I haven’t gotten a chance to look through the site too much, but it looks like The Copyright Corner will be a useful resource. From the site:

As an artist or designer, you are passionate and serious about your work. You should be just as serious about learning about copyright, because copyright allows you to protect your work, or to share it with others, if that is your preference. This site, dedicated to the creative spirit, aims to be a source of accurate information, and a corner for debate and dialogue about copyright and other important intellectual property issues.

File this next to Stanford’s Copyright and Fair Use Information Center, Carolyn E. Wright’s Photo Attorney blog (and see her recent guest post at A Photo Editor on dealing with infringements), The Copyright Zone, and Matt Slaby’s Legal Left, Meet Creative Right column.

Dubin at Work is a such a strange and unexpected set of photos, I almost don’t believe they exist. Harry Dubin took his teenage son around the streets of 1940s New York to take pictures of people working. Only, they didn’t photograph the workers. Instead, Dubin asked the workers if they’d be willing to lend him their uniforms and then posed as the workers. There’s Harry Dubin as a street sweeper, then as a hansom cab driver, then as a blind beggar on the street, then as a railroad worker. In each photo, he’s fully transformed as the worker and the results are a beautiful artifact of a time gone by.

The photos, 30 in all, are finding their way online by way of Jeff Kisseloff, a historian and writer, who met Dubin while researching a book on television. Dubin was the subject of a 10-page New Yorker profile (PDF) in 1947 (well worth a read) as one of the first families in the city to own a television set. Kisseloff was intrigued by the article and on a whim decided to look for Dubin in the NYC phonebook, thinking he might still be alive. Dubin agreed to an interview. When Kisseloff arrived for the interview, Dubin asked if he could reread the New Yorker piece and handed Kisseloff a small photo album titled “Dubin at Work” to look through while he waited. That happenstance turned into a 1996 special exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Kisseloff also wrote an article about the photos for American Heritage (PDF).

(via MetaFilter)

• Banjo extraordinaire Danny Barnes (I don’t know his music) has a great essay on “How to Make a Living Playing Music,” and he might as well be writing about making a living taking pictures. He starts “if you are a very materialistic person, skip this article, i don’t think you are going to like what it says.” The article is partly philosophical–don’t gossip, avoid people who talk about gear, “all the trouble in the world is going to come for you in two ways. the things you say, and the things you agree to do. be very careful about these items.”–but mostly practical–”the main business strategy is to build your own audience,” “don’t be afraid to do other things to make money in the short term,” and
  

  “be totally square on your taxes. render unto caesar that which is caesar’s. if you try to fudge on this, it will come back to bite you every time. get receipts for everything, 1099 everyone no matter what, unless they are a corporation.”

  The whole thing’s a fascinating insight into what allows a successful musician to keep doing what he loves, and has many parallels to photographers working on a career.

• Kenneth Jarecke’s “2009 – Year of Transition” has a great analysis of what 2009 meant to many freelancers. He explains why he turned down editorial work (a first for Jarecke), talks about new strategies for distribution, cogently analyzes the havoc caused by editorial layoffs and how it will affect the future, and the stupidity of photographers signing “work for hire” contracts for $1200 a day with big clients.
• PDN talks with the Aftermath Project jurors to find out “What It Takes To Win An Aftermath Project Grant“
• Joerg Colberg’s excellent “We’re all Zapruders now (but that doesn’t make us journalists)” examines what it means when everyone has a camera and how that’s different from journalism.
  

  “I don’t ever recall hearing or seeing anyone describe Abraham Zapruder as a “citizen journalist”. He was seen as what we was: A chance bystander who happened to have a camera (and use it) the moment the American president was shot and killed.”

  The piece ends with strong argument for what society stands to lose by getting rid of professional journalists.

• Magtastic Blogsplosion surveys many perspectives on upcoming tablet devices and what they may mean for magazines in “The revolution to come.”
  

  “The industry also wants to avoid the newspaper dilemma – publishers were so excited to give away their content for free in the early days of the web, that there was no thought to an industry business model – and the toothpaste is proving difficult to push back into the tube.”

  And check out Magtastic’s collection of groups using the newspaper format in innovative ways in “What Newspapers Did Next” and “What Newspapers Did Next (2).”

• The New York Times covers big media companies’ likely plan to begin charging for online content in “Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites.” Among the problems faced by the old guard,
  

  “It is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.”

• PDNPulse talks with the Wall Street Journal photo department and examines how the newspaper’s attitude toward visual journalism has changed under Murdoch. PDN reports: “The good news for photography is that our editor, Robert Thomson, is a very visual person,” says Jack Van Antwerp, the paper’s photography director. And while you’re at it, check out the Wall Street Journal’s 2009 Year in Photos, which includes many friends.

I won’t try to keep up with the Photos of Year roundups like I did last year. Thankfully, the Visual Student (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) and Fimoculous have compiled their own lists of varying media organizations’ “best of the year/decade” packages. There’s a lot to see, and I certainly won’t look at all of them myself. Of those I have seen, my favorite has been the New York Times’ 2009 Year in Photos, which offers a mix of freelancers, staffers, and wire reporting broken down in a month-by-month timeline. There are many well-known pictures in the NYT’s presentation, as well as some undiscovered gems worth seeing.

Also not to be missed is a recap of BAGnewsNotes’ decade of blogging about visual politics and journalism. The site is one of my favorites, and their end-of-the-decade rundown of the archive is essential reading. Check out Best of the BAG Decade: Contributors & Friends, Pt. I; Contributors & Friends, Pt. II (in which Matt’s coverage of the Obama inauguration gets a nod); Heavies & Heroes, Pt. I; BAG Looks at the Iraq War; and The Origins of BAG. There will likely be more decade- and year-end wrap-up at the BAG, so tune your browsers and RSS readers over there.

We’re a ways off from hand-held cameras that can do it, but the future of photography will involve pictures in which the depth-of-field and focus and camera position each can be adjusted reliably and with quality in post-production. It’s a complex mathematical and computational problem, but the power is within reach.

So you want to influence the future of photography? Well, you gotta build a camera, ’cause this future isn’t for sale, yet.” -FuturePicture.com

Two enterprising photography enthusiasts have taken a page from MIT’s and Columbia’s and Stanford’s computational photography research labs, and have built their own light field camera arrays, and they’re posting instructions on how to build your own, including a method for achieving the effect with just one camera. Check out much more information and some of the science behind the project at FuturePicture.com.

(via MetaFilter Projects)

From Boogie: another simple website* full of themed photos – SketchySantas.com. Right in time for Christmas! Kind of reminds me of the Santa at the local mall during my childhood… turned out he was a child molester.

* check out My Parents Were Awesome for another cool example.

After a couple years away from the keyboard, Alec Soth is back to blogging with his DIY publishing operation Little Brown Mushroom. Not much on the blog yet, beyond a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to LiveBooks call for ideas on the future of the photo book. I hope there’s more to come at the Little Brown Mushroom Blog.

(via Soth’s old blog)

A couple of months ago my friend Darko Stanimirović in Belgrade mentioned that he was hoping to organize some of his friends in town to create a Serbian street photography collective of sorts. Over the following weeks the groundwork for Belgrade Raw was developed through memorable nights full of Montenegrin wine and impassioned debates. I’m proud to present my friends’ efforts here and invite you to see some awesome work by six Belgrade photographers. I invited Darko to answer a few questions about the project:

What is Raw all about, who is involved, how do you know each other?
Well, one day I realized there are a couple of really good freelance street photographers in Belgrade. I especially admired how they capture those ordinary-extraordinary moments of Belgrade life. And they didn’t really care about using old films or front flash. I liked that rawness, it was way more honest and interesting than any boring touristic picture we can see all around. Not just in tourist guides, but basically everywhere – night-life/news magazines, websites, photo galleries etc. We’re all either Belgrade-born or we’ve been living here for long enough to know it shows nothing about Belgrade, but it’s all anyone can really get. So we’re here to try to change it, to show all those small & big things no one wants to publish, but things that really make this city.

We know each other mostly over some Internet forums and Flickr pools. One night in a park, drinking cheap but fine wine, I proposed this idea of a website that would showcase portfolios of some interesting Belgrade-based street photographers to Luka-Strika, one of our photographers. Over next few nights I designed simple layout and coded it in Wordpress. In some three weeks the whole crew was gathered and voila! It’s cool how everything was brought to life really quickly.

Why does the city and photo community need this group?
It’s not just that we as photographers “see” other side of our city. There is a whole community of people who’d love to see something really different and “honest”, without that ugly touristic taste in it. And I’m talking about both people living in Belgrade/Serbia and foreigners. You can learn much more about a city by looking at works of it’s street photographers, than looking at tourist guides or surfing the promo websites. And for the photographers themselves, Belgrade Raw is important because it gives them a context in which to work. It’s always easier to “fill-in” when you have that framework.

What is it about Belgrade that you are focusing on?
It’s hard to tell exactly what we focus on. In a joke, we usually say “that’s something for newspapers, not for Belgrade Raw.” That means we also publish photos which probably wouldn’t be published in traditional sensationalistic media. We like normal, ordinary people, personal stories and interpretations. Someone would think the city is too small for such a “focused” project, but it’s not. In fact, it’s incredible how many big and little stories are still waiting to be covered, while there are so many local newspapers, magazines, TV stations, websites…

Why street photography? Why this manner of photographing Belgrade?
Street photography is a concept that perfectly matches our idea of showing our own, honest view of Belgrade, because it involves photographers who “wander” all around, by day or night, covering everything that seems interesting or important. It’s the opposite of “beautiful sunny day panorama of Belgrade, commissioned by…” Also, street photographers are often freelancers, so you kinda get that true personal view. Speaking of Raw, we don’t care if a photograph was created using a cellphone camera, compact, film or digital. Prime or plastic lens. All we care about is strong personal storytelling. And if you look at the whole “industry” of documentary photography, that’s more or less the direction it takes.

What is next?
We’ve only just begun, but we do have plenty of ideas. Right now, it’s important for us to continue photographing our city, there’s so much more to show. But in the same time, we make plans for print too. We would also love to make some kind of cooperation with other photo-collectives, especially with those in the neighboring countries. There are also plans for guest photographers, so we’re not being limited to “Belgrade-born” or “Serbian” or such. (ed: check out the recap of a workshop with Donald Weber in Belgrade that members of Raw attended, and helped support, for an example of where this project might continue to grow).

And how does this reflect Belgrade/Serbia/Serbs?
For starters, we’re avoiding traditional cliches. But not the other extreme either (“we’re all beautiful, peaceful, awesome people”), so we’re trying to find the right balance. No, we’re not trying actually. We don’t even think about it much, I guess it just comes naturally. But about some other, deeper sync with Serbia/Serbs in general, we’ll have to wait.

The site is still developing and new projects are uploaded every week. One of my personal favorite series, and which sums up the Raw project so well, is “Wind” by Nemanja Knežević. A fresh, personal view of the city that is completely honest, and confounding to much of Serbia’s reputation. Great to see photographers, under their own motivation, creating their own work under their own voice, and finding ways to get it seen on their terms. I’m looking forward to spending more time with this crew when I’m back in Belgrade and maybe producing my own street work from town.
You can, and should, also follow these guys via Belgrade Raw’s Blog, their Flickr Feed, Twitter or become the 521st fan of theirs on Facebook.

DIY film production

When I first started playing with color photography, I shot Kodachrome as often as I could. I couldn’t resist the red and yellow canisters and the beautiful colors of the final product. Earlier this year Kodak announced the end of its 74-year production of the film, and Dwayne’s Photo, the last developer of the film in the world, announced it would stop developing Kodachrome in December 2010. Now, some photos on flickr, with precious few details, show a homemade Kodachrome manufacturing unit. In goes plastic and some chemicals, out comes a fresh spool of Kodachrome film. It reminds me of the effort to recreate Polaroid film. Amazing!

(via boingboing)

One of my favorite things from the photo-web-universe is the 2008 interview of portrait photographer Platon from World Press Photo where he describes the circumstances behind one of my favorite portraits of all time: the cover shot of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Vladimir Putin. The photograph won first prize in portraiture at World Press that year, and the story behind it is amazing for russophiles and to gain huge appreciation for what Platon goes through to get his images. If you haven’t seen or heard it yet, you must go listen. (click on the 2008 tab)

Jump to today, when a few people alerted me to The New Yorker’s presentation of Platon’s Portraits of Power. Each image of a world leader, taken in a five-day period at the UN this September, is accompanied by audio of Platon talking about the photograph, the situation, the person sitting.

It’s rich, inspiring and above all enlightening. You gotta have a look.