of licenses from popular sources including Creative Commons, GNU, and others.

What this meant for me was that I would have to give up some rights to that particular work in order for it to appear on Wikipedia. Aside from the intangible exposure I would gain from it, and of course my own sense of altrusim, I hoped to see a bit of traffic from my submission.

Being the generous man that I am, I selected the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license (the link leads to the “deed” page, conveniently available in about 30 languages), which means that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, remix, and adapt the work as long as what you create from it carries the same license and that I am credited for the original if displayed in any way.

I think that releasing a portion of your work in this way, especially in a high-traffic and high-exposure location such as Wikipedia, can definitely pay off in terms of recognition (both for the work itself as well as your reputation for generosity) and help to promote your other work, to which you retain all rights. Give a little, get a lot.

The way I see it, if everyone gives a little, we all gain a lot.

Postscript

If you are serious about protecting your copyrights, you may wish to officially register your work with the United States Copyright office. It isn’t terribly difficult or expensive, and it will give you huge leverage if you ever take a claim to court. For more information, check out Copyright Office Basics on the Copyright Office’s website.

1. Lawrence Lessig (2002) “Innovating Copyright”, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, 20:611-623

There was a time, long ago, when photographs were conceived at the moment the shutter button was depressed. Darkroom techniques were limited at best (the idea that a photographic image could even be created was a modern miracle) and the photographer was required to make near-perfect exposures every time.

Things have changed a lot since then; it’s now possible to do amazing things long after the light has been captured by the camera. Today I’m going to explore some competing points of view and take a philosophical walk through the annals of photographic history to clear up some improper perceptions of digital post-processing.

First, Some History

The first commercially viable photographic technology was the Daguerrotype, a positive-only process (no negative is created and each image can only be made once) resulting in extremely fragile prints on copper plates.

Not only was the development and printing process inflexible and time consuming, but it also exposed photographers to chemicals such as mercury and iodine; not the kinds of things you want to be boiling and possibly inhaling!

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Over time, photographic technology evolved. The system of using silver halide-based negatives emerged, allowing photographers to make more than one print from each of their images; prints that could be handled without fear of destroying them. The printing process itself was transformed from a cumbersome operation using metal substrates and boiling chemicals to the more refined and less hazardous procedure we use today.

It was the invention of the glass negative (circa 1839, possibly by John Herschel, an astronomer by trade¹) that precipitated the institution of photographic post-processing. The negative expanded the photographic process into three steps, which should look very familiar:

1. Exposure
2. Development
3. Printing

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Post-processing, by definition, is altering the image after the light has been captured (hence, post-). Traditionally, these alterations were achieved by modifying the way the exposed film was developed into a negative and the way the negative was printed. For the first time, photographers had the ability to enhance their images beyond the capacity of the film materials of the day; dodging and burning, for example, can create images with a tonal range beyond what can be captured by the film at exposure time.

As photographic technology and techniques surge forward, the photographer is given a progressively more expansive collection of post-processing tools and abilities. Digital photography has completed the transformation of post-processing into an art form unto itself, based concretely on captured-light imagery but possessing all of the characteristics and nuances of a full-fledged medium. Regardless of its flexibility and capabilities, is it not still bound to photography?

“While I have always worked with fairly conventional means and techniques, I anticipate new departures which, if I cannot examine them in my lifetime, will assure the power of future vision and accomplishment.” —Ansel Adams, Carmel, 1976

Artistic Integrity

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Any debate over whether post-processing invalidates the artistic integrity of a photographic work is fundamentally academic. Even before chemical photography existed, artists used camera-like devices such as the camera obscura or optical contraptions like the camera lucida to trace a three-dimensional scene onto paper. Chemical photography and highly sensitive film materials simply permitted artists to capture their subjects faster and with greater accuracy, but never excused an artist from laying hands upon the entire process to reach their artistic goals. Never in the evolution of darkroom techniques was the final product’s status as a photograph questioned.

A perception exists that the medium of captured-light images is pure, not to be spoiled by the meddling of non-optical tools. It may be that the last few decades of photography, during which no paradigm shifts in traditional process have occurred², are responsible for this notion. Or, it may be that the digital world is so vastly different—not in essence, but in physicality—from the world of the darkroom that this discussion has arisen.

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Still, there are those who perceive an imaginary line in post-processing across which a photograph passes into a different state of being and loses its status as a photograph. To me, this distinction is purely semantic. We could debate the definition of “photograph” ad infinitum and never reach a consensus. What does this discussion do for any of us as artists?

Far be it from me to make sweeping generalizations about a field as personal and subjective as art, but I feel as though the detractors of post-processing are the antithesis of its very spirit. Let me explain.

The Question of Intent

You could say that a watercolor splattered with acrylic ceases to be a watercolor. Semantically, that’s true enough; I think that the world of art would classify such a painting as “mixed media.” Perhaps the stumbling block in digital photography is the inextricable relationship between its traditional light-capture methods and the digital “development” tools that make even its most modest creations possible.

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Because traditional darkroom development tools have always been part and parcel to the process we call “photography,” even since the earliest days of its existence, it’s hard to suggest that they are separate mediums or separate forms of art. I contend that digital photography is no different. A digital photographer may not use chemical developers or optical enlargers, but the process is fundamentally the same. Those who claim otherwise tend to draw the line at a subjective point in the editing process, one which marks no meaningful boundary.

Rather than introducing entirely new mechanics or technology, digital post-processing of any degree makes use of the same fundamental operations that produce simple and austere works. Because the tools are the same, it is the methods themselves, the intricacies of the artist’s process, that are called into question; something that has never happened in photography before, certainly not to this degree.

What do you think? Are there Photoshop filters or third-party software tools or certain editing techniques that transform a photograph into a photographically-derived work, not deserving of the name “photograph?” Where do you draw the line?

I think that it’s an artist’s duty to carefully examine each viewpoint in this discussion and then promptly ignore them all.

1. Edit: It was brought to my attention that Herschel wasn’t responsible for the “invention” of the negative, although he probably coined the term. For more information about this stage in photography’s early development, read about William Fox Talbot, John Herschel, and the wet plate collodion process
2. Digital photography is unquestionably a paradigm shift, but the idea of collecting light through a lens, capturing the resulting image, and reproducing that image on paper is exactly the same as it was when the term “photography” was first conceived in 1832.

Photographers today are faced with the very real possibility that their rights are being violated due to the simplicity that digital media brings to the act of duplication and distribution of their work. Your ability as a photographer to understand and apply the tools and techniques available to protect your copyrights will contribute largely to how easily someone else can wrongly profit from your work and how easily you can seek remedies for that infringement.

This is a long article. I get into some detail about copyright law, the implications of at least two types of self-attribution you can use to assert your copyrights, the technical aspects of metadata and some of its history, and more. But because I am considerate and I want the impatient and lazy among you to be equally satisfied to have dropped by (thank you, by the way), here are the major points:

• The Orphan Works Act of 2006 does not threaten to dilute your rights as a copyright holder. Which is to say, it wouldn’t even if it actually passed, which it hasn’t.
• There are two major forms of metadata, one older one and one newer one, and you should learn how to use them properly.
• Watermarks are so ugly.

Now, if you feel up to it, dive in.

An article ran in this month’s issue of Shutterbug magazine called “How to Protect Your Images: Photos on the Web Might Be Fair Game.” The article was written by Jon Canfield and centered around one specific concern raised by a little piece of legislation called H.R. 5439 or, in plain English, the “Orphan Works Act of 2006,” which has not yet been passed.

Setting aside for a moment the somewhat alarmist phrasing of the article’s title, which seems to imply that the government could declare open season on copyrighted works on the Internet, and ignoring the calculated impression a reader might get from the first two paragraphs that the Orphan Works Act will do just that, Canfield offers several good tips.

Orphan Works Act of 2006

Before delving full-throttle into the nitty gritty of copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself, I must first dispell concerns about the Orphan Works Act of 2006. If you want to read it, there it is, in all of its PDF glory. So what is an “orphan work,” anyway? An orphan work is one whose copyright holder and rightful owner cannot be reasonably discovered. The Act attempts to fill the void in current copyright law where orphan works live. Canfield says:

Boiled down to plain English, this act says that if a reasonable effort is made to find the owner of an image, and that search is unsuccessful, the work can be used at no charge and without credit to the original creator.

There is mounting concern—legitimate concern—among the agencies of various governments equivalent to our Copyright Office regarding the fate of these creative works whose owners may not be outwardly apparent or may have disappeared and left no next of kin, etc., etc. It’s all very legal and complicated, but suffice it to say, if you want to use a painting that you found somewhere and nobody could identify its creator, so you searched up and down for them but found nothing, you might use that painting only to have the creator suddenly reveal him or herself and sue you. And they could win.

The Orphan Works Act of 2006 seeks to “limit remedies” sought by the creator of a work when their ownership status could not “reasonably” be discovered. That doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that people could start using your photographs and somehow slip through a loophole in copyright law that would absolve them of guilt. First and foremost, the Orphan Works Act of 2006 hasn’t even been passed, so none of its provisions have any legal weight whatsoever. Second, even if it had been passed, it doesn’t give additional rights to copyright infringers. In point of fact, it places the burden of proof on the infringer to document their search for the proper owner of the copyright in question and to further prove that they performed the search with “reasonable diligence,” making use of “reasonably available expert assistance” and “reasonably available technology.”

Furthermore, the Act also holds that if the infringer had discovered, to any degree, the identity of the owner of the work, that they must have provided attribution “in a manner reasonable under the circumstances.” In other words, if someone meant to use one of your photographs but couldn’t figure out exactly who you were, they would, under the Orphan Works Act, be required to give you credit to the extent they were able. If they only knew your first name, for instance, they would have to use it in an attribution or fail to meet the criteria of the Act’s provisions.

What that means to you as a photographer is that you should be certain of anyone’s ability to locate you as the creator and owner of your work with a reasonable level of diligence. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to plaster your name and website URL across the middle of your images (although it could help; I’ll get into that later), but it does mean you have to make yourself available to be contacted and to do what you think is reasonably expected of you to claim ownership of your work. So what does that mean?

Let us assume that the Orphan Works Act will be signed into law. I hope that I have allayed any fears that this Act could dissolve your rights as creators outright, but as they say, you can never be too careful. The Act clearly describes the level of diligence that is expected of an infringer in their search for the owner of a work, and one of the specific tools mentioned is “reasonably available technology,” which is what I assume Canfield latched onto when he dove into the topic of metadata.

Using Metadata

Metadata refers to one of two major types of non-image data that can be embedded into certain image files. The first type is IPTC, which stands for International Press Telecommunications Council. At least as far back as the early ’90s it has been possible to use Photoshop or a similar tool to embed non-image data into the “header” of a Photoshop, JPEG, or TIFF image using the method IPTC came up with. Eventually, though, Adobe came along and decided there needed to be more data. Around 2001, Adobe launched XMP, or Extensible Metadata Platform, which they hoped would provide even more useful metadata space within popular image formats. XMP also defines “synchronization” methods to move certain data fields back and forth between itself and IPTC; Photoshop naturally supports this.

Right now we’re in a transitional period between IPTC and XMP formats. Adobe envisions XMP basically absorbing IPTC, and although that has already begun to happen with the strength of Photoshop and Lightroom as the premiere metadata management tools in use, it’s probably a good idea to fill in every field you can regardless of which standard it’s defined in. In most applications that support metadata tagging, there is now a section called “IPTC Core” and then another for XMP. It won’t hurt you to pay attention to both.

I should note that Aperture also supports XMP metadata, but I am a Lightroom user so I won’t be able to talk about Aperture’s interface or specific support. If you use Aperture and have anything to share about metadata, please leave a comment.

Watermarks

The most popular way to assert copyright on an image is to emblazon it with your name and/or URL and/or a phrase such as “All Rights Reserved.” Personally, I find most “watermarks” to be distracting, distasteful, and poorly executed. To me, a watermark screams opportunism, perhaps a small drop of greed, and utter distrust. The level of greed and distrust that I perceive is directly proportional to the size and audacity of the watermark. Watermarks with outer glows, very thick lettering, or worst of all colors drive me up the wall. Musn’t there be a way to indicate ownership without stabbing your viewers in the eye with Photoshop filters and text set in Papyrus?

To me, the watermark has two distinct purposes:

• To deter would-be thieves from snatching up your image and using it for their own nefarious purposes.
• To increase awareness of (read: advertise) you and/or your website to the people who would be most interested in it: people who look at photographs.

Having a watermark probably doesn’t deter the small-time offender, but I don’t think it’s important. Someone who wants to spend the time to Photoshop out the watermark and make a very poor inkjet print of your photo because they wanted to hang it above their toilet is not the person who was going to bring you fame or fortune in the first place. Photographs prepared at web-viewable resolutions are virtually worthless outside of the Internet, anyway; prints from images of that size are not going to look very good, so the risk of being defrauded is marginal.

The copyright symbol itself and the “All Rights Reserved” phrase are so ubiquitous these days that most folks don’t even think twice before copying things and using them in all sorts of bizarre personal efforts. I say go for it; I’m a big supporter of derivative work and if you want to wallpaper your house with web resolution copies of my photographs, well, frankly I’d be honored.

The bottom line is that watermarks aren’t tremendously effective deterrents. The only way a watermark is going to truly deter a would-be offender is if it covers the image in some distracting way. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of showing off your work in the first place? It may also be said that a visible watermark strengthens your legal copyright claim. It may make such a claim more convenient certainly, but in the eyes of the law, metadata is just as strong. Even stronger would be possessing the full-resolution version of the photograph. You have that at least, right?

As you can see on this blog and in my gallery, I chose to apply a very modest watermark to my work. My intent was to make it very easy for a casual onlooker who discovers a photo of mine outside of this site to be able to identify me, but also to disturb the original image and its impact as little as possible. Coupled with metadata, I feel that this solves the problem of asserting my legal rights to my work as well as giving me a bit of casual advertising.

I am always ready and willing to answer questions and discuss particular topics in greater detail. If you want to share your own experiences with copyright, watermarking, or metadata, please leave a comment. You are not required to sign up or log in to comment, but I encourage you to do so.