For some reason, Shankbone is offended by this article in the NY Times disparaging the celebrity photos in Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons. Evidently, according to a note on his talkpage and his blog (which I won't link to), Shankbone was offended that the Foundation didn't mention him when the NYTimes reporter called them to ask for a comment.

The NYTimes is correct, most of the celebrity photos in Wikipedia are lousy. Some participants, like Raul654 have tried to correct the situation by inviting celebrity publicists to submit better photos, but they have usually not responded.

I'm not sure why Shankbone should be so upset about it. Has he really taken that many pictures of celebrities? Did he really expect the Foundation members to have his name at instant recall when asked about it?

I uploaded this picture of drying persimmons (the picture is of an old dwelling on my in-laws farm), but I don't think I would be upset if the NYTimes said that all of the persimmon pictures in Wikipedia are terrible. Does Shankbone have good reason to be offended?

Shankbone has generated his share of horrid photos of celebrities. As thumbnails some might be okay, but judge for yourself the quality of the full resolution images.

A sampling of them are in his user space here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Sh...ne/Entertainers

Some of those pictures are excellent, some are so-so, and some are lousy. I would say that on the whole they support the NYTimes' reporting which is that, in general, Wikipedia's celebrity shots aren't as good as the probably should be for an "encyclopedia". Shankbone's pictures all appear to be candid shots in some social setting, perhaps at the reception line for some awards show or premier or something. So some of them come out good, but many of them look amateurish. This is not necessarily Shankbone's fault, he is a victim of the situation. I think the NYTimes is saying, why not have professional-looking portraits of each of them since they are public figures?

Some are pretty good, but others are just horrible. For example, the image of Christopher Walken. I would have never published that. Just horrible.

The image of Seth Green is good, and some of the prettier actresses. It would do celebrities well to have their agents send WP promo shots.

Shankbone is an amateur photographer and an amateur journalist. That is not a problem, per se, but his mistake is imagining that he is the real deal. As an amateur, his work is inconsistent and often bumbling. But he doesn't appear to take kindly to criticism, and he also doesn't have anyone mentoring him on how to do things correctly. His response to the Times coverage suggests his ego is running far ahead of his talent, and that is never a good thing.

Bingo.

Allowing CC-BY-ND photos would probably be helpful. The insistence on allowing derivative works doesn't really make sense in terms of photographs.

I think it does make sense in many ways; licensed as "no-derivatives" would bar alteration of the photo in any way, so (as far as I understand it, I'm not a lawyer) you couldn't even crop out crap/offensive/irrelevant parts of a photo, or change the brightness - you either use the photo as-is or not at all. There are always the "vanity" photographs of some-guy-with-celebrity or that person who plasters their name at the bottom.

The commercial use stipulation on the other hand, is utterly stupid. And I don't buy Wales' "if an entrepreneur in India wants to print textbooks and sell them for £1..." justification one bit.

Wow, I certainly called this one.

My understanding -- also not being a lawyer, and being very open to be shown wrong on this -- is that it's not a derivative work unless something that passes the threshold of creativity is done to it. I don't think cropping or basic brightness adjustments would generally qualify.

Its because WP is mirrored by commercial sites like about.com

So only accept photos under CC-BY-ND which don't have any crap/offensive/irrelevant parts.

The Foundation is extremely aware of Shankers and all of his online activities - that's most likely why they didn't mention his name to the reporter from the New York Times. If someone like Cohen had looked into Shankbone's WP history in any detail, he probably would have jettisoned the photography story completely, in favor of something far more embarrassing to Wikipedia and everyone associated with it.

Very good point. David, if you're reading this, remember that sometimes there are consequences for our actions.

Looks as if I need to point something else out:

Real "encyclopedias" don't have BLPs of all these assorted actors, singers, athletes
and other semi-famous tabloid fodder. So they don't need photos of them.

Look in a dead-tree directory of famous people, like Who's Who. Very few photos.
And they expect people to PAY to have them run a photo. IMDB wants the rights
to any photos posted for a bio--period. No rights, no photo.

If WP simply removed those BLPs, multiple problems are solved at once!

Example: Ayumi Hamasaki. One of the most famous pop singers in Japan.
Do you see a pic of her on her IMDB page?
Or Namie Amuro? IMDB listing, no photo.
Or Hitomi? Same deal.
Or Hikaru Utada? Same. (Bad WP photo, too.)

They don't have photos on IMDB, because they're almost unknown outside Japan, and
the Japanese don't use IMDB anyway. But WPers who are Japanomaniacs, especially
the anime freaks, know who these singers are--because they're famous in Japan, and
have had songs or vocal parts on animes. So, they get extra-special treatment on
WP, and not anywhere else in English-language online media, except on anime
fansites and J-pop fansites......

I take it back. Shankers can't photograph to save his worthless life.

My wife is horrible at taking pictures and she'd still take better than Shankbone.

Indeed -- Kenneth Pinyan learned that the hard way.

There are no photos at all in Who's Who. Do you mean some other publication thats taken the name?

Shankbone is butthurt? This is news?

It looks like he has a red halo. And he had an awful haircut there too.



Yes. If he wanted credit or recognition, he should have published the photos on his own site. Otherwise, people will take his work for granted.

Anyone running a counter for how many times David has threatened or claimed to actually quit because he wasn't adequately recognized for his contributions?

I ran out of fingers... too lazy to use my toes.

Perhaps the NPG will hack into the database, illegally download his photos and ... er ... delete them all again.

The NPG isnt a wikipeida sockhunter!

I don't exactly understand all his drama here. He may have spent many hours standing around waiting to take pictures of celebrities, but based on a majority of his contributions, I don't see where he labored over the process. He stood around and clicked a button on his digital camera (often at times unflattering to the subject) then uploaded them to his computer and then to commons. It doesn't appear that he spent much time in post processing on most of these images. It isn't like he labored in the darkroom for hours like photographers of old were required to do. So what's to feel sorry for if he wasn't "recognized"?

It is prime time that he realize the waste of time this has all been, stop his whining, and get on with his life. He blames WMF for Noam Cohen's lack of research, when, if you analyze his contributions objectively, he can be lumped into the paragraph about amateur photographers. Despite Mr. Shankbone's contributions, Mr. Cohen's reporting on the dearth of quality photographs for BLPs is still true. If the article called out Shankbone's contributions specifically as poor that would be one thing. But it's Mr. Shankbone himself who has assumed the slight here. He claims to not require the be "noticed" in the same breath that he complains about his contributions not being recognized by the WMF. Time to find a new hobby, bub.

Actually, Shankers managed to "labour" to produce extremely bad pictures. He appears to have the magical ability to make some of the world's most recognizable people look terrible. The backgrounds interfere with the pictures on some of them, but mainly they are just very bad photographs.

My wife actually took umbrage that I told everybody that she's a bad photographer, but then she saw Shankers' works and agreed that even she isn't that bad.

Yep. Even with all the doo-hickies and doo-dads to automatically adjust focus and exposure for you, it's still surprisingly hard to take a decent photograph. It probably takes a minimum of 10 hours of instruction even to turn out non-bad ones.

I have seen a few people who have "the eye" and can be taught in less than an hour. They automatically frame, pay attention to foreground, medium and background, composition, overcontrast, and so on. Some of this is hard to teach somebody who doesn't have the "eye." It's like teaching painting.

I'm a part timer pro photographer in RL, and even after years of experience I still take shots that are hideous. I just don't show those shots to anyone. Anyone can take a great picture, but you need to be heavily self-critical to weed out the crap.

I do sympathize with his situation, press conferences with no exclusive access would have to be among the worst situations from which make a decent portrait. Damn, can't believe I'm defending the guy.

Yes. Back in the days of film the pros said you were lucky if you got one really pro-quality shot per dozen rolls of 36. Now that's it's all digital, god knows what the ratio is.

I wish I could afford these cameras which can fire and store an hour's worth of bracketted sets every fraction of a second, as you walk around your subject. Somewhere in there, there's bound to be the magic flag-raising-at-Iwo-Jima moment where the spark just jumps. But it seems like cheating.

That said, I'm sure there are people who couldn't take one good portait photo even with the latest Nikon. And if you can't control angle, lighting, background (yes, as in press conferences) that can happen, as you say.

He doesn't shoot with a d-SLR or anything fancy. If I recall what he told me about a year ago, he just has a step above a point-and-shoot and I nearly convinced him to splurge on something of a prosumer or an entry-level d-SLR.

He wasn't intending on being a photographer by any means, but he more or less fell in love with the role and with the access he gained by shooting for Wikipedia.

I don't know why he up-and-sudden quit. There are hundreds of photographers on WP, yet they did not receive a mention and are still editing.

What, you mean "f/8 and be there" isn't enough?

Personally, I see no reason to criticize him as a photographer, at least from a technical standpoint - obviously he's no professional, and lacks that "eye" that might otherwise lift him into the "artist" category, but he's not a terrible photographer IMO. A terrible person, sure, but not a terrible photographer.

What seems clear is that he likes to be around celebrities, whom he probably sees as "power people" or a kind of authority surrogate - this is a common narcissistic trait. What strikes me is that the life of a papparazzi photographer is simply not suited to him - those people are always having to debase themselves, lurking outside of people's homes and hiding in trash cans and the like, following people into tunnels while riding on motorcycles, etc., etc. What he needs is a way to maintain access and proximity to the famous and fabulous folks of the world without requiring an excuse or an ID badge of dubious legitimacy. Where he'll find that I don't know, but I have to admit, he's gotten considerably more mileage out of Wikipedia for that purpose than I would have thought possible just a year or so ago. Putting aside the toxic nature of his personality, that's a fairly impressive thing to have done.

I certainly hope the pic of Jim Carroll is a very, very bad photo. At least no one (for now) has put that pic in his BLP.

Well that's the thing. Not all of his photographs are bad. But what he does is go to these events, snaps what appears to be one photo per celebrity, then regurgitates all of them onto commons. At these red carpet events each celebrity stands there posing for a few minutes because they want the photographers to get the chance to take at least one quality shot. Surely he has time even with the most limited equipment to bracket more than one shot to compensate for the occasional weird expression. Even most mid-level cameras have the capability to be set to quick-shot, and Shankbone has lamented that he's spent over $5,000 on this hobby.

Jesus... that's just horrible. That's a good example of a shot that should be deleted, or never have been uploaded.

There are some really good ones, though:
Debra Messing
Mary Kate Olsen
Evan Rachel Wood
Seth Green
Danica Patrick
Kristen Bell

Others, the subject looks like death, and you really can't fault the photographer for not being able to improve upon that when on a red carpet; however, some shots should just not be published. But then, there are the plain bad shots, such as this unfortunate shot of a beautiful woman: Padma Lakshmi
And this shot isn't even in focus: Leonardo DiCaprio

Investing in a quality camera and a lot of memory is necessary for such photo ops, I think (those on red carpets and such). You gotta have many shots per celebrity so that there is a best shot to publish. And in the absence of a best shot, no shot should be published.

All that said, I don't think David should take it personally. Plenty of people say that Wikipedia is wholly unreliable, can't be trusted, is full of crap articles, blah blah blah. Those of us who have written quality articles can take that as a slight against us. It's not about getting paid or getting recognized. It's about providing information to others. Children in Africa and all that shit.

Why exactly is that blurry DiCaprio shot in White people in Zimbabwe? "Once played a character who had been born in Zimbabwe, in a film set in Sierra Leone and filmed in Mozambique and the US" seems tenuous even by Wikipedia standards.

Why is there even an article about White people in Zimbabwe at all? Not to mention the fact that it goes on for pages and pages and pages... I think it may actually be longer than the Zimbabwe (T-H-L-K-D) article itself! And according to Wikipedia itself, they're less than 1 percent of the population.

Same reason there's African American, Anglo-Irish or History of the Jews in Germany – because they're a minority who've had a significant impact on the country, and "White people in Zimbabwe" is less politically charged than "Rhodesian". The very fact that the population is down to less than 40,000, from 300,000 a few years ago, is itself part of the story (and a broad "race relations in Zimbabwe" article would cover too many inter-tribal conflicts). I don't have any problem at all with Wikipedia having this particular article.

There are still problems with those. Shankbone needs to learn to re-direct or soften his flash. Even in the "good" photographs, the subjects seem cursed with oily skin due to the glare of the flash on their skin. Not to mention they look a little over-exposed. His white balance seems a bit off. A lot of that could be solved by burning-in some of those over-exposed areas. He says he has Photoshop. He should use it.

Commons ought to have some objective inclusion criteria instead of being the free Flickr that it's become.

Cheap trick: You can buy battery-powered slave flashes that are both radio and photocell controlled. The second type, which are pocket-sized, work with any type flash camera (even a cheap one), and so long as you're the only one taking flash photos, can turn a mediocre flash shot into a professional-looking one (depending on where you place them). They can provide indirect lighting, bounce-lighting, extra diffuse stuff, etc. You just place them about your subject out of frame, turn down the zorch on your primary flash, and away you go. I've got cheap slave-flash shots that look like they were done with a whole umbrella setup and studio.

Yes, that photo makes Jim Carroll look like some sort of decrepit junkie.

The photo in Woody Allen's bio is no better. In addition to his death warmed over appearance, the thumb at the bottom almost looks like someone photoshopped a penis into it.

?? He is a decrepit junkie.....at least, an ex-junkie.
Started on the shit when he was 13.

Look at #5 definition of "geezer"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=geezer

He might like it in Japan where visiting Western celebrities often go out at night in Roppongi without their entourage or security teams and are usually very approachable. It's so common that some of my friends who hung out in Roppongi a lot got to the point where they didn't even pay much attention to it if some band like U2 or actor like Robert DeNiro was sitting at the other end of the bar.

I guess, though, if I were younger I would have been interested in using a Wikinews press pass to attend some of those celebrity events just to see what it was like. Anyway, Milton's advice on using a "softer" flash is something I might look into, because I'm always interested myself in improving the quality of the pictures I take.

It's basically a gauntlet of photographers, isn't it? There's actually a movie called [i]Jiminy Glick in Lalawood[/url] that might give you a decent idea of what such events are like, though of course it's kind of a silly parody, and not particularly worth seeing for any other reason.

Standing in the gauntlet may or may not have been a pleasant experience for him, but IMO the real achievement from Shanky's perspective was getting the Wikinews "press pass" validated in the first place. Few people would have gone to that much trouble, and many would have felt like they risked embarrassment to even try it. I suspect that's the real reason he feels unrecognized (and is therefore upset) now.

I'd be surprised if the Tribeca Film Festival allows just anybody to stand in the gauntlet (hard to say though, since their Press Credentials page doesn't give any detail on it). However, I think we can at least safely assume that if anyone asked, he most likely told them he represented "Wikipedia," and either didn't mention Wikinews at all, or just mentioned it as an "offshoot."

I guess it really is necessary for me to include smileys when I'm making a joke...

I am a mediocre photographer (some of my work, for good or bad, is on flickr, and you can ask me for the link if you're interested; there's also some in Commons), and yet most of it is both better than virtually all of Shanker's crap, as well as better than most of the crap on Wikipedia.

Getting good photographs of subjects who aren't actively trying to be photographed is hard.

Ding! Whatever the quality of his work, he got off his ass and tried. The rest of them just want to sit at their terminals and maintain their Experience Points at their favorite MMORPG.




I'm sorry, but You Don't Know What You Are Talking About™. I suggest you try to take a few photographs yourself before passing on 'advice'...

I agree -- it is better to rush out and create third-rate works of endless mediocrity instead of taking the time to correctly learn your trade and doing the job in a professional manner. Or something like that.