Surf's up in Capitola

The surf scene today at 3 p.m. in Capitola, Calif. Click image to enlarge.

The Bay today

Here's a shot of the San Francisco skyline, taken from Tiburon (on the north shore of the bay), at 2:45 pm on this sun-dappled day. Angel Island is at the left. Click on the image for a larger view.

Looking for a stable photo viewing program

For the past few years I've been using Moon Software Multimedia Xplorer (v. 2.09) on my PC for organizing and viewing photos. I also use Picasa and FlipAlbum 5. (And then there's iPhoto for our Macs.)

Multimedia Xplorer has been crashing badly lately, the victim of my upgrade to Photoshop 7.01, Windows XP, or both.

I hear there are dozens of good photo/slide-show programs for PCs. Anyone have any favorites you'd like to recommend? Mostly want to be able to view collections of family photos at a glance, play a slide show, and be able to call them up for editing in Photoshop 7 without Photoshop or the photo program crashing on me.

Corbis sues Amazon over celebrity images

Corbis, the image licensing agency owned by Bill Gates, is suing Amazon for selling celebrity images without permission.

Here's the AP story. Here's an Internetnews.com story about Corbis invoking the DMCA. And here's an excerpt from the WSJ story (subscription required):

In May, Matthew Rolston paid $24.95 on the Internet for a photo taken by a famous photographer, Matthew Rolston.

The photographer was surprised he was able to buy the picture -- of actress Meg Ryan -- since he had authorized its use only once, for an issue of Detour magazine three years ago. Mr. Rolston had never permitted the picture to be sold over the Web.

Now the company that distributes Mr. Rolston's pictures and those of other photographers is fighting back against what it sees as a rising problem of illegal Internet sales.

Monday Corbis Corp., the Seattle photo-licensing company owned by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, filed a suit against online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and 15 poster and picture stores for allegedly selling unauthorized copies of hundreds of images. Included among the movie, music, sports and television celebrities are images of Cameron Diaz and Vin Diesel.

The suit appeared to have an immediate impact. Late Monday, Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said the Internet merchant would remove the images in question from its site, possibly by the end of the day. ...

Corbis's lawsuits raise a fundamental question for Internet companies such as Amazon: How much responsibility does a company have to monitor and weed out misbehavior by users of its Web site?

The answer is somewhat murky. The best-known ruling on a case of this type involved Amazon rival eBay Inc., which in 2001 successfully argued it wasn't liable for the sale of unauthorized copies of a documentary movie about serial killer Charles Manson through the eBay site. In its defense, eBay successfully used a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. that law generally favors copyright holders, but exempts certain "Internet service providers" from liability for material that passes through their networks or Web sites.

But the same defense may not work for Amazon, because, Corbis executives say, Amazon is more directly involved in transactions on its site than eBay. In their complaint, Corbis attorneys argue Amazon plays a central role in reproducing, displaying and distributing the allegedly misused material. Amazon bills customers when an image is sold, receives a portion of the proceeds and allows customers to track their shipments through its site, Corbis alleges.

Gallery: a free Web slide-show program

Scot, by the way, is playing with a program I hadn't seen before: Gallery, which I take to be a free open-source software program available for download. Here's a Father's Day photo slide show Scot just put up.

Photo retailers in a digital world

NY Times: Photo Shops Find the Bright Side of Digital Technology

A mugshot-laden blogroll

I've added some photos in the right-hand nav to add a little personality to the boring text-only blogrolls we see everywhere. Took most of the photos myself, though relied on Google Images for a couple. (They look better when not reduced to 45 pixels and optimized for quick downloads at 3K.) If you're listed there and want to send along a mugshot, fire away!

Gallery: a cool photo utility

Jamie Hutt, a design editor at startribune.com, emailed the online news list about a program he's crazy about called Gallery. Says Jamie:

It's the best of many "donation-ware" photo tools available now. Aside from providing a lovely slideshow utility, it allows you to catalog and organize all of your site's images. Oh, and it makes your pics searchable. If you have zero to little photo automation on your site, but would love to easily improve efficiency and access, I'd really recommend you look at this software.

You can see it in a form that was easily customized for my personal pics at:

http://www.huttstuff.com/gallery(Username: guest Password: guest)

Or sample one gallery here.

These are lovely slide shows.

The dangers of taking photographs

Just came across this email to the Farber list from a professor at Bryn Mawr:

At the faculty meeting at Bryn Mawr College on 12 Feb 2003, we were informed that a student at Haverford (our affiliated College) was arrested over the weekend when he was trying to do his homework assignment in Philadelphia. As part of the Cities project, he was taking photographs of SEPTA (our regional transit authority) facilities when he was arrested, detained for a few hours, and eventually released. Haverford administration is working to try to ensure that this event not be a part of the student's permanent police record. Apparently taking photographs at transit facilities is cause for arrest during "Code Orange" alert, the authorities explained. Faculty were advised to be careful about assigning "field trip" projects during such alerts.

In response to this, another list member posted this handy one-page foldup, The Photographers' Right (pdf). It's legit -- sent in by Bert P. Krages, an attorney in Portland, Oregon -- and may come in handy in these sad times, it seems.