Stray pets in abundance here…
It’s hard to tell a dog that there are appropriate sizes for everyone.
Especially this particular cutie seemed to be determined to bring back anything you threw away. I tried with a log I just managed to lift and he went after it and tried to drag it back. To no avail, of course 😀
Oh, and challenge of the day:
Try panning this!
Yes, I hear you thinking, but seriously… “Art” is subjective.
I considered entering this into the FotoFinlandia competition, but I don’t think Finland is ready, yet, for this kind of “artistic anxiety” 😀
But anyway…
Winter is good for many things. There are a few things you can do ONLY in winter. Or should I say “there are few things you can do ONLY in winter”. There’s a slight nuance there. The thing that I did is one of those things you can really do only in winter. And it tells a story. It tells about character. It tells about personality. And it gives you the weirdest looks you can imagine. But I’ve dealt with a good number of looks in my days as a photographer, so…
What’s more important is the story I want to share with you. The story it tells us about who left it behind…
This is Waldo. He also wants to be a writer, but he can't accept the fact that he's illiterate and dyslexic...
I’m part of the Worth1000 community and a couple of years ago I participated in a Surf and Turf competition for which the idea was to combine a land animal and sea animal into one being. Lots of hilarious things come out of that. Mine was called the Seahound and it looked like this:
Courtesy obligates me to mention that neither of the two images I used to create the above one were made by me. See below for the two sources. I have no way of retracing who the original photographers of these pictures were. I found them through a Google search when I came up with the idea of making a Seahound. Uses like this, non-commercial, supposedly fall under the creative commons license, meaning (in short) that, as long as the user doesn’t sell the derivative image onwards and doesn’t use it for commercial purposes, it is okay to use the source images. This image ended up 8th (out of 73) in the contest, with seven even more hilarious ones going first.
Occasionally I do a Reverse Image Search on my work (typically the stuff that IS my own and COULD be used commercially) through Tineye and see if anything comes up. Several times something did come up, but nothing close to the results that were returned on this particular image. Together with a good number of other images from this competition it came up on a wide variety of sites, among which websites that sell backgrounds for cellphones and such.
Dilemma, then. What to do?
This is my image, I created it. But it it’s not completely my image, because I used source images that aren’t my own. Should I pursue this? Should I find out what I can do about it? Someone out there IS making money of images that aren’t his/her.
Kind of frustrating it is. And the biggest problem is that most likely the servers that host these images are based in some obscure country where the laws in these matters aren’t taken too seriously. And if for whatever miraculous reason they would reply to emails, or if for whatever miraculous reason the websites would be taken down, then they would simply set up another website within a couple of days.
Carrying water to the sea, that would be.
So… as you’ve noticed before in some of my posts I’m a big fan of Jim Carrey, and I’ll quote that favorite quote of mine from Liar Liar again:
…so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!
It’s not always all easy and lazy, photographing cats lazying on a warm lamp or on the bed. Sometimes it takes a bit more than just pulling the camera out of the bag.
Our friends have a beautiful German Shepherd. She was quite patient and willing and jumped up and down in the snow for the most part of an hour while I tried to get the right shots, which in the end wasn’t all that easy, focusing in the dark on a moving subject… But… in the end I think I managed to get a few good ones anyway.
Two of my good friends asked me to take some pictures of them during their pregnancy.
We got together about a week before they were officially due and had a great morning together.
Lovely mom-to-be was just radiating happiness 🙂
And of course lovely daddy-to-be did just the same 🙂
And I’m The Godfather [insert tacky one-liner here 😀 ). WOOOHOOO!!  🙂