Pinterest puts the burden on the user, rather than itself, asking Pinners (in giant, scary CAPS) to agree that risk related to the ‘application of services’ — i.e. stealing — remains with YOU. Further, it emphasizes that Pinterest is not responsible for all the theft the site encourages.”

I’d be curious (in a purely abstract way!) to see how such such an agreement would hold up in court, seeing as pinning up images from every possible source is built into Pinterest’s design: Pinterest describes itself as a place for people to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web” and provides its users with a bookmarklet they drag into the bookmark bar of their browser that makes it easy to create a pin on Pinterest whenever a user stumbles across an image they like while browsing the internet. Does Pinterest really believe that their users are really only going to use this bookmarklet only to upload images they personally own the rights to? Of course not. In fact, Pinterest’s guide to “Pin Etiquette” explicitly advises users not to use Pinterest plug their own stuff too much:

Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.”

Just visit the boards of the members of the Pinterest team: do you really think those guys technically own the rights to the all of images they post? Or, you know, any of them?

Yet somehow I doubt terror over photo copyrights is keeping up anyone on the Pinterest team up at night. After all, what would that legal battle look like? “Boo hoo, your honor, due to Pinterest users pinning up photos from a wedding I shot, I got a bunch more new clients”? “Woe is me, Pinterest has brought a lot of traffic to my Etsy store, and now I have more people queuing up to buy my meme-themed pillows than I can handle”? Has anyone, anywhere, ever lost a single damn cent because an image they owned to right to was posted on Pinterest?

There have been stupider lawsuits, I suppose, yet I’m not holding my breath. And neither, I expect, are the journalists and bloggers who write overwrought articles about “Pinterest’s potential copyright scandal”. What’s really stupid is that such a lawsuit is even conceivable under current copyright laws. If I tear a photo out of a magazine and show it to friends in the name of sharing my inspiration, should I be taken to court, even if I fail to acknowledge the source and/or photographer? Why should it be any different if I share that photo with friends online, as long as I don’t pretend that I own it?

Even stupider than current copyright law (which is pretty spectacularly stupid!) is Pinterest’s is lame, hypocritical, and disingenuous user agreement. It reeks of the most shameless, dishonest cover-your-ass bet-hedging. I’m not naive enough to expect companies, tech or otherwise, to not be evil. But it’d be nice if they weren’t openly disrespectful and contemptuous to the users whose numbers and enthusiasm are the only reason they’ve been able to raise millions of dollars in funding.

(Yes, I still have a set of pinboards of my own on Pinterest. For now.)

And yet… I still use Things. I still love Things. It’s possible that part of this is due to the old sunk cost fallacy. After all, Things wasn’t cheap. $50 for the desktop version, another $10 for the iPhone version. But I don’t think so. Things just works for me. It hits that magical sweet spot: incredibly simple and intuitive to use, but with enough depth for the power user. It’s simply laid out: when you create a task you want to complete, you choose whether you want to do it today, next, or someday. If the task is part of a larger project, you can create a project, and add other tasks. If it’s reoccurring, you can fine-tune how often you want it to reoccur (the first of every month, every Thursday through the end of the year, etc.) and when you want to be reminded about it. When a task is completed, it goes into the logbook, which you can easily peruse to see what you accomplished when.* You can add tags to tasks, so it’s easy to find all tasks, current or past, relating to a particular subject. It also has the shiny bells and whistles power users need — keyboard shortcuts, options to add teammates and areas of responsibilities, etc. — but it’s incredibly functional from the get-go, even if you decide you’re not in the mood to struggle your way up yet another app’s learning curve. For me, it handles everything from intricate sets of work with multiple deadlines to mundane daily errands to long-term goals with perfect ease and simplicity.

OmniFocus gets all the productivity nerd love nowadays, but I found it fiddly and constraining. (It’s also quite a bit more expensive: $80 for the desktop version, $20 for the iPhone version: not a huge deal for something you’ll hopefully be using intensively on a daily basis for years and years, but still — ick.) Wunderkinder’s Wunderlist, with its super-friendly interface, easy cloud syncing, and magical price tag of $0 gets a lot of love too, but I found it too basic. (I still subscribe to their newsletter, though, because everything Wunderkinder does is so very pretty.) Clear, the new iPhone app, is even more basic, but so fantastic-looking and fun to use that it’s sure to win the hearts of those for whom all the power user features of apps like Things and OmniFocus are just so much cruft (I use Clear for grocery lists, but can’t imagine using it for anything more complicated). The danger of all this productivity nerd stuff is that you can end up spending more time and energy figuring out how to do things than, you know, actually doing them. There will always be shiny new apps, new techniques, new productivity gurus our there that promise to boost your productivity to heretofore unseen heights. Meanwhile, I’ll be sticking with Things. Why should I waste time daydreaming about invariably overhyped new productivity products when I already have something, eccentric as it may be, that I personally enjoy using, and that simply, effectively, measurably, helps me get stuff done?

Still looking forward to that stable, non-beta Things cloud sync, though.

* The new database required by the public beta compromises the functionality of logbook, which is why I won’t be using it.

Dear photographers,

I love you, but…

If you’re shooting weddings, chances are you’re bringing more than one camera with you, and/or at least one additional shooter. Why wouldn’t you take two minutes to sync the time of your cameras before the shoot? If you don’t, it means photos taken seconds apart will be strewn willy-nilly across your job, and the only way to get them in their proper order will be to manually reorganize them. (And don’t say the order doesn’t matter– having like images with like makes editing so much smoother and more consistent, and it makes for a much nicer presentation for your clients.) Oh, no big deal, it’s not too hard to drag a few photos around in the catalog. But picture this: a catalog with perhaps thousands of images. Imagine sifting through those thousands of images for the shots, say, of the bride getting her hair done. Ok, here’s the first set of images of her getting her hair done, and (scroll scroll scroll) and here’s the rest I took with my other camera. Now, the groomsmen pre-ceremony portraits. The wedding party group portraits. Going down the aisle. Ceremony candids. Detail shots of the venue. Bride’s dance with her dad. Post-ceremony couple’s portraits, location #1. Post-ceremony couple’s portraits location #2. Pre-ceremony wedding party portraits location #4. Ok, wait, now here’s some more of the bride getting her hair done, how did I miss those? Scroll scroll scroll. Ok, there they are. Imagine doing this dozens of times. Imagine how confusing things can get when you’re dealing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of images. Imagine how much more confusing this would be for your photo editor, who wasn’t there and doesn’t know that you doubled back to a location, or about anything else unexpected that happened on the day. And then imagine how absolutely none of this effort would have been necessary if you had just taken two freaking minutes to sync the clocks on your cameras to begin with.

Please: sync your camera clocks. Your editor will thank you.

Affectionately,
Your ever-loving photo editor

The iPhone is smaller than most cameras. This makes it easier to position it in places you couldn’t place a DSLR[...] The iPhone’s small scale also changes interpersonal dynamics between the photographer and human subjects; people feel more at ease with what’s perceived as a more casual act, you can make contact with both eyes, and allowing the subject to see the picture while it’s being made (instead of after) provides a dynamic feedback loop of action and reaction or pose and repose.

Don’t knock it, photo snobs. Still, I’m glad no one is asking me to edit iPhone photos. (Yet.)

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains the phenomenon in which the very stupidity and/or incompetence of an individual makes it impossible for them to understand just how stupid and/or incompetent they are. Cases like the above illustrate the unexpected upside of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the people dumb enough to steal a photographer’s images are also often too dumb to avoid getting caught. Kind of poetic, really.

Update: Lots of discussion on the same subject on twitter lately, after illustrator Jessica Hische was stolen from in a similarly brazen and foolish fashion, leading to the creation of this instructive site: Should I Steal Intellectual Property?

Incidentally, yes, I’m posting on twitter now.

Dan Margulis is the sort of teacher who doesn’t care if he terrifies you. All the lazy, cheap, quick tips you find in online tutorials by hacks who don’t know any better fall by the wayside, and suddenly you find yourself in a starkly beautiful landscape where only hard-earned knowledge can show you the way. You’re in Dan Margulis’ world now. While other Photoshop books are repeating basic shortcuts you should have mastered 200 pages ago, Dan Margulis shows you grayscale images of the different channels of an image in RGB, CMYK, and LAB and commands you to figure out which is which. Without knowing the color of the original image. Note to people who don’t know what channels are: this ain’t a cakewalk!

Some of my Photoshop professors didn’t even mention curves — they thought it was too complicated for us poor distracted college students. (I have clients who are still afraid of curves, bless ‘em.) Meanwhile, Dan Margulis devotes chapters to every nuance of curves, and explains why you’re a chump if you even think about using the Master Curve.

Dan Margulis is not the type to beg anyone’s permission to have an original thought. I was reading a more conventional Photoshop book which blithely assures readers that there’s no reason to ever use the Apple RGB working space. Meanwhile, Dan says, “I use Apple RGB! I’ll tell you why and when in ten chapters, if your puny little brain hasn’t exploded by then.”

Maybe this seems a bit too demanding. That’s fine, you can have your Auto Color. Me, I’ll be over here, learning at the feet of the guy with the technique so mercilessly sharp that he was able to teach a colorblind guy how to color correct.

As if I didn’t know it before, reading Dan Margulis has made me certain that I’ve chosen the right career. Not to say that I’ve become his obedient follower in everything — but I dearly love his rigor, his unapologetic emphasis on technical mastery, and how goddamn opinionated he is. An industry that embraces such a man is the industry for me.

Then, some time later, a professional retoucher very generously took me under her wing. She let me observe her technique with her tablet and suddenly I felt like a complete idiot for not being more serious about mastering the tablet. My eyes opened, I started working with a tablet again, and much to my surprise and delight, it resulted in the single greatest leap in my skills since I got into digital post-production. As crucial as it was to have someone experienced teach me proper technique, it was every bit as important to use a tablet that is a) reasonably sensitive (you should be able to navigate menus without awkwardness), and b) a decent size. If you’ve struggled to get comfortable with graphic tablets, the problem may not be you; it might be the tablet. Once you’ve worked with a good graphics tablet, you will never go back to your sad little mouse.

While I’m being a shameless shill for the graphics tablet industry, I might as well just go ahead and say it: the Wacom Intuos4 is the business, and you should sell your mother to get one, if necessary.

Incidentally, if you look up ‘graphics tablet’ on Wikipedia, you’ll find this little tidbit: “In 1981, musician Todd Rundgren created the first color graphics tablet software for personal computers, which was licensed to Apple as the Utopia Graphics Tablet System.” Now you know. Also, Giorgio Moroder helped design a supercar, but that’s a story for another day.

For an even freakier peek into Photoshop’s possible future, watch this:

PatchMatch: Structural Image Editing from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

The reaction to this sort of stuff is generally: 1) “cool!” 2) slack-jawed disbelief, or 3) ohmigod, I’m out of a job. But stuff like this no longer gives me career anxiety. Let me explain why there’s no reason to be afraid.

In Ken Robinson’s Ted presentation, amongst the many excellent points he make is that in designing our schools’ lesson plans, no matter how prudent we think we’re being, we’re attempting to prepare students for a world that we just can’t anticipate. So it is with image editing. You can take every Photoshop class your school offers, you can read every Photoshop book, watch every training video, or do every online tutorial, but the reality is that Adobe (or maybe, someday in the future, some other company that’s surpassed Adobe as the dominant company in image editing—shock horror) may bring out some new feature that renders a task that used to require several (billable) hours dead easy. Say goodbye to the meticulous, carefully honed technique that took you years to perfect—if you can’t do the new faster technique, your clients will find someone who can. Someone cheaper, probably.

(Also, as a side note, I have to think that whenever a video like this comes out and gets coverage outside of Photoshop-nerd circles, you worry if less-savvy clients will form even more fantastical ideas of what Photoshop can and can’t do, and how long it actually takes to get things done in Photoshop. “Hang on, if you erase the top of the building in Photoshop, the sky will be behind it, won’t it?”)

The unavoidable fact, if you’re going to be a retoucher, is that you will have to be committed for the rest of your career to staying on top of the technology. You’ll have to discard the techniques that took you months, maybe even years of blood, sweat, and tears to develop the moment something quicker comes along without a second thought. And you better not waste time mastering every important new technique that comes your way. No matter how good you are, the progress of technology will never stop. That’s why I think that if you’re going to survive in this industry, it’s crucial that you are (or make an effort to become) the sort of person who never gets tired of learning new things.

Not such a big deal, right? Who doesn’t think of themselves as the sort of person who enjoys learning new things? But try to imagine yourself in the future, imagine how you’ll feel after years of dealing with ground beneath your feet constantly shifting. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? Who wants to stand around waiting to be made obsolete?

Coincidentally, I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, which depicts a dystopia in which technology has rendered all labor obsolete, except that of a tiny elite cadre of engineers. Although many of the particulars seem quaint (how worried are you about vacuum tubes making you redundant?), the fear that technology will make us obsolete is every bit as powerful today. I expect it’s especially acute amongst those in careers that require dependence on changing technology, including photo retouchers. After all, history teaches us that not only is change inevitable, it is often terrifying, unfair, and inhumane. (No wonder those who predict an imminent apocalypse are always with us. Somehow it’s very easy for societies to forget just how many wonderful things we have that our ancestors didn’t. Things like not dying of the Black Plague, not being burned alive for one’s beliefs, like children going to school instead of being maimed in filthy factories, and infinite other marvels that make it a pretty good time to be alive.)

The unpleasant fact is that the changes that will come as image editing technology evolves will not always be unmixed forces for good in our industry, just as Photoshop itself has always had a decided dark side. Someday all the most complicated things you can do, the things you considered you specialty, will be rendered so simple that the proverbial relative of a client who owns copy of Photoshop actually could do them. Or maybe, and this is more likely, you’ll be able to do new things with the new techniques that the dabblers of the world couldn’t even imagine. Because you know how to experiment in Photoshop, you have a honed and sophisticated understanding for what gives an image impact, your knowledge of Photoshop, and photography, and color theory, etc., is deep in a way they couldn’t even begin to grasp. You will grow and change with the technology. It will be scary at times, but it will also be stimulating, even fun. If you’re dedicated and experienced enough to choose to make photo retouching your career, at some point you passed through the wall of understanding and you began to see inside the image. You know what it needs, you know what it can do, you see the possibilities. When new technology comes along, you will be able to explore its possibilities in a way the inexperienced amateur couldn’t even imagine. Even if Adobe came out with a one button interface in Photoshop that said “make my image beautiful” and came with a device your clients could plug directly into their brains, it wouldn’t be able to do what a knowledgeable, artful retoucher could do. The technology is only a starting point. Embrace it.

I shoot all digital now. I have a closet full of film cameras like Hasselblad, Nikon, and Rolleiflex, and every time I pass by the closet I hear, “Help! Help!” I feel terrible because they were all great cameras, but why should I use them when I’m getting better results with digital?

He also gets in the usual snide digs at digital post-production.

If I manipulated the photos, I would feel that everything I did was fake. I might take a scratch out but I don’t adjust lighting — that’s creating something that wasn’t there. When photographers start doing that, it can’t be called artwork.”

Kind of amusing just how quickly and thoroughly the practitioners of a medium that only won the right to call itself an art after a bruising struggle lasting more than a century become experts on what counts as artwork and what doesn’t. Must be nice to enjoy that kind of certainty.