Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

I just exited the holding pattern.

This is the 2TB LaCie Little Big Disk, Thunderbolt Edition. Based on the nods the drive has gotten from trusted folks so far, I picked it up so that I can have a fast, huge, and portable place to store and work with tons of data while in the field. The 500GB drives I’ve been using will still be useful for backups, but they just weren’t going to cut being primary work drives for the things I’m looking at doing in the very near future. And since all of the equipment I’m going to use in the near future in the field—my MacBook Air as well as a loaner iMac or the like—has Thunderbolt, this drive makes a lot of sense.

For what I need this drive for, speed is a priority, but so is capacity. So I went with the 2TB HDD version instead of the version with twin 120GB SSDs. Still, it’s pretty damn fast. How fast? Let’s let Blackmagic Disk Speed Test answer that:

Not shabby. Not shabby at all. Obviously, this is straight-line performance on an empty drive and not a measure of how fast the drive is for random access. It’s also slower than the SSD version, which Patrick Lenz is now using for his iMac boot drive. For storing photos and video files on the road, however, this should work just fine.

So, what’s not to like? Three things:

1. Having to use an external power cable is annoying and potentially limiting when using on the road with a laptop. There’s probably a power limitation somewhere that forces this, but still. Sub-optimal. Very sub-optimal. If I find myself on a long plane ride without an AC outlet—which happens all of the time—I won’t be able to work with data on this drive.
2. The drive isn’t as quiet as I’d like. There are two spindles in there and absolute quiet isn’t going to happen with traditional hard drives, but this drive seems a bit more noisy than I’d expect based on my time with other portable drives.
3. There’s only one choice in Thunderbolt cables: 2m long. Great for the desktop. But on the road, I could certainly go for a 1m cable. And for daisy chaining devices, a 0.5m cable would be even better. Of course, this is Apple’s problem to fix, but it’d be really nice not to have all this cable gunking up the works.

Obviously, none of these issues are deal-breakers. The benefits the drive offers overshadow them, especially since LaCie is currently the only game in town for this size Thunderbolt drive. And long term, none of these issues will be a problem at all when it’s time to crack the enclosure open and drop a couple of SSDs in it for use with a desktop.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Copyrights, fair use, clip length, sampling, and a whole lot of other things are hard… But credit, that’s not hard. It’s not hard at all. Neither is accurately portraying what a piece is and what it does.

Credit is easy. Well, mostly easy. It might have been hard to get the format of citations right at first in school when we were writing papers, but the act of citing is easy. You just do it. At least you do it after getting your knuckles rapped for plagiarism a few times. Yet, people all over the Internet don’t. A huge portion of new set of amateur (remember, that’s not a bad word) creatives that are—for the first time in human history—publishing to a huge worldwide audience just aren’t doing it. And many of them when confronted with the problem, just shrug and don’t see the issue.

Furthermore, as more of these amateurs pass into the ranks of pros—such as has happened with the explosion of the Web—their habits and attitudes seem to go with them and are now spread throughout the new media sphere. I’ve dealt with this many times before and have been perplexed not only by the fact that my work has been used without attribution, but also by the attitude that comes back from those I contact about it. I blogged about an example of this last October when Michael Arrington used an image of mine distributed under the CC-BY license without attribution on his blog, and then removed it with snark when I simply asked for him to attribute the use. While Arrington is well known for being the way he is, my experience with him is one experience out of hundreds I’ve had that have followed the same path.

Why is this? I wonder that all the time. I especially wonder it when I have discussions with myself about how I want to license my work. I’m a fan of the Creative Commons, but I’ve seen so much work misused even with CC licenses that I keep hesitating in using them even though my own position on copyright and photography lines up quite nicely with CC-BY-NC.

This morning, a thought occurred to me. It’s a thought from left field, but stay with me. Maybe the people on the Internet that aren’t giving appropriate credit are just following social norms as established by a lifetime of commonly seen commercial media use. After all, you don’t see credits for creative works used on advertisements. You often don’t see credits in lots of other works that are creative compilations around you. Even where credits appear, such as television shows and movies, they are often incomplete or squished off to the side of the screen on TV so that video of what’s coming up next can be shown.

Maybe that sets a template. A template of expectations about the right way to do it. And—fully consuming the everything is a remix Kool-Aid here—since we emulate what’s come before, maybe what we are seeing here are people who think they are doing the right thing because it matches the majority of what they’ve seen in the world. All these people who are just using stuff willy-nilly without credit are emulating the visible part of what media has shown them is the right way to do things for a hundred years.

Of course, those people are blissfully unaware of the fact that arrangements were made to use a lot of content without attribution. Money was paid. Even when money wasn’t paid, discussions were—for the most part—had. But, that’s invisible. That isn’t part of the visible template.

It’s just a wild ass hypothesis. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s the random start of a thought. But, maybe there’s something to it? On the other hand, maybe it’s full of bunk. After all, newspapers credit photographs under images all the time—though often with corporate names like AP which leads others to try to credit photos to Flickr. Films have huge rolls of credits at the end. It’s not like the commercial world is a totally uncredited mess where money has totally bought off everyone’s right to be credited.

What do you think? Has somebody already ventured into this territory and chased this thought experiment through? I’m seriously interested. Please chime in at Google Plus if you care to share your thoughts.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Background trivia: Camera equipment is traditionally black to reduce its appearance in in reflections. The reason Canon long lenses are white is to reduce the negative effects from thermal expansion of the flourite lens elements used. That, and it makes the Canon lenses easier to pick out in a crowded press box.

More trivia: For a time, at least, you could get light grey long lenses from Nikon. It’s rumored you can still do so if you know the right people and are willing to pay extra for it.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Since a lens aperture is a mechanical device, it has tolerances and some lenses are better than others about repeating apertures. Most lenses don’t get it exactly the same every time and the result is that the circumference changes ever so slightly between exposures. The difference is almost always so small that you wouldn’t notice in side-by-side images but when you combine them all into a movie, it can be downright infuriating.

There are a few ways to eliminate aperture flicker, such as the twist your lens slightly off the mount trick that you do on Canon cameras. You can shoot wide-open, but that can introduce other problems by forcing you to use short exposure times or stack ND filters. Or, you can shoot with lenses that don’t integrate at all with your camera so that the aperture doesn’t cycle between exposures.

In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to take this thought a bit too far and try modifying a few old used Nikon Series E lenses to disable the mechanical linkage used by the Nikon F-mount to hold the aperture open between exposures. Here’s a short little video I made while modifying a Series E 135mm 1:2.8 lens.

It’s not for the mechanically faint of heart, and if you have any question about doing it, I would recommend that you don’t. The tiny screws that you’ll find inside lenses strip easily—yes, I speak from experience—and you can quickly make a mess of things. Furthermore, every lens is a bit different inside and you shouldn’t consider the above a definitive how-to. Instead, you should view it as an illustration that it’s possible. And last, you should know that you’re in serious manual mode territory when you use a lens like this.

That said, I’ve found modifying these lenses works rather well and, considering that I started with rather old and inexpensive used equipment and can always reattach the part I removed, the risk involved was really quite minimal. You’ll almost certainly see some examples of time-lapse footage made from these lenses in the weeks to come.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

An instant landmark, the “Go By Streetcar” sign hangs at the intersection of Northwest 11th and Lovejoy and joyfully encourages people to use Portland’s awesome transit system. It’s also an homage to the “Go By Train” sign on Union Station. Shot using my Nikon D3S and new Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic at ISO 3200.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

I made this photo standing in the ActiveSpace parking lot at the intersection of Northwest 17th and Quimby. I was using my Nikon D3S and new Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic and shot it at ISO 6400. All the effect is in the lens with basic color correction and adjustments in Lightroom 4.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.

I should say that there’s the most meager attempt at attribution at 3:34 in the video where Luc says, ”On each clip presented in this video, you can see the number that refer to list below”. He obviously means below in the sense of below the video on the YouTube page. Of course, below means nothing when you embed the video somewhere else, like when Maria Popova links into it on curiosity counts.

Ok, so when you’re on the YouTube page looking at the caption, there’s a link to this Google+ page. Go there and you see a list of links—links to the source videos. OK, so that’s credit of a sort, but I’m sorry, that’s not good enough even if the creators of those videos are totally cool with this usage either through permission is given via a Creative Commons license or other arrangement made by the parties.

Proper attribution would have listed names in the video in the commonly accepted place for such attribution: the credits.

End. Of. Story.

I see this happen all of the time and I think that this is something that so many people that are in the free and remix culture movements miss on. As much as the proponents of those movements agree that attribution is important—it’s a core requirement of every Creative Commons license, for example—there’s so very little push to make that happen. And it’s something that drives anybody who is in the middle ground of this debate screaming away from the idea of letting people use their stuff.

You’ll notice that I’m staying silent in this rant on the rest of the copyright implications with this video. That’s because I don’t know if Luc got permission or not from the creators of all 179 sources. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. But this rant isn’t about any other copyright implications. It’s about one thing: Giving credit where credit is due to the people who created the stuff that this video was cut from, and doing it the right way.

Listen, regardless of the rest of the debate around modern Copyright practices, attribution—crediting where ideas or parts come from—is essential. It’s the right thing to do. It makes creative types a lot more friendly towards the whole idea of letting others build off their work instead of feeling ripped off. So do it. And press on others to do it. Kick their butts and call them out when they don’t do it or they half-ass it, even on something as beautifully edited as Luc’s video.

One more thing I should mention: I’m know I’m picking on Luc here, but I wouldn’t be writing this if this were the first or even hundredth time I’ve seen this problem. Noticing the issue this time was simply the straw that prompted the post.

UPDATE 2/20: Since I posted this, Luc’s video has been removed due to a copyright claim. Apparently, as one would easily suspect but which I didn’t want to accuse without knowing, Luc did not get permission to use the clips. Discussion continues on the Google Plus page where some of the people whose clips were used have weighed in and others are trying to defend Luc based on fair use. Messy stuff that’s playing out about as one would expect if you’ve seen this sort of thing before.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Linked by James Duncan Davidson.