standing stones, originally uploaded by briandorey.

Stacks of stones in kimmeridge bay on Easter Sunday

Update 05/04/2010

More info about the photography issues for this law on http://www.stop43.org.uk

Update 28/02/2010

UK Gov nationalises orphans and bans non-consensual photography in public

The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to become law within the next 6 weeks. It introduces orphan works usage rights, which - unless amended, which HMG says it will not - will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist, since there is no ineradicable way of associating ownership details short of plastering your name right across the image. Photographer's organisations have pressed hard for mandatory attribution to deter orphans being manufactured. Early in the consultation process the IPO accepted the irresistible logic that it was completely unreasonable to permit orphan use without a balancing requirement to not orphan photos in the first place. However, the IPO recognised with dismay that this would mean "taking on Rupert" (Murdoch).

Publishers have a long history of opposing our moral rights. They were responsible for the feeble and unenforceable moral rights clauses in the 1988 Act. They want their branding, not ours, and they want maximum freedom to exploit our IP at minimum cost and inconvenience.

The IPO avoided confrontation with Murdoch, who does have something of a rep for being a vital friend in an election year. The Bill contains no deterrent to the creation of orphans, no penalties for anonymising your work, no requirement for bylines. It is a luncheon voucher for industry hungry for free and cheap content.

So Flickr, Google Images, personal websites, all of it will become commercial publishers' photolibrary. A fee will have to be deposited with a collecting society in case the owner spots the usage. The author who discovers his work has been used as an orphan can then make a claim and receive a percentage of the peanuts, after the collecting society has had its share, and the government its share.

Source: http://copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public

If this law is passed, anyone who takes a photo can have it "stolen" by the media and not get paid or have any attribution to their work unless we put a huge "photo by xxx" across the middle of all images used online.

There is a sample letter on http://copyrightaction.com/digital-economy-bill-mp-letter-template which you can send to your MP to urge them not to vote for this bill.

These were taken using the full Bowens studio kit to light the item using softboxes and light the background with separate lights to give a more even light over the items.

Below are some new samples of what we can do with the rotary table we built for 360 degree stock photography

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After looking at various ways to show stock items in a better format for our ecommerce sites we thought it would be good to have 360 rotating images of the items.

Commercial systems to do this cost thousands and as we already have a Manfrotto 300N Panoramic Head for my tripod we decided to use this to make a round table top to use on the panoramic head.

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DIY Camera Laser Break Beam Trigger MK 2

A DIY optical camera flash or camera trigger using a laser and PIC Processor based timer circuit.

Following from the basic high speed photography trigger we made, we found that it was difficult to be precise with the timing using the simple 556 timer based circuit.

We decided to try to make a new version using a PIC Processor and LCD display to display the timing settings.

The program was written in C and uses the ADC on the PIC as the input to take data direct from a photodiode and the processor deals with all the timing and delays before sending a pulse to a optical isolator to trigger a camera or flash unit.

The prototype build on a breadboard to allow easy development of the code.

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A DIY optical camera flash or camera trigger using a laser and basic timer circuit.

I have always enjoyed trying to take water drop photos but getting the flash and camera to trigger at the right moment by hand was always very difficult.

After researching commercial (very expensive) and various DIY triggers which activate via a light beam, infrared or sound, I decided to try to make a trigger which would fire a remote flash using a red laser as the light source.

I found a lot of very useful info on www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Triggered-High-Speed-Photography/ regarding timer circuits an I was able to adapt and add modify a circuit posted on the website to use an optical isolator to trigger my external flash unit.

Parts List:

• Stripboard
• 1 x Photodiode
• 1 x Red Laser module 5V (this came from a gun sight but the laser from a laser pen should be ok)
• 1 x 556 timer chip
• 1 x High Voltage optical isolator
• 2 x 1M 22 turn variable resistor
• 2 x 1K 1/4 watt resistor
• 1 x 22K 1.4 watt resistor
• 2 x 120R 1.4 watt resistor
• 3 x 1uF 35V Electrolytic Cap
• 1 x 10uF 35V Electrolytic Cap
• 4 x 100n Ceramic Cap

The prototype circuit board

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I have added a new custom gallery to the blog which you can access via the Gallery link on the top of each page or on http://www.briandorey.com/gallery/gallery.aspx

Went out for a drive today with my Canon Eos 5D in the car and did one frame every second which was then converted into a time lapse movie

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3321437