It’s official – Cloud don’t work!

I’ve been following  a conversation in the Canon group on LinkedIn about storage mediums for photographers… I know I’ve talked a bit about this topic before, but I want to dip my lens back into the subject for just a few minutes to clear something up… “Cloud Storage is not the server in shinning armour” ….but, what the hell IS cloud storage you ask? …errr, basically it’s lots of servers all over the place, and your data goes out “into the clouds” and you can download from whatever server is closest or quickest… and it all happens without you having to think, mostly. Still don’t get it? Ask your Grandma…

this awesome image is used with cc goodness

People bang on about “Cloud” and how it’s going to revolutionise storage as we know it… How it’s where everything will sit and that’s where we’ll work from… There are some things that make this idea an absolute pile of steaming doggy whatsit…

Got Data? Yeah, a lot! OK, so I took some photos of my little boy this morning, and after about twenty minutes, I had around 1.5GB of images… (21mp at 3.9fps) He’s a quick little mover, so I had the camera on burst and was pushing it often to make sure I caught the expression I wanted… That’s not even on a shoot “shoot” ..that’s just at home, for fun… So, I have pretty fast internet at home, about 6mb down and around 768kbps up… so, that’s nice, but it’s still going to take an AGE to upload 1.5gb of RAW images!

What if I want to work on those RAW images after I’ve uploaded them? Do I point Lightroom at the cloud and tell it to get its files form there? Can you please tell me how long it’s going to take to download, edit, upload each change? So that won’t work…

I have an image library that needs to be kept together, in one place, so I’d need to upload my existing image library to said cloud… that’s almost 1.5TB… Can anyone tell me how long that’s going to take to upload and then how much it’s going to cost to keep up?

Cloud is just disk based storage, and it’s on more than one server, but there is something that weirds me out about not being able to physically pick up my external disk and say to someone “here are my photographs, guard them with your life”

So, that’s not even scratching the surface of what could possibly be wrong with a semi-pro photog trying to use cloud storage as his main archive… opinions, please….

Who Stole your photographs? What can you do?

I was followed by BreakingPhoto on Twitter and had a brief scan down their tweets as I do with everyone that follows me… I found a tweet by them that linked to Thomas Hawk’s blog post here… Which led me to the following bunch of cheap bastards, Wapfever dot com.

If you go to the link below (Hate that I’m giving them traffic) and search for yourself… You may be interested to find that they are stealing your photos too..

http://wapfever.com/picsearch/upload/search.php — Hosted on GoDaddy.com

So, what can you do? Well… it’s a right royal pain in the bottom that hosting companies make it SO BLOODY HARD to get your stuff pulled from these sites… but the following is what will work best…

1. Go to the page linked below, it’s the GoDaddy “someone stole my stuff” page…

GoDaddy Trademark & Copyright page

2. There’s a link to a form, click it, fill out the form and print it out…

Please print form along with your identification and email to trademarkclaims@godaddy.com or FAX to Trademark Department at 480-247-4137. Please allow 3 business days for an initial response. The trademark claims department can not process your request without the ‘Trademark Tracking ID’ listed at the top of the form.

3. Then you should do yourself an email with the following points covered in as much detail as possible, and email it to TrademarkClaims@godaddy.com

Here’s the information you need to put in your submission.. *BE VERY ACCURATE*

  • Sufficient evidence that the party posting the trademark that is claimed to be infringing is a Go Daddy customer.
  • The trademark, service mark, trade dress, name, or other indicia of origin (“mark”) that is claimed to be infringed.
  • The jurisdiction or geographical area to which the mark applies.
  • The name, post office address and telephone number of the owner of the mark identified above.
  • The goods and/or services covered by or offered under the mark identified above.
  • The date of first use of the mark identified above.
  • The date of first use in interstate commerce of the mark identified above.
  • The mark the Complaining Party believes is an infringement of its mark.
  • The goods and/ or services covered by or offered under the mark claimed to be infringing.
  • The precise location of the infringing mark, including electronic mail address, etc.
  • A good faith certification, signed under penalty of perjury, stating:
    1. The mark [identify mark] infringes the rights of another party,
    2. The name of such said party,
    3. The mark [identify mark] being infringed, and
    4. That use of the mark [identify mark] claimed to be infringing at issue is not defensible.

Now, does this always work? No… Will you immediately feel redeemed? No… If enough of us show that we’re damned unhappy with the whole scraping our content and using it thing, will we get anywhere? Probably not… What’s the only way to stop this happening? — Go back to shooting film and buy yourself a nice, leather bound, photo album… (Don’t get depressed)

I hope this helps someone!

iPhone, iPad, iNeedaCoffee!

Much interweb chatter about the whole “Steve Jobs gave Adobe the bird” “Flash is heavy and slow” …blah blah blah! Well, Let’s take a look at how NOT having flash on your iPod / iPhone / iPad is going to screw your life.

iPod from Apple without Flash from Adobe

Suddenly the top began moving, rotating, unscrewing...

So, when I say FLASH you say VIDEO when I say FLASH… oh, you get it, yeah… So, flash and video hold hands and skip, that means that you can’t watch.. well, YouTube are letting you watch their stuff, and many other commercial video sites are jumping on the wagon as well… So, what video can’t you watch? That’s right – PORN! don’t deny it, you sneak a little bit of the Swedish goodness in from time to time… “everyone” does it… you’re just cut that you can’t go straight to redtube and… oh, wait, you can… (blushing now) how ruuuude!… So, there you go, you can watch video…

What else? Games? Suck it up game boy, do some work!! Plus, there’s a gazillion games you CAN play – let me introduce you to the App Store!

world-without-flash-on-the-ipad

iPad in a Flashless world

This image came from Cult of Mac and I’m not sure if it is theirs or Adobes, if it is, sorry

OK, so you’ve got games, porn.. oh, err.. I mean video… you can view pictures, you can listen to music, you can tell the time, check the weather… learn about first aid, check the footy scores, tweet, read the news, call your mum… What’s missing? What can’t you do on the iPhone / iPad / iPod without flash?

That’s right – You can’t view FLASH WEB SITES… Well, maybe it’s time for some smart cooky to build “an app for that” …something that, when you go to a flash website, it springs out onto the website, grabs all the flash in its teeth, munches it into html5 on the fly and spits it back onto your poxy little screen in all its ex-flash glory… there’s not a flamin’ APP FOR THAT yet… (Dave? Get busy)

Think Tank Photo – Retrospective 20 Video

Think Tank Photo Retrospective 20 is what I’m talkin’ about… A quality piece of kit that deserves your love… Here’s a short’ish video on its main features.

Think Tank Photo – Retrospective 20 from Simon Pollock on Vimeo.

A new camera bag from Think Tank Photo – The Retrospective 20. Could this be “The One”

PLEASE NOTE: The bits I said you might hang a tripod off, they can also be used to swing the wide range of accessory bags from TTP
You can find Think Tank Photo on Twitter | Facebook and Flickr and here’s the main website should you wish to go on an immediate buying frenzy..

Vimeo

Apple Fanboy Rejoice?

I managed to end up on the Telegraph website watching, literally, train crash videos… Somehow a related video came up that was a HTC Desire v iPhone 3Gs “Speed Test” Where the presenters place the devices side by side and click a link – whichever loads first wins…The opening line is “Now, one of the key selling points of the HTC Desire is the speed of its processor” ….Errr, and that, once the browser is running, effects the page load time how? Network / GPU / so many factors…

They close the piece with the guy saying “Apple fanboys you can rejoice…blah blah” …Well, I just wanted to share this as the least conclusive bit of tripe I’ve ever watched #FAIL

***VIDEO REMOVED DUE TO BLOODY ANNOYING AUTO START***

aCurator – A Website Review

I’m always on the internet, somewhere, somewhy… And often I find sites that are inspiring and have great content, but just don’t show it as it should be shown – BIG! I wanted to share a website that I’ve recently found (I can’t remember how, perhaps via a tweet?) named aCurator.

aCurator by Julie Grahame

Welcome to aCurator

aCurator was born out of frustration when Julie Grahame, long time veteran to pretty much all things photographic industry, wanted somewhere that displayed work as it should be viewed – full screen! – and shortly thereafter, aCurator was born…

Continue reading “aCurator – A Website Review” »

ONE TWO THREE – iPAD!

So, most of you will know, from my tweetness yesterday, that I have become a father again!! Father to a sweet little iPad… That’s right, that sweet looking device that everyone in England wants, but doesn’t have… YET

ipad winner 123rf.com

Don’t fret! There is still time for you, dear reader, to win your own damn iPad!!

If you head over to 123rf.com and follow the instructions, you’re in with a shot!! Who are 123rf.com? 123RF.com is your one-stop royalty-free photo library offering stunning, practical stock photos at the most affordable price! (they said it themselves!)

So THANK YOU www.123rf.com THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Ladder to the sun…

Just to share some images from the last week in the Lake District in Cumbria. In total, I shot 403 images with this!

A wonderfully peaceful week, good times with friends, interesting magentas in the sky, amazing landscape and lakes with waves. The Lake District, or “Lakes” is up north, innit, about 5 hours drive (Or a record 4:41 minutes, at the speed limit, honest) from London. A week there without much more than a farm house and some terribly cute lambs…

Coniston Water, The Lake District, Monk Coniston

magenta on white under blue

Image of Lake District with man and camera bag thinktankphoto

Dark clouds follow me...

Blossoms on a tree in a blue sky

New beginnings?

Fence leading into lake in the Lakes District, England

Leading me astray...

Black and White photograph of The Lake District, CUmbria, England

Slide down, me..

Waves on the shore of a Lake District Lake in England

Wave back to me..

And if you’re up for going there yourself, I highly recommend staying at Whistling Green which is located here and the photo above, of me, was taken as per below…