Happy New Years everyone.

Here’s some photos I took from the roof of Eric Scheid’s apartment block. (Thanks for inviting us up, Eric!)

So, about two weeks ago now I took Friday off from work to fly down to Melbourne, for the wedding of Paul Jenkins & Natalie Elbourne out in the Victorian countryside - Nat’s home town of Drouin.

You can read the rest of story, or just go straight to my photos from the wedding. (They’re higher quality than the versions shown here too)

 
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(This is for the folks who didn’t see this post on Facebook)

This is Claude, he’d just like to let you know that he really dislikes:
- Vampires
- Werewolves
- Zombies
- People who Poke/Prod
- And other silly Facebook applications

Claude says he’ll come visit all the people who send these through.

Just… y’know, so you know what to expect.

PS: Claude is a Huntsman Spider. He’s currently residing in my bedroom, and plays around on Facebook and Twitter whilst I’m asleep.

It might’ve taken a day or three, but here’s the pics a few folk wanted to see…

Let me just say first up, that the pie was great… and it’s all gone (I had the last bit for dessert tonight)

Unfortunately, because I was trying to help serve (we had folks over for dinner) -  I didn’t have a huge amount of time to get the exposures right.

A slightly too large piece of Mulberry pie… they’re messy things.

Apologies to the colour-space fanatics - I tried to get the colour of the pastry to match between each of the three shots and still show as much detail as I can, but it’s difficult.

There’s a recurring Food theme here at the moment, but work’s keeping me pretty busy handing over all the applications I support to colleagues.

Today we got a big bag of Mulberries ~3KG I think - they had their stalks on them, so I had to remove them before they are made into Mulberry Pie(s) tomorrow.

Needless to say, my hands got, err… a little stained from the mulberry juices. I imagine the stains will hang around longer than the Mulberries themselves will last (in pie form or not). Mulberries are kinda like little tasty packages of anti-theft dye.

Photos of the mulberry pies will come later.. Yum.

Delicate Genius points out the recent Sydney Morning Herald article about Virgin Mobile Australia being sued for using Alison Chang’s picture in their advertising campaign.

Another girl who’s likeness was used in the Virgin Mobile campaign. Credit: Jason Meredith “It’s fine to text about someone, just don’t send it to them by mistake” says Virgin Mobile.

Some quick facts, for those of you who aren’t aware of the background on this:

• Virgin Mobile Australia ran an ad campaign called “Are you with us or what?” earlier this year.
• The ads used pictures which were obtained from Flickr - a photo sharing service.
• The photographers who posted the photos on Flickr marked them with a Creative Commons licence of some variety - although apparently not all of them allowed commercial usage.
• Model releases were not obtained by Virgin Mobile/Advertising Company/Photographer - Which is required for commercial use (with some disclaimers) , but not non-commercial use (such as posting to Flickr)
• Neither Virgin Mobile nor their Advertising/Marketing agency contacted the photographers to let them know their photos would be used.
•  Some of the pictures were not exactly flattering, and the captions (added by Virgin Mobile) could possibly be offensive to those pictured.

I find it interesting the viewpoints of some of the people commenting about this.

With the exception of someone shooting with the intent to use pictures commercially; I don’t believe it should be the responsibility of the photographer to obtain model releases for all those featured in a shot.  Many apparently disagree with me, for example the first comment by ‘wjkocik’ on this photo 

There’s also some confusion about the role of the Creative Commons folks in this. The Sydney Morning Herald says “Creative Commons Corp, [is] a Massachusetts nonprofit that licenses sharing of Flickr photos”.  The Creative Commons folk simply provide a way for people to use a pre-prepared licence for their works which clearly states what the work can be used for.

I’ll be watching the lawsuit to see what happens.

Tonight I went to empty the garbage, and I find this sitting on top of our recycling bin.

Check out the close-up on the head. Strange looking little ear-ish things.

Very cool.

Via Your Daily Awesome, comes Time’s Photo Essay on what 15 different families around the world eat in a week.

Very interesting to see.

Digital Photography School has this great list of tips for amateur wedding photographers - but I think the same list of tips goes for where there’s any other serious event. (eg: Engagements!)

FWIW: I really lucked out that day - almost all of the people were happy to pose for a few seconds to have their photo taken, so even though I was having issues with the flash (too bright/too dark), it worked out well.

I’m sitting in Melbourne Airport, but there’s free wireless which is good.

Anyway, I’ve put the photos from Nat & Paul’s engagement up. Click here to view them

Edit: Some of the photos arn’t uploaded correctly - I’m re-uploading them them now.

Edit 2: Should be fixed now.