If your an F1 fan and this is a cracking read, even if you follow the odd race, its a good insight as to why this year will have fireworks!

The article can be found here.

We have a great special offer for you, for a limited time we are offering you the chance to get your portrait taken by a professional photographer and receive all of your images on a CD. You will be free to use the images however you like, print your own photographs, get that canvas you keep promising yourself, email them or even get a photograph printed on a mug! The choice is yours.

If that wasn’t enough it gets better, we will banish the boring “shot on white” portraits forever by taking to a local Wolverhampton park and capture stunning, personal images for you and your family. People look their best when they are enjoying themselves so just say no to props and staged backdrops, enjoy our studio without walls and take home some memories you will cherish forever.

Normally you would be looking at hundreds of pounds for a sitting fee and images but for a limited time, all we are asking is £75.

I am so confident you will not find this offer anywhere else locally that I will be happy to give this guarantee, if you find the same deal locally I will refund twice the difference, not only that, if your not totally happy with the images, I will give you a full refund.

So what are you waiting for? Places are limited so take advantage of this 100% risk free offer please call us or email ASAP to avoid disappointment.

01902 780010

The government has now gone one step further by trying to force through the Digital economy bill. This bill basically states, among other things, that if the copyright owner of a photograph can not be found after a reasonable search, commercial publications can use said work after paying a small fee to a collecting body. The bill calls these photographs “orphaned works” and as the copyright owner of an image used in this way you are able to apply to receive whats left of this tiny fee after both the collecting authority and the government have had their share, thats assuming you notice your image is being used in the first place.

To compound the problems the bill makes no definition of what a reasonable search is and makes no attempt to ensure orphaned works are avoided in the first place. In virtually all occasions that a photographer is either commissioned by a publication, or a publication legally licences an image, they state that no copyright information can be placed on the image and in many cases that are not obliged to print a by line stating who took the image and both of these two actions will lead to orphaned works. Once a professional photographer loses their right to control where their images are reproduced they also lose the right to this revenue stream which will push prices up to cover this missing revenue. It also removes a photographers right to decide where and for what purpose their photographs are used for, for instance, I may decline the use of my images for uses that I find either distasteful or morally objectionable, once this bill is passed all of my wishes and the wishes of my clients will be ignored after a “reasonable search”.

If your reading this as either a customer or as someone with an interest of photography please do not assume this only applies to professional photographers, in fact it may apply more to you that it does to me. I am fairly easy to find, a search for Martyn Greswolde on google.co.uk shows that any of the links from the first page will get to my contact information. I also embed code (called IPTC data) into every single photograph I take with my contact details, web address and copyright information. How many casual photographers are this easy to find? to compound the issue many casual photographers post images on sites such as Flickr using nicknames that would be almost impossible to trace back to an individual, so your images are more at risk than mine.

You may think that it would be cool and flattering if your images were used and if you could receive a couple of pounds for the privilege everything is great but what if your image is used to advertise an embarrassing product or worse for something you find questionable? You would have no recourse to have the image removed but you would still receive the few pounds if you could prove you took the image. There are several petitions on the 10 Downing street website relating to this bill and they can be found here, I would urge everyone of you to read these petitions and sign up for them.

Once again the UK government have proven they can not be trusted with individuals rights and are not concerned by public or small businesses concerns or opinions.

There are a lot of web resources available on these topics, a few I have found useful are here-
Long but very detailed – http://www.copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public?page=1
or a more concise post – http://www.wirefresh.com/uk-photographers-stop-government-plans-to-strip-you-of-your-copyright/

Anyway, here is the reposted review of 2009 in movie form

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This is a short video of some of my favourite shots of the year.

This list is by no means exhaustive, I had to keep editing the list down so I could bring the video in under six minutes. I think it is a true reflection of my work this year though and I’m very proud of it.

The Boston Big Picture has some pretty amazing images of the ceremony on display here.

Since its announcement it seems to have split opinion right down the middle. All of the tech geeks and apples pro users seem to be let down, frustrated and just plain angry that apple hasn’t released a tablet for them. Consumers and business analysts however seem to be looking much more favourably on the new device claiming it fills a new role not currently (or adequately) filled by any other device. Now while I definitely fall in the the first group of people I actually agree with the second group of people.

When you think most laptop users only really use their devices for surfing the web, listening to music, sending emails and watching films, this device does all of that but comes with a reported 10 hour battery life all for $500 (we will wait to see what Apple think is a fair conversion to pounds) Yes your tied into apples app store and iTunes but is that such a big deal? to average consumers I don’t think it is. The device currently can not run applications in the background (unless they are Apples pre-installed apps) now this is an issue but the much rumoured OS4 due in the next few months is reported to fix that issue.

Yes I would have loved to see a Snow Leopard running photo munching behemoth that could replace a laptop but why would I really need such a device when I could just by a laptop? Even if apple did build such a device it would be a minimum of five times the price of the iPad.

The real power of this device, much like its iPhone cousin before it, is the App store. Once developers start creating some specific apps for the iPad its uses will become more apparent.

Apple have taken a risk putting a new product category into the market place but I think they may well succeed.

We had hoped to spend a few hours in Warwick getting some great portraits of the newly married couple but unfortunately the great British weather didn’t oblige us although it stayed dry enough for us to get some shots down by the river at the foot of the castle.

For the reception we moved to a small central restaurant called 7 Square. The restaurant was beautifully decorated and a perfect size for the wedding. I often comment how much I enjoy winter weddings because of the soft, low light. Well this wedding was no  different but it was really pushing the limits of what was possible without using flash. Throughout the whole day, apart from the portraits in front of the castle I was running at 3200ISO to avoid using flash but I think the extra effort was well worth it as the low natural light gives a 3D effect to the images.

I hope you enjoy the images.

Martyn

As I am a big fan of both I was totally blown away with the quality of the images in this gallery. Covering a sporting event is difficult enough, when its stretched out over 6000 Km its amazing that anything gets photographed!

Take a look at the article for yourself!

I have been advised they are working to correct the issue.

Please accept my apologies for this (hopefully short lived) technical issue.

Martyn

Ps I have written this from my iPhone so please excuse the lack of formatting.

*UPDATE*

Thanks to the guys at CMD most of my stuff is back online so hopefully the blog is back to normal, if anyone notices anything a wry, drop me a note.

I want to wish all of my customers, readers and suppliers a very merry Christmas from all of us at Greswolde photography.

There are a lot of exciting new things coming in 2010… I can’t wait!