Photography and the Law - Useful UK Article

Since this subject has been raised in various newsgroups several times
recently, I thought it would be worth drawing attention to a very useful
and quite comprehensive 3-page article in the August/September issue of
F2 Freelance and Digital magazine.

This UK magazine is not commonly found on newsagents shelves, but (I
think) may be subscription only. I find it an excellent magazine (apart
from the title) covering a good mix of things (film, digital, freelance
work, generally the best end of amateur work and the part-time/freelance
stuff) which suits me well. YMMV. It is edited by David Kilpatrick, who
occasionally makes very cogent contributions here. Contact

http://www.iconpublications.com

I have no connection, other than as a satisfied subscriber.

David

 

Thanks for the heads up - the article was in fact sourced from internet
newsgroups originally, as its author made a PDF available freely. I
approach her (Linda Macpherson, a law lecturer in Edinburgh) and she
equally freely permitted reworking the rather densely packed PDF into an
article, and updated sections at my request (specifically, those dealing
with photographing children). Paul Cooper, a well-known UK commercial
stock shooter, made a title page photo for me at a very modest fixed fee
on the basis of placing the photo on Alamy as RF after I had used it,
and I have been able to reproduce this excellent article in both our
MASTER PHOTO DIGITAL (professional association) magazine and in f2.

All our magazines including the UK Konica Minolta PHOTOWORLD mag are
subcription only, and it is no easy task to sell physical paper
magazines today. The title of f2 was a change made last year to our
earlier FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER magazine because the ad agencies said
that unless the title included the word DIGITAL we would be unlikely to
see any more advertising; most UK photo importers now ask their agencies
only to advertise in digital photography titles. Hence the name changes
on our two magazines for the pro/am-pro markets.

I find whatever contribution I may make to NGs is far exceeded by the
value of the input and feedback received, by the breadth of knowledge
(some unprintable without breaking embargoes) and in the featured
photographers I am able to find via forums/NGs.

David

 

Sorry for the dig, I was just being playful. What you say sounds sad but
all to credible.

David

 

Here's a link to what I think was the original article:
www.sirimo.co.uk/media/UKPhotographersRights.pdf

Sorry, David, don't mean to disuade people from subscribing to your
magazine. However, there are probably many who would be interested in
the content but not the subscription fee.

Please note, David has said that the information has been updated in a
couple of places so, if the contents of the .pdf are likely to apply to
you it may be wise to investigate further and treat the .pdf as
suggestion, not law.


Justin.

 

We do provide a large number of articles in pdf form on the
www.iconpublications.com website, including some from the very latest
editions in their full form, freely downloadable. If they turn out to be
password protected in any way, it is 'hypo' or 'hypo1'.

Right now we are working on a change to the website which will make it
possible to put all the magazine content up as pdf downloads, accessible
for small subscription fee on-line with no printed edition. If and when
this goes ahead, the entire back issue content should be converted and
available. If it proves successful, additional material not appearing in
printed editions will be added.

Although I love producing printed magazines, they are barely viable
given my approach to content - the exact reverse of the Dorling
Kindersley type 'easily digested chunks' with lots of sidebars, panels,
little topics, tables and small pictures. I go for long rambling
narrative texts with as many useful asides as possible and large
pictures well presented in a plain fashion! Exactly what the industry
says 'will not sell' to today's readers with their short attention
spans, limited vocabulary and lack of real interest...

David

 

It was available on the site without subscription.

You're simply repeating information contained in the last
paragraph.

 

There is nothing wrong with the Dorling Kindersley approach - it gets
people reading. All the excellent information in your long narratives
is completely worthless if you cannot get people to read it.

 

True, Tony, but having worked for the Dorling Kindersley machine (the
darkroom section of John Hedgecoe's original 1970s Book of Photography
was mine) and then for the partwork biz which followed (You and Your
Camera and The Photo) I know that the restrictions of explaining every
step in (shall we say) 5 lines of 50 characters each and forcing all
processes into a set of three, six or twelve boxes/pix - and so on -
does real damage to content.

I see better written, longer articles in womens' market TV soap celeb
magazines, compared to some consumer technology and photo mags. My
experience is that most buyers of mags complain about lack of reading
matter, and 'only takes half an hour'.

There is a compromise and I like the general approach taken by Digital
Photography, and Practical's latest makeover seems to have removed the
excesses of graphic box/sidebar/pullquote/table/blob design-run editorial.

Photography lacks an equivalent of Sound on Sound magazine, which is
happy to print a 4500 word feature if 4500 words are needed. It's also
amazingly successful for a private venture. If I was 20 years younger I
might look at that and think 'I can do the same with digital
photography' but I'm no longer especially interested in big money -
either making it or LOSING it...

David

 

Oi, mush! We didn't use boxes *that* much on The Photo (an ex-Marshall
Cavendish sub writes) - in fact, we used to run quite long articles. But
I'd agree with your general premise. The move to boxout-mania to entice
those afraid of words has contributed to greater superficiality.

BTW, if memory serves, my very first journalism job was to sub an article of
yours for The Photo - a 2,000-word piece on using wideangle lenses.

Steve Mansfield

 

In message <devt5e$3dh$-infra.bt.com>

[OT]
But here's the double whammy:
I teach in a school which, although we have some excellent pupils
every year, is definitely pear-shaped in the academic department.

I'd imagined at first that the small chunks with sidebars,
pull-quotes, etc., etc. was trying to cater to the 'lower-ability'
reader: and have noticed that a lot of the publications which we get
to give out to pupils are written in this style. Suprisingly, the able
pupils (who would be able to cope with the traditional 'wordy'
approach) like and can cope well with the more modern layout: the
poorer-ability pupils are totally lost, as they don't know where to
look and get confused.

Of course, they are totally turned off by the 'wordy' approach, and
probably can only cope with the narrative beginning-to-end in photos
or, preferably, cartoons.

Slainte

Liz

 

I agree with this. I am quite susceptible to buying magazines, but only
have two (the GMC ones) on subscription now as I find that generally
they are all of this DK style which I find too superficial. You can
'read' an issue of many photo. mags in a short space of time and end up
feeling like you've wasted your time. There's no 'meat' there.
I'd like to think that there's scope for both approaches (entry-level,
boxes, sidebars, etc. and a more 'learned' style), as there used to be,
but perhaps there isn't anymore? Sad, but we're often told that society
is all 'instant gratification' these days.

 

How many can name the popularizer of the expression "double whammy"?

Without Google.

 

Thus spake Frank ess unto the assembled multitudes:

Wasn't it the UK Conservative Party - or perhaps one of the Saatchi clan?

 

OK, The Photo was not quite as compartmented as Y & YC, and I am
thinking of the step-by-steps more than anything - there always had to
be a set number of steps no matter what the subject!

The Photo was less commercial too. Eaglemoss were still paying me fees
for spin-offs five years ago, twenty years after the original photos
were published. It's dried up now, finally, but they kept reeling out
reworks and revisions and stuff for two decades. I suspect maybe
Marshall Cavendish only bought words from me - this was the publication
where I stopped supplying images because of the complaint:

'Yours pictures have too much green in them...'

Yes, I lived in the countryside, and my pictures generally showed that.
The London picture editor couldn't stomach so many trees, fills, fields
and things like that and wanted more concrete!

Actually, what they wanted was a more international flavour, and the
reason for my pictures not being acceptable was that they didn't work
well outside the UK. Not just more urban, but more variety of landscape,
was needed; desert, prairie, alpine, arctic, the lot. And more variety
of people, and architectural styles. They had to source images from all
over the world in order to create a publication which could be sold on
to the world market.

Now of course if it had been run by EMAP, a boxful of shots of Bamburgh
Castle, that Cornish beach with big stones, a couple of waterfalls -
well, I'd have been made...

David

 

John Fryatt wrote:

GMC is the best hope you have. Keith Wilson and Ailsa McWhinnie both
come from the same direction as I do editorially/designwise, and they
have a VERY good company behind them. Outdoor Photography and Black and
White Photography are in a class of their own on the news-stands.

I recently received two books from GMC and their associate PIP
(Photographers Institute Press), both on the KM Dynax 7D camera. The
American imported book was little more than a manual reprinted, black
and white all through, irrelevant pictures badly captioned in the wrong
place, peppered with errors. Their own PIP guide by Chris Weston (an
excellent UK photo tech writer) was exactly the same price, full of
colour, far better produced and a decent user book going beyond the
manual in every way. They just happen also to be the importers for the
American object. Their own production standards are far higher.

David

 

Judge Dredd Voice activated gun. Double whammy was the highest output of
the gun.

 

You seem to have missed the point here.

Lots of people read Dorling Kindersley books, and enjoy them. Their
style invites people to read them. The content may be compromised -
in your eyes - but it is far better to get people reading something
than nothing. Many people are put off by long narratives to the point
where they either don't buy the book, or buy it and don't read it. No
matter how good the content, it is wasted if people don't read it.

This isn't because they are thick, it is just that most people no
longer have the time (and the peace and quiet) to digest long, complex
narratives. That's why there is a demand for books that explain
things in a way that people find easier to understand, given the many
competing demands on their time.

It takes a gifted person to write books in this style without losing
sight of what the book is about. In my opinion, Dorling Kindersley
deserve high praise for maintaining a very high standard of content
while making their books immensely readable and enjoyable.

 

Tony Polson wrote:

AVA Publishing are the current best at this. There is a particularly
good - really, really good - book by Jeremy Webb about to appear. Watch
out for it. It's the best photo book I have received in a long time. It
is called 'Creative Vision, £24.95, ISBN 2-88479-072-1 and it goes on
sale tomorrow.

This book does use the boxed copy/spread/extended caption style, but the
text is printed in tiny 8pt and the pages are biggish, which means
several hundred words can be used in place of just a few, for each
example. Webb himself is an exceptionally good photographer and uses
work from several dozen others. It's intelligent, visually surprising,
technically sound, and well designed and printed.

I believe it is also Jeremy Webb's first book. No commercial interest. I
just happen to be impressed by this in comparison with (for example) the
RotoVision pot-boilers where a fair to moderate hack writes a para about
a different photo example per spread - same basic formula, but in this
case, an extremely perceptive and thoughtful writer deals with just
about the whole visual idiom.

David

 

Success in this style depends on content, audience - and brilliance! I've
wasted much time in trying to transfer basic text with graphics (for
computers) to boxed step-by-step style and, not only is it very hard work, but
you frequently end up with very little said after 4 or 5 pages. It may be OK
for *very* basic stuff where that very little is all that is said - or where
you know *all* the audience knows all the basics and just wants the extra bits
illustrated. Attempting it under other circumstances is doomed to fail ...

... but I'm willing to learn from anyone who knows otherwise. ;-)