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.
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?
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
Lv Sisi created this music video, titled “Digital Analogue”, using only sounds recorded from a collection of antique cameras and 6,000 individual photographs carefully shot and edited together into an artistic stop-motion video.
This is a low budget music video directed by sixtwelve for the song “The Better Man” by Cayetano, and filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II. The story centers around an old Polaroid 636 received as a birthday present. Read the rest of this entry »
The music video for Sara Bareilles’ song “King of Anything” has everything contained in Polaroids and contact sheets. The concept is pretty neat. Can you imagine how mind-boggling this video would have been if they had done it in stop-motion with individual Polaroid photos and carefully exposed film strips? That’d be epic.
