On Saturday a local museum opened a new attraction, a re-creation of an old tweed shop. This is one of my pictures from the opening:

Not a bad picture, I’d say, but not brilliant. What bothers me about it is that it doesn’t really tell a story. I’ve always placed too much value on composition, and this is my go-to set-up: person at one side of the frame, prop at the other side, and the camera twisted. Basically it works. It gets you an eye-catching picture of nearly anything.

But what is that picture telling us? Has the lady won an award for designing a new tweed? Is this a special tweed that has been made for a royal occasion? Is the story about the lady herself, or the tweed, or the loom, or the shop?

Here’s the caption:

14 May 2011: The Highland Folk Museum in Newtonmore opened the doors to its latest attraction on Saturday, a recreation of the Craig Dhu Tweed Cottage that once thrived in the village. In addition to the many items on display, including looms, spinning wheels, and examples of a wide variety of tweed products, visitors will be able to see a demonstration of tweed weaving by the museum’s heritage attendant Marion Smart, pictured.

Fine, so the caption tells us what the picture is about. But isn’t it meant to be the other way round? Otherwise what is the point of having the photograph in the first place? A picture should be worth a thousand words, etc.

Have a look at any local or regional newspaper and what you’ll see is that news photography has become more about composition than illustration. This is almost entirely due to time constraints: We are expected to get a picture in a few seconds, or at most a couple of minutes, so we get in to the routine of using the same old reliable compositions that we know how to quickly set-up and light.

Now with apologies to whoever took the next photo, I want to hold it up as the perfect example of what I’m talking about. It was the first example I found on Google, from a finance story:

What exactly is the purpose of that photo? The composition is contrived, which sometimes is exactly what you want, but in this photo the composition was clearly the most important thing on the photographer’s mind. You can’t see anything on the laptop screen because of the glare, you can’t see what’s on the TV screen in the background because of the shallow depth of field, and you can’t tell what connection any of the three people have to whatever the story is about. Is the guy at the front the manager of a technology company, or do the guys at the back run the company and they’ve donated a laptop to a baldness charity?

My point here isn’t to confess to becoming a run-of-the-mill photographer, or to pick apart another photographer’s work. My point is that a lot of people reading this will know it rings true for them too, and maybe we all need to be a bit bolder in our work. Next time you’re on a job, don’t think of your photo being the pretty thing at the top of the article — think about your photo actually being the article. Talk directly to the reader, and tell them as much as you can with the photograph. How to do that? Well that’s the challenge. That’s what we’re paid for. Have fun…

Ignore everything I’ve written here and here about the low space problem that blights HTC/Android phones. When I ‘fixed’ the problem by disabling the social networking apps, it was happening again within days. Now after I’ve ‘fixed’ it by disabling the Android e-mail app, again the low space warnings have returned after a few days. Conclusion? Well it’s obvious isn’t it: Somewhere within Android or HTC’s Sense interface there is a fault that causes the phone to always think it’s low on storage space. I have no idea what that fault may be, and I no longer have any interest in finding out. HTC haven’t bothered, Google haven’t bothered, so why should we bother? I’m returning this stupid faulty phone and going back to an iPhone. Sure it’s got the frustrating Apple walled garden but at least the damn thing works.

A simple question: How could the Chinese government censor the songs that Bob Dylan was singing, without his knowledge? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to you? And when I say odd, I mean impossible.

There has been a bit of controversy about Dylan performing in China and giving the government set lists for approval. Actually, Dylan says, he gave them set lists from the previous 3 months, which makes sense because he’s known for not playing the same set at successive concerts.

But then in a post on his blog he says:

If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

Maybe there’s something incredibly simple here that I’m somehow missing. But it looks an awful lot like Dylan’s critics may have been right, and he actually did agree to having some of his songs censored. Now to save face he’s claiming that it was done without his knowledge.

Surely the only way that could be true is if he was using lyric sheets for some of his songs, which is quite possible, with his extensive back-catalogue. But then we must also believe that someone was able to covertly change or censor the lyrics, and Dylan just went ahead and sang the edited versions without realising it. That’s quite a stretch of the imagination.

In one of the most disingenuous pieces of public-relations fluff we’re ever likely to see, the Twitter picture-posting service TwitPic has defended its plans to sell users’ photos.

Writing on TwitPic’s official blog, founder Noah Everett, who describes himself as "the nice guy that finished first", apologised for changes to the service’s terms & conditions that had been interpreted as claiming copyright of every uploaded image. He writes:

To clarify our ToS regarding ownership, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it’s your content. Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable.

As we’ve grown, Twitpic has been a tool for the spread of breaking news and events. Since then we’ve seen this content being taken without permission and misused. We’ve partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner. This has been done to protect your content from organizations who have in the past taken content without permission. As recently as last month, a Twitpic user uploaded newsworthy images of an incident on a plane, and many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission.

Noah may indeed be a nice guy, and I’d hate to suggest otherwise, but this statement is horribly misleading, and in such a way that the deceit appears to be deliberate.

For a start, the bit about deleted photos being "no longer viewable" is plain weird. It would have made sense if he’d said "no longer available" or "no longer hosted on our site", but to specifically say that they’re no longer viewable suggests that they’ll still be archived somewhere. In other words, TwitPic is building up a library of valuable images which can be sold and re-sold, even after the user has chosen to delete them and believes they’ve gone forever.

The rest of the statement paints TwitPic as some kind of copyright-defending white knight, concerned about uploaded photos being "taken without permission and misused". To combat this, TwitPic has "partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner". Translation: Noah knows that newspapers and picture agencies around the world are using pictures from TwitPic without paying for them, so now he wants a slice of the action. But of course he doesn’t just want a slice, he wants the whole cake, because the people who took the photos in the first place won’t be seeing a cent.

Finally, Noah has the cheek to complain about the theft of a recent newsworthy image, saying that "many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission". As if the user’s permission matters a jot to TwitPic. From now on, those same commercial entities will still be able to take the image and use it without the owner’s permission, just so long as they throw a few coins in to the TwitPic coffers.

The entirety of this statement from TwitPic is intended to stave off the growing hate campaign from users who don’t like the idea of their copyright being gobbled up. Noah points out that people still own their copyright, which is true, but the whole point of copyright is that you can control who does what with your pictures, and how much they have to pay for the privilege. If you grant distribution rights to TwitPic then your copyright is worthless. If you want £500 for your image, but a newspaper can license it from TwitPic for £400, then you won’t be a part of that deal.

Bottom line, Noah claims that TwitPic’s desire is to "protect your content". It isn’t. TwitPic wants to make money from your content, for themselves, and there’s none for you.

This is a cautionary tale for anyone who may think of offering a deal through Groupon, the group-buying site that promises great deals for customers and great exposure for businesses.

The idea is that, as a business, you offer a special deal on the Groupon web site. For example a restaurant may offer a meal-for-two worth £200 for the bargain price of £80. Groupon takes a 50% cut so the restaurant gets £40 which should be enough to cover the actual cost of the food, plus they’ve had some good exposure and, hopefully, the few hundred people who bought the deal will go back another day and pay full price. Maybe they’ll even become regular customers.

But look at what happened to one independent photographer in Somerset:

He offered a £200 portrait package for £29, which was bought by 301 people.

Let’s break that down…

Firstly the photographer will only get £14.50 because Groupon takes half. And if the client pays by credit card, which they probably will, then the photographer has to pay the credit card fee, so he’s only getting around £12.

Each shoot lasts one hour, but it can be anywhere the client chooses within 15 miles of Bristol city centre. So let’s suppose the total time for travel is half an hour each way, plus 20 minutes to set-up lighting and background and 10 minutes to tear it all down at the end. Already he’s up to 2.5 hours so he’s charging £4.80 per hour, not taking fuel costs in to account.

"Every photo taken will be put on CD or DVD in high resolution" — this is fairly trivial, let’s say 15 minutes work and £1 for the disc and case. He’s now getting the equivalent of £4 per hour.

But the deal gets better! "20 of the images will be professionally edited and air brushed" — now I assume this is nothing more than a bit of spot removal and some minor tweaks, because there’s no way you can do a full retouching job as part of a £29 package, and there’s certainly no way you can do 20 of them. So we’ll estimate a super-speedy 5 minutes per picture and imagine that he somehow gets the whole lot done in 2 hours. He’s now on £2.32 per hour.

Anything else included? Yes! You get "one 12×10 framed print, two 10×8 prints, two 8×6 prints, two 5×4 prints, two 4×3 prints, and two 3×2 prints" — a total of 11 prints, with the largest one framed. I’d estimate the absolute rock-bottom price for producing those prints will be £8 plus another £5 for the frame if he’s buying in bulk. That’s £13. That’s more than he’s getting from each client, and he’s got 301 clients to make his way through.

Even if this photographer is doing each job to a bare minimum standard, he has committed himself to nearly a year’s work for no money. If that doesn’t sound like good business sense to you then be very careful if you decide to offer a deal through Groupon or any similar site. What may at first seem like success could very easily put you out of business.