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Gradient, Thanks for the links. I guess i should check out the forums more regularly. Man, what a goram load of crap that proposed legislation is. :-(

I am not quite sure what this is all about, as under the Berne Convention (of which I thought the US of A is a signatory) copyright comes into force not by registering something, but rather by creating an original work of art - or so I always thought. Could someone please explain this to someone not following the minute details of copyright law (or one country's copyright law, as the case may be), please? My first impression is that this is just a rip-off. 175$ to register a copyright? Since when exactly do you have to register a copyright? A trademark, sure, but a copyright? Isn't that what you get anyway, the moment you create an original creative work? Registering it may help claiming damages in court, but how often will that come up for the average photographer?

Interesting stuff - or it might be, if this dude hadn't lost me after a minute with all his blabbering. ;-) The first part is as far as I got, and I probably won't go any further. It's interesting all right, but I think this guy needs to decide if he wants to do a tutorial or a funny video and then stick with a theme. And - to me at least - a tutorial has to be more than "let's grab this tool and do something with it". Call me old-fashioned, but I think a tutorial has to explain why a tool is used and what benefits and limitations it has. But, as always, that's just me and my two cents. :-D ;-)

Okay, first of all an explanation where I am "coming from", so to speak: I started as a photomaniper when I created illustrations for my Star Trek fan-fic. You know, putting one actor's head on another actor's body and stuff like that. Then, after quite a while of doing this, I discovered photography as something I like doing. And from where I sit the difference looks pretty simple to define: If you change an image to something it never was you are doing a photomanip. Combining elements of two or more different pictures is a prime example of that. But if you use postwork techniques to bring out what you consider important in an image - or enhance an aspect of the image you saw but the camera did not capture quite like your eye did it - it is not a manip. However much an image is changed I would not consider it a photomanip, as long as the goal of the artist is to present/enhance some aspect of a single image taken that he/she saw when the original photo was made, even if that involves some radical changes of focus, lighting, or colors. But that's just me. :-)

Quote - what am i doing wrong?

You are trying to use BBCode, whereas most of the post formatting seems to beased on HTML (as far as I can tell, being not very fluent in HTML). Gave me quite a headache too, for a while. What I do these days is save coding that works in a text file, replace parts of it when I want to post a new image, then copy-paste the whole block into my post. Might be a bit of a roundabout way to handle it, but probably doesn't take much longer than typing all the tags would.

Pete, you do not have to "copyright" a photo in any way, as you own the copyright to any piece of art the moment you create said piece of art. It's not like a trademark or patent that has to be registered to come into force. All a watermark or other copyright notice does is allert people to the fact that you hold the rights to it. Now, as for protecting your rights to any image you take: A big fat ugly watermark may really be your best choice to protect your images from being stolen and passed off as someone else's work. IIRC there are programs that will encode invisible copyright information in the image, but that only helps you prove that it is yours. There are a few ways to prevent someone from simply doing a "right mouse click" on your images and downloading them to their computer, but given enough time and effort some a***hole will figure out how to get his grubby little paws on your images. And once he does, the best copyright notice/protection may be useless as you probably won't have the time or resources to fight a court battle against someone who could be living at the other end of the world. The problem is not "creating" a copyright, it is enforcing it, and even if you can afford the best lawyer in the world it will do little to keep a stolen image from spreading on the net, once the deed is done. If you really want to go professional and need to put some images on your homepage I would strongly suggest you (i) make it as difficult as possible for anyone to download your images, and (ii) use a big ugly watermark. If you intend to go professional you can always stick a "inquire for higher-quality sample images" notice on your page if you are worried about image theft. Not sure if that may drive some potential customers away, but it would allow you the 'feel out' anyone you send your images to and keep track of where those images go.

Quote - It's kind of a back to the basics challenge.

I don't really think it is. After all, how much of a basis has B/W phtography been for anyone here? Sure, black and white has been the start of photography, but how much has it really been the basis of what the guys and gals around here do? If it has been, it has been a choice, but not a necessity, as it has been been when photography was really at its "basics". These days black-and-white photos are an artistic choice, not a "basic" - or so I would think. What the basics of photgraphy are can be defined from a historical POV, but will that really do the craft justice? Like most things photgraphy evolves, so should we really cling to the roots of it, or embrace the opportunities modern technology provides and make them our own? Nevertheless, this challenge got me thinking and I figured if I shot a B/W image I might as well shoot an image of a blackbird:

Î would like to extend my congratulations to all the winners, but at the same time I would like to extend my congratulations to everyone who participated in this challenge, however many votes you received. Voting sure wasn't easy with all this many excellent photos. :-) I can only judge by myself, but the Urban/Cityscape genre presents some obvious motives and it was refreshing for me to see a lot of entires that broke some of the conventions that had been set by previous posts in this gallery category. This challenge sure made me think and I hope the same goes for everyone in future genre challenges. :-)

And a fine and happy new year to you, Tom. :-) As for your question, no, I don't usually refer to these things later. Most of the time I shoot plants or other subjects that don't move very fast, if any. That allows me the luxury to run through different settings and sort out the results later. But I never felt the need to go back to an older image to figure out what might work for a new image, as every situation is different, and with plants and macros aperture value (which is most important to me) depends a lot on the motive and background, so I doubt it would be much use to me anyway. When it comes to faster-moving motives I do it more or less like you and try to figure out a setting that will work when the moment comes if I have time for test shots, but again that is something old data won't help me much with.

How exactly do you count the votes? My assumption would be that you award 3 points for a 1st place vote, 2 for 2nd, and 1 point for a 3rd place vote - and if that's the case we have a clear winner and a tie for 2nd and 3rd place.

All I know about martial arts is what little I've read and what I've seen in movies (which may be far from the most realistic depection of it. G). But the words that come to me are motion, flow, and fluidity.

@rmtagg: IR = infrared @jocko: Seems your book is correct. The support section of the (German) Nikon homepage says the same thing. Alas, it doesn't specify if some of their DSLRs models are an exception, it only mentions cameras for the consumer market. But to me it sounds like they all have this feature.

It's an interesting read, but the focus is, IMO, too much on the business world. Not entirely surprising, mind you, given that the article appears in the "Business" section. But as a general statement about creativity and how ideas are created and communicated it falls a bit short, viewed from where I sit. The experiment with the "tappers" is certainly interesting, but after starting with a rather broad and general statement the article fails (again IMO) to carry through and apply that broad statement in a broad context. Instead we get some general ideas and experiments presented to make a point about a rather specific field. And the way creativity works in the workplace is something I think can't be linked that easily to more general thoughts about creativity. Just compare the opening statement to the last few paragraphs of the article: At the end of the article there is nothing left about how creativity works in general, but only talk about specific contexts. As I said, I think it's an interesting read. But it falls short of providing what it pretends to be about in the opening paragraph. Unexpected twists and turns may be a staple of writing, but here it leaves me rather cold, and a bit disappointed.

It's a "Sticky" right here in this forum called 'Genre Challenge open for voting' or somesuch. http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2724800 Sorry, I don't speak HTML, so I can't turn the above into a link. :-D ;-)