Early in 2011, there was a brouhaha after newspaper photographer Jay Westcott complained about Lady Gaga’s photo release form given to photographers attending her concerts. PDN characterized the story as a “fame monster gobbling up photographers’ copyrights“. What you see above is a copy of the actual release form given at concerts. Apparently contracts like this one are pretty standard these days.
(via Reddit)
Reminiscent of the Fatescapes series we featured recently, LIVE ! is an ongoing project by Hatim el Hihi and Jean-Marie Delbes in which they post classic album covers that have had deceased band members carefully Photoshopped out of them.
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Wedding photographer Joe Simon learned about copyright the hard way recently after his video of Tony Romo’s wedding went viral on YouTube. He had used the song “Fix You” by Coldplay without permission, and was forced to take down the video and pay a settlement to avoid a costly lawsuit. David Walker of Photo District News has an illuminating article on the issue:
“It’s nearly impossible and I’ve never heard of a wedding photographer successfully being able to license a mainstream song for synchronized use,” [wedding photographer David Jay] says. “I’ve spent a long time trying to make it possible. Photographers want to pay a reasonable fee to use the music so when they can’t they’ll just do it anyway.”
The problem, Jay explains, is that you have to get a license from three or four different people, including the lyricist, the composer, and the recording artist and/or their record company. While rights licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI make it easy to license music for broadcast, they don’t offer synchronization licenses for “small” users like wedding photographers.
Wedding Photographers Face the (Copyrighted) Music [PDN]
Image credit: Music Note Bokeh by all that improbable blue
A major craze in camera-related novelty items started early last year when Canon lens mugs took the Internet by storm. Last December we showed you a speaker designed to look like a Canon DSLR and lens. Now Nikonian music-lovers can join in on the fun: there’s a new Nikon 55-200mm lens speaker for sale on eBay that costs between $20 and $40.
Renowned rock photographer Baron Wolman, the first photo editor at Rolling Stone magazine, is speaking out against the worrying trend of copyright grabs by music artists. He recently spoke to makingimages.com.au, saying:
I think it’s horrible – here’s how I feel about that. They own their likeness, they are the creative force – if they were not musicians, we would not have been taking pictures, right? So they’re the source of the creativity, but on the other hand, we are the source of the visual creativity recording them. So I think that that copyright should remain with the photographer, but with limitations upon how the pictures can be used.
[...] But to just say “they own everything”, I mean, why even do it?
Wolman’s comments are directed towards bands like the Foo Fighters, which reportedly has one of the severest photo waivers in the industry.
Iconic Rock Photographer Hits Out At Foo Fighters [makingimages.com.au]
Image credit: Photograph by Scribblerman
For three years, Italy-based photographer James Mollison visited music concerts and photographed the rabid fans outside. The resulting photographs became an interesting project titled, The Disciples, which shows how people emulate the singers and bands they love to form their identity.
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Instagram is changing not just the way photos can be shared, but how music videos can be made. UK indie rock band The Vaccines recently created a website that asked fans to snap photographs of themselves while at music festivals and then tag them with “#VACCINESVIDEO”. After receiving nearly 3,000 submissions, the band used them to create the music video for their song “Wetsuit”. Aside from a few video clips, everything you see in the video was submitted through Instagram.
(via Mashable)
P.S. Building upon this idea: what if a band were to ask fans to snap photos during a live performance of a song, and then combine the photos afterward using the timestamps of the photos to sync them with the song? That would be crazy.
Shutterlog is an interesting YouTube channel started earlier this year by Mijonju and Cameron Lew that collects user-submitted videos of people taking a picture with their favorite camera. After receiving and sharing over 100 videos, they decided to take some of the shutter click clips and remix them into a beat. It’s like a simpler version of Lv Sisi’s Digital Analogue.
Here’s a super creative video that attempts to capture 100 years of East London fashion, dance, and music in just 100 seconds. Reminds me of Rick Mereki’s amazing “Move” short that we featured earlier this month, except this video travels through “time” rather than space.
(via Laughing Squid)
