Juha Ylitalo

In August, 1999, I had one week vacation in Nice, France. During that week, I walked around in a city, did day trips to Monaco (and Monte Carlo’s Casino), Cannes and Diego-Les-Bains. All this was documented into 39 photographs that you can find from my photo album called Nice, France (August 12-29, 1999)
Yes, it all happened on last millenium. Yet, its sort of refreshing to go back in time. In my last year as film photographer, I photographed to slide film, sent them to local photolab to be scanned into PhotoCD and then converted those PhotoCD files into (6.3Mpix) JPGs in my own computer. In those glory days it was not unheard of that I photographed less than two rolls (36 slides/roll) during one week vacation. At that time I was also happily using kit lens (Canon EOS Elan and Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6) and cheapest ISO200 slide film that I could find from shop.
Nowdays I would take more than three hundred photographs from similar kind of trip and would have huge problems in getting number of photographs in the album go below two hundred …

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Let’s take one last look into photographs from year 2007, before I start posting new content from year 2008. These photographs were mostly chosen from photo-a-week project, but I’ve also added one photograph, that wasn’t photo of a week. See if you can recognize it.

Here are my 10 favorite photographs from year 2007.

Porontimajoki, Kuusamo (June 1, 2007)	Guivi fell, Kevo Strict Nature Reserve (September 4, 2007)
Olhava, Repovesi National Park (July 21, 2007)	iceBREAK 2007, Helsinki (April 15, 2007)
Sedum acre, Helsinki (June 29, 2007)	Great tit, Helsinki (October 21, 2007)
Kiasma, Helsinki (August 18, 2007)	Tübingen, Germany (November 20, 2007)
Hietaniemi cemetary, Helsinki	Winter Garden, Helsinki (December 9, 2007)

Did you recognize which photograph just made its first appearance on this blog?
Lue koko artikkeli »

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This weekened we made our first steps for getting some of our albums with finnish captions and place names translated for english speaking audience. First two albums were quite easy choices: Portfolio and Mute Swan (Cygnus Olor). Portfolio, because every photographer wants to show pictures that they like most, and Mute Swan, because all images have same caption (even though place names varies).
Next ones in queue are birds, plants, nature and wildlife, because in these photographs its easy to check different species english name from dictionaries. Once those have been done, I will probably go for vacation albums from Azores, Karhunkierros (also known as Bear’s Trail hiking trail) in Kuusamo, Finland and continue with other hiking trails.

There will also be more Photo-a-Week posts as we go further and further back in history. My goal on that front is to have one blog post for each photo-a-week image that I’ve posted so far. My photo-a-week project started on November 2004, so we still have “few” images to go through.

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I don’t know whether its Flickr’s large userbase and/or huge collection of images, but somehow Flickr always seem to be part of news, when someones photos are being used without proper license or in some other fishy way in media. News about how Virgin Mobile’s latest ad campaign in Australia are probably old news from many Flickr users, but now it can even be viewed at CNN.
One common (even though not mandatory) phenomen to these news about questionable use of Flickr’s images is that disputed photos have been licensed under Creative Commons license. There are at least six flavors of Creative Commons’ license with different rules regarding attribution, use of image and what you can do to the image. Regardless on what rights photographer was willing to give out, Virgin Mobile hadn’t bothered to check for Model Release from the girl in picture.
Even if we can ignore license issues on Virgin Mobile’s case, Creative Commons license has at least one problematic issue. How do we define what is commercial use and what is not. If you have personnel website with ads, is your site commercial? What about website for non-profit organization that has ads on its pages, is it commercial website?
These situations often come up, when new “non-profit” website want to use images from Flickr to make it look pretty and Google Ads to create revenue. Some of these sites might not even bother to check what the license each individual images has, while others might do it, but have their own definition for what is commercial use and what is not. There have been many debates about what is commercial and what is not, but we are still missing clear ruling on where the line is drawn. Even if their would be concensus on what it should be, is their way to write it down so that it means same thing all over the world, since every country has their own legal definitions for these things.
If you are using Flickr and want to play safe, Flickr has tools that you can use to protect your privacy, but you have to turn them on before you start uploading images. You can set your default license to be ‘All rights reserved’ instead of something more liberal. You can also define, whether you want your images to show up when some performs searches in Flickr through Flickr’s website and/or 3rd party tools.
While these things should make use of Flickr to be pretty safe, I’ve got tired of cases, where images form Flickr have been misused somewhere and I’ve decided to keep my images in ylitalot.net instead of trying to keep my photos in two places at the sametime. For those, who really want to follow my “photostream”, you can do it quite easily by monitoring my RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader. If your not familiar with RSS feeds, commoncraft.com has excellent video called RSS in plain english that will give good overview about how it can change the way, how you keep track of things.

Articles that I found afterwards:

• The Register: Creative Commons sued for deception

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My pro status in flickr will expire in 21 days (October 11, 2007). I originally purchased it for one year to be used as backup to all my JPGs. During this year, I bought two 500GB USB drives as faster, more reliable and versatile for backups. Since then I’ve been doing some sort of self searching on what should I do with flickr. During my time in flickr, I’ve found some very interesting photographers through it (_rebekka, artnir, B. Wilson, noeltykay, quarrresma, Richard-, T_smith, tankgirl, tinyfishy and äRRä), whose photographs will usually get my attention, when flickr’s daily mail arrives. At the same time, I feel that its not worth of time and effort for me to upload, tag, etc. my own photographs into flickr (vs. keeping them on my own website).
If I keep things on my own site, only feedback that I am going to get is Google Ads revenues, which have so far manage to cover my yearly hosting expenses within first ten months or so. If I send things to photo agencies (vastavalo.fi and Cartina), I am going to get some feedback during photo submission, but not whole lot after that, since my profits from there won’t even cover sensor cleaning costs.
At the moment, my long term plan is to keep on circulating some images on flickr (with free account), but at the same time generate english translation from portfolio, birds, plants and rest of the wildlife photo albums as well as photo albums about Bear Trail hikes in Kuusamo (2005 and 2007) and my trip to Azores and see, if those albums will start to generate revenue in one form or another.

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Current

Cameras:
Canon EOS 40D, (primary)
Canon EOS 20D, (backup)
Canon PowerShot G3 (undecided)
Canon AE-1 (for sale)
Prime lenses:
Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L [3%]
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro + EW-67 hood [14%]
Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM [1% + 2% (with 2x II)]
Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM [3% + 6% (with 1.4x II)]
Zoom lenses:
Tokina 12-24mm f/4 AT-X Pro DX [11%]
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM + EW-83DII hood [36%]
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM [9% + 1% (with 1.4x II)]
Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM
Tele-Converters: Canon EF 1.4x II (for 70-200/4L, 200/2.8L, 300/4L IS) and 2x II (for 200/2.8L)
Flashes: Canon ST-E2, Canon Speedlight 580EX II, Canon Speedlight 420EX with Stofen OmniBounce
Storage: 4GB, 2*2GB, 1GB, 512MB, 2*256MB (all in all 10GB)
Support:
Manfrotto 055ProB tripod (backup for lighter Velbon)
Manfrotto 449 Carbon monopod with Manfrotto 234RC2 tilt head
Manfrotto 709B tabletop tripod
Red Pod
Velbon CF-630 tripod and Manfrotto 486RC2 ballhead
Bags and cases:
Lowepro Primus AW (daytrips with 300/4L IS + 1.4x II)
Lowepro Toploader 75AW (hiking and situations where 70-200/4L, 200/2.8 + 2x II, 300/4L IS are needed),
Toploader Zoom 2 (carried inside backpacks during workdays, etc.)
Stealth Reporter 200AW (parties, events and such),
Lens Case 3 (for 70-200/4L, 200/2.8 + 2x II),
2 Lens Case 4S (for 35/1.4L, 100/2.8, 12-24/4,17-40/4L, 200/2.8L (+1.4x II) …)
Post Processing: BibblePro on Linux

Past

Cameras: Canon EOS Elan (switched to digi with digi IXUS), Canon digi IXUS (upgraded to G3)
Lenses:
Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 SP AF Aspherical XR Di LD (IF) (downsizing lens collection)
Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 (was sold with Canon EOS Elan)
Canon EF 35mm f/2 (upgraded to 35/1.4L)
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 (didn’t like its field of view)
Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 compact macro (macro made this lens fun to use)
Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 (too short for my taste)

[XX%] indicates how big percentage of my saved images was taken with this lens.

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