Shepherd Fairey, the designer of the Hope and Change iconography which helped Barack Obama become elected last November, is being taken to task for his use of a photo of Obama owned by Associated Press. This has brought issues of copyright, ownership and fair use to the forefront of our news media, and is significant in light of the fact that copyright laws may be changing and Creative Commons is so widespread.

Illustrators, who often borrow from photographic references, have long been dealing with issues of fair use. How does one make a portrait of a public figure if one does not have access to take a photograph of their own or to have the person “sit” for the portrait?  If a designer or illustrator uses a copyrighted image and simply performs an editing job on it, which is what Fairey appears to have done, that may very well be construed as infringement. If the designer also profits from it, the infringement is compounded.

I believe this incident will be the impetus for tightening of copyright law and possible re-thinking of the Orphan Works Act, as well as differentiating copyright more specifically from Creative Commons uses. The lines of separation are being drawn. In a culture becoming used to and demanding common use, will rights of ownership disappear? Will intellectual property be re-defined? Will work for hire, which artists and  photographers have so long fought against, become standard practice? Depending upon how the AP/Fairey case is decided, we may be on the slippery slope of changes we don’t want.

Light and shadow define form.

I love road trips. I frequently will take off in my Jeep with my camera and see where I end up. Most of the time I stay fairly local, because I live and work in an area surrounded by the Santa Monica Mountains; near beaches, harbors, ranches, farmland and shopping malls.

Just down the hill, nestled at the edge of the Oxnard plain is the former Camarillo psychiatric hospital facility –  now the home of California State University, Channel Islands, or CSUCI (we affectionately call it “C-Sucky”).

So on one recent Sunday afternoon I found myself patrolling the campus with my camera. The winter sun was beginning to lower in the sky, casting long, cool shadows which stood out in great contrast to the warm light hitting the stucco walls of the buildings. I had to capture it.

St. Maximilian Kolbe Church, Westlake Village, CA.
I was on location at this client’s campus doing some photography for a brochure I was designing. I liked the way the light and shadows were delineating the forms, and the shape of the bench against the wall.

I received an e-mail last week about a massive mastiff noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as being the world’s largest dog. There was a photo accompanying the email and, sure enough, said pooch is depicted walking alongside its master. The dog is definitely out of proportion, and, on closer look, we can take note of a few issues with the image that makes its veracity questionable.

First: what’s with the dog’s hind legs? Given the presence of the right back paw shown just “under” the right forepaw, the leg it should be attached to is missing.

Second: The dog’s shadow is incorrect. Compare it with the shadow of the horse, and we’ll note that the angle of the light would create a cast shadow of the dog’s legs just as it’s doing with the horse’s legs. However, we see that the shadow cast by the dog is hanging close and is too elliptical to represent the shape of the dog. And, there’s no shadow attached to that unseen hind leg.

Third: proportions don’t work. Proportion (relative size) is an aesthetic principle in which the size of something is measured against something else or against an established standard. For something to be believable it must make sense. Proportion is one way to achieve a believable illusion: the size of something is related to the size of something else. The dog is too big in proportion to the horse (which, by the way, is a fairly small horse

I checked out this story and photo on Truth or Fiction, and found it to be “almost” true. The world’s largest dog, according to the Guinness folks, is an English Mastiff named (appropriately) Hercules that weighs about 282 pounds. The dog in the photo can’t be Hercules: it’s not an English Mastiff and it would weigh in at about 500 pounds, if we compare its size in relation (proportion) to the horse.

Well, at least the lighting in the photo is consistent in angle, which is usually a problem with composited images such as this one.

We can draw the conclusion from this that we cannot believe everything we see. We live in an age in which it is a simple and common thing to modify a image. A photo is no longer proof of anything.