without comment :

this is GFDL: here's the link to the license.

I like her earrings.

I thought this one of one lady was vile, it's been removed from her article, thank goodness. Looking at the one TFA posted though, this one isn't half as bad.

Part of the problem of free-use; people with high-quality images of celebrities tend to be reluctant to release the rights because they know they're valuable. There's no way round it.

Yes, but this is one extremely ugly photo. Nobody should have to look like this, especially since she's not an ugly woman. I mean, probably Marilyn Monroe took photos this bad sometimes too, but who wants to look at them?

As with anything related to the hippie-dippy free culture movement...

You get what you pay for!

If anything is going to convince her publicist to release a good photo under a free license, a photo like that will do it.

It's like an emoticon, photographed. O.o

And then someone will whine that the current photo is NPOV and the new one reflects her POV.

I don't think that sort of whining would be listened to. I know I would giggle and ignore it.

What intrigues me more is that a photographer who appears to consider himself somewhere towards the semi-professional end of the scale at least, should consider it appropriate to publish such a work under his name. For all the suggestions of him using WP to build a CV, I wouldn't hire based on that sort of work.

It's been flagged for personality rights. Doesn't Shankbone know enoug to put something on the page about it?

Personality rights are almost never discussed. Someone (Kelly Martin?) wrote a good page about them on Commons, but I do not think anyone reads it.

In her case, the answer is distressingly, a lot of people. Example: there's a famous one of her in the morgue which you can find on the web. Lividity present, hair is combed out and wet, but unmistakably her. On a bad day. Her usual makeup artist re-did her before the funeral, but they took no photos there. So it goes.

She has great under-eye makeup though.

This is a man who wrote a short discourse on his abusive photography of a homeless woman doing bathroom duties in public.

Please.

The eyebrows though





It did actually happen a year or two ago on the Gillan McKeith article that the picture used at the time was too unrealistically good, possibly airbrushed etc so it was changed.

Great photo, "delightful" expression! Too risque, perhaps?

Except, there is a way. Allow fair use in biographies. Also, it is patently absurd that we have to put up with those have you seen me? silhouettes in our biographical infoboxes.

I tracked down a couple of decent to nice semi-free photos of Rachel Dratch and I'm trying to see if I can get the people to flip them to free licenses so that I can replace David's... rather unflattering image. None of them are truly "professional" grade, like you'd see in Entertainment Weekly or Annie Leibowitz, but they don't make her look like a sidekick of The Joker either.

David does do some good photos of people in that he's able to get harder to get images, due to the access he's able to get, but I don't know why some of them come out... unflattering. Partly it looks like he just fires off the flash full bore in their faces, but I could be wrong, letting the camera's firepower just overpower things. Flash abuse is what makes 95% of photos plain suck. Or he might just fire off the first decent looking one he gets, and move on... I don't know. I usually even if I'm taking photos of friends will nail them repeatedly (holding down the "shoot" button is a nice invention, innit?) once I line up the photo, and avoid flash like the plague if I can help it in favor of natural light.

If you can't help flash, in shitty conditions, you can't help it, but it's not exactly hard to even fire off a one-time shot with no repeats of a total stranger that's flattering. Not shoving the camera lens in their face helps and zooming in a little from a distance helps--this one I just added to [[Sunglasses]] was about a range of 25-30 feet, first shot, just randomly aimed at her and fired.



I think his camera is FAR better than the one I took this with, a Canon PowerShot S3 IS with just the stock lens in place.

Nice pic, Rootology, but it probably needs to be Personally Identifiable tagged, and you need to say where you took it so it can be established that it's a public place.

It's not just a matter of having a good camera, it's knowing how to use it. It's also knowing that most of the photos that you take are simply not going to usable, so you have to get ALOT of them.

It's also knowing how to do subtle reprocessing later. All of this implies professional knowledge....and there you are...

By the way, can anybody explain or direct me to a good explanation of the "personality rights" pollicy on WP? It seems that quite a few photos have those sorts of issues, but I have no idea where this policy is. It might be interesting to try to understand it a bit better.

For example, if I were this guy in this picture : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...y_Showering.jpg

which is titled "Homeless guy showering" and if I weren't homeless anymore and if I were looking for a job, I might not want this photo of defining me as "homeless" on Wikipedia. There's a personality rights tag there, but no indication that this guy ever gave permission for the photo to be used...

Yep. Can work both ways, occassionally. For example, here'a woman who was homeless while the subject of the most famous Dorothea Lange shot ever, and she spent the rest of a long life mainly pissed-off that she never made a nickel from the image.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson

Oh, the amazing things you can find on Wikipedia.

This is an interesting side effect of any art, however. I can take a photo of you, draw an illustration of you, paint your picture, or write a poem about you, and make $1,000,000 off of any of them--and in no nation, you're not legally entitled to a cent of it. It's actually been like that... well, forever, everywhere, that I know of. The subject of artistic endeavor has rarely been rewarded with more than a place in history.

If you sell the thing ONLY itself, as art, yes. But if you use a person's image (even as taken from a photo taken in a public place) to promote a product or make money in any other way, then god help you. The Roger Richman agency will rise up and smite thee.

Well, yes. I can't use your photo without your permission to hawk cell phones.

An interesting example is the artist Alex Ross's version of Superman. Lots of images here:

http://images.google.com/images?q=alex+ros...snum=1&ct=title

The original model is apparently one of Ross's friends--now that friend's face is synonymous with the Man of Steel, and his mug is sold on mugs, posters, you name it.

Doesn't someone have copyright on Superman's costume?

Uh... DC Comics and Warner Brothers?

THat guy doesn't look paticuarly homeless to me - in fact it looks like he has just got out of swimming in a river/surf.

Must be a trademark like Universal's Frankenstein-monster makeup. A copyright of the kind that would have been created in 1938 would have expired 56 years later in 1994 and be public domain by now.

Superman is not public domain, no more than Mickey Mouse.

That's what I thought too....It just looks like a guy who went swimming in the ocean or a pool and is rinsing off. But, there he is in the "homeless" category. Maybe it's a prank?

According to the image page, this is the source...I don't know what to make of that, myself...

Again, only could only be due to trademark, which acts like a no-limit copyright for commerical sales. See Levis. And Mickey Mouse and everything to do with Disney is trademarked to the max, for that reason.

You are correct that the term of copyright in the United States for a long time was 56 years (an initial 28-year term followed by a single 28-year renewal term), but copyrights that were still in effect when the new Copyright Act took effect in 1979 were extended automatically, and there have been further extensions. In fact, it is widely believed that the most recent extension was passed specifically at the behest of Disney to provide for continued copyright as well as trademark protection for Mickey Mouse and related characters in the United States. Wikipedia coverage (caution: not guaranteed accurate, nor is this post) at [[United States Copyright Act#Duration of Copyright]] and [[Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act]]. Mickey Mouse and Superman are definitely under copyright in the US to Disney and DC Comics respectively.

Well, like most things, it turns out to be damned complicated. Mickey Mouse's copyright should have expired in 2003 even under the 1978 revision, but the Bono extention act (partly funded by Disney) went all the way to the Supreme Court where it was upheld as constitutional in 2003. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft. If I understand it, that means you're right. Mickey now gets 1928 + 95 = copyright to 2023. Superman probably to 1938+95 = 2033. Under the 1978 copyright law, again, this would not have happened. Only a new law passed in the late 1990's at the lobbying of Disney, prevented it. I didn't know this.

For a blow by blow description of the Mouse that Lobbied its way right through US copyright law.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20...5_sprigman.html. Grist for the mill of Marxists.

Ironically, as a pretty hard core left winger type, I have no problem with copyright extension like this. It benefits big corporations heavily, but at the same time everyone from the small creator to the big novelist benefits as well. For all the working authors out there and artists, in particular, it's lifetime protection and then some for their estates. Shitty in some ways, but fantastic in that their creations stay under their control and their estate. I personally don't have a problem with that. If I write a book, and it turns into three, or five, or ten, and a trilogy of movies, and a line of toys and comics, and a cartoon, or whatever...

...good if my hard work and creativity can benefit my heirs. But I'm a weird commie pinko.

But I, alas, am partly an inventor. None of this gets extended to patents, which remain expensive and short-lived. Those who had the money already from long copyrights (music, film-- print authors generally never made much) used it to get even longer copyrights. Inventors, who never had any money, are still screwed.

Think of it this way: portraits have a nasty tendency to capture the subject ... and the photographer.



For the best indoor flash photography, buy the most powerful external flash you can, and aim it at the ceiling if it is white and low enough. Failing that, get a bracket and move the flash as far from the optical axis as you can.

Don't bother with diffusers and such, except for very close-in work.



Professional quality output is correlated strongly to professional quality equipment. Given little control of the background, long focal length, fast optics -- to blur it out -- are usually the minimum requirement, and this isn't exactly cheap stuff to buy, or easy to carry around and use.

And the ones who can afford it are probably more than a little aware of the risks of taking photographs of people and publishing them without a model release in hand.