philly

Adobe has launched Photoshop Express beta. It's a stripped down version of the very popular photo/graphic software program. It's free to sign up and use. But with all the photo-related things I join online, I read the full Terms of Use and went straight for usage of the content the end user uploads:

a. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

b. "Publicly accessible" areas of the Services are those areas of the Adobe network of properties that are intended by Adobe to be available to the general public. However, publicly accessible areas of the Services do not include Services intended for private communication or areas off the Adobe network of properties such as portions of World Wide Web sites that are accessible via hypertext or other links but are not hosted or served by Adobe.

Translation: any photo you upload to PSx is Adobe's to whore out without your permission AND SELL without notifying you. You signing up and accepting the terms of agreement is you giving your express consent for Adobe to do what they want. Fuck that.

The Terms of Use are crazy. Not just for pros who may want to tweak an image on the road when they don't have their computer with a full version of PS on it. For the people on Facebook or MySpace or Photobucket or Picasa (there's a Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa login via PSx) it's troubling too. All those photos of you and your friends can be used as stock imagery now. It can be sold off, modified, published anywhere, anytime, forever and you can't take it back (that's the "irrevocable" part).

But Adobe "does not claim ownership of Your Content" - oh no not in the least. They wouldn't dare make such claims. Not when they can legalese their way around it. I see this release as impetus for even more people to use pirated copies of PS.

This is really pathetic.

via: A Photo Editor

UPDATE 3.28.08. Looks like Adobe's revising their legalese

Statement for Terms of Service Issues:

We've heard your concerns about the terms of service for Photoshop Express beta. We reviewed the terms in context of your comments - and we agree that it currently implies things we would never do with the content. Therefore, our legal team is making it a priority to post revised terms that are more appropriate for Photoshop Express users. We will alert you once we have posted new terms.

Thank you for your feedback on Photoshop Express beta and we appreciate your input.

-Adobe Photoshop Express Team

Kudos for Adobe for listening, but chroist were they asking for the backlash they got. via DP Review.

UPDATE 2 4.7.08: The Revised Terms explained by DP Review.

This Friday at The Curiosity Shoppe (529 S. 4th St) 9 of my photos will be up on their walls in their April - May show. I've loved going into this shop for the last 6 months or so since Lady and I finally went in, but now I'll like the place even more ;)

My photos are for sale (11×14 frames, matted, 8×10 prints) along with the works of several other wonderful local artists.

They'll be kicking off the 2 month show with another of their Last Friday installments featuring music by Lily Ruth Bussey and The Tourists.

The party starts at 9p and should be going through Midnight.

I stumbled upon the answer to a pretty big mystery while on a photoshoot at The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania - the final burial place of Jimmy Hoffa.

It's a plain wooden drawer in a research lab marked "Jimmy Hoffa" - whoda thunk it?

Official American lives lost since the official start of the war in Iraq 5 years ago today.

I don't particularly like Barack Obama, but chroist, he gives good speech. The video above is from a speech he gave earlier today at the National Constitution Center, about 7 blocks from where I was in bed catching up on some much needed sleep (after getting up before 6a for a week).

Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of talk about healthcare and the need for everyone to be covered, but he's not backing universal single payer healthcare.

via Booman Tribune

Update: The text of the speech after the jump via Philly.com

My final Great Expectations agenda forum was in District 7 - the home turf of freshman councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez. The forum was held in Holy Innocents Church in Junianta. Along with about 6 staffers were about 40 participants. Councilwoman Sánchez and Councilman Bill Green made it out to hear their constituents discuss the agenda.

I sat down with the breakout group which discussed Budget & Taxes, Leadership & Reform, Transportation and City Services more in depth. This group was definitely the most subdued out of the four I've sat down with in the past month or so, but still some lively conversation on some points. The discussion started with transportation. Duane wanted to see incentives for not taking cars into Center City like in some other large cities. Adan, a church leader from Norris Square, wanted to see how the city could become greener and address the issue of clogged streets in one fell swoop. James, a PhillyCarShare advocate, wanted to try new ideas and see if the worked out. He wanted smaller vehicles run late at night instead of the large double-length buses which run up and down Broad St with single-digit passengers. John was worried about privatizing I-80. He definitely wanted more money to fund mass transit, but thought that this option would bust the unions and lead to crony appointments.

I finished and developed another roll of film last week with my Yashica Electro 35 GSN rangefinder. It was a roll of Ilford HP5+ 400, a black and white negative film. The shot above is my favorite from the roll of 36.

I saw her walking east on the 1500 block of Chestnut St with the wigged mannequin head in her left hand. I know that there's either a beauty school or hairdressing school on that block from walking by there so much and seeing the students milling around outside the building. I quickly caught up to her and walked passed her with my camera pointed backwards and up from my hip. The lens is a 45mm f/1.7 so it was a tight frame, but I got the scene in frame. I dialed in the focus of 1m and an aperture of f/4 for a little margin of error and it looks like I got it right. All the shooting from the hip I've been doing with with my digital cameras has paid off enough for me to get a feel for it now with film. If it were sunnier than it was, I could've gone with a smaller f-stop allowing for some more depth of field and a larger margin of error, but I can't control the sun, just the settings on my camera.

The rest of the photos from the roll are up in this flickr set. The crowd favorite seems to be this shot taken down Chancellor St from 12th St just outside 12th St Gym. The strong lines must be getting people to click on the thumbnail for the larger photo.

The HP5+ has been my favorite film so far and will be my first re-purchase of a film stock. The negatives are very dense - nice and dark with a good range of greys in between. I've read that I can manually dial in anywhere between 100 and 800 ASA with this film (rated at 400 ASA) on the same roll and get nice negatives without pushing or pulling the processing accordingly. Now that's some great latitude to work with making this single roll a very versatile one - very good for changing lighting conditions. I'll surely be keeping that in mind the next time I have this film in a camera to test out for myself.

I'm currently carrying around the Nikon F3 slr with some 1 year expired Ilford XP2 Super, another black and white film stock, but this is one of the new breeds of black and white which can be developed at any 1 hour photo lab due to it's C41 processing meaning it's not a true black and white film. The negatives will have an orange color cast to them and I've read that if I were to try to make real black and white prints from them in a darkroom, it would be more difficult than with true black and white film (like the HP5+). I'll be taking the film to the lab.

Oh, and film processed, printed and scanned by the good people over at Photo Lounge (19/Chestnut).

Andi and I went out in mid February to take photos of the third grid of the Philadelphia Grid Project I mentioned before. It was in the area between Oxford Circle and Bridesburg in the NE (north of Aramingo Ave to Roosevelt Blvd). It was my first time up there. I'm really loving how this project is pushing me to go to places I've never been to and would most likely not go to.

Andi posted some of her shots from the outing and her thoughts of the first critique session with a full group of about 10 participants in the project. Only 3 of us had shots from the grid so it was mostly people critiquing. Some of it was constructive, some more destructive, but all in all, interesting to hear what other photographers have to say about my stuff. I'm very eager to see what everyone shoots for this month's grid which is from south of University City to Belmont areas across the river. I haven't gone out to shoot there yet. I think I'll be mostly well north of Drexel. There's a slice of the Schuylkill in the NE section of the grid too.

Some more shots from my outing in this flickr set.

Above is a shot of a driainpipe over on the 900 block of Pine St from about 3p yesterday. About 2.5' above street level is a leak in the cast iron pipe leading straight to the sewer. That was almost 24 hours ago and it's only been raining harder since. I'm going to imagine there's a leak much higher up the pipe, most likely in the aluminum leading into it by now.

Remarkably, the sewer across the street and up the block about 20' from our house is completely unobstructed and draining nicely. But I do know that about 1/3 of the houses in Philly have flooded basements right now and raw sewage is flowing freely into both rivers. Something's gotta be done about that. I hope Mayor Nutter's given the Next Great City's action plan a good read and especially the sewer section.

I've set what seems like a modest goal for the year: To read at least 12 books. On average, a book a month for the mathematically challenged. That may not seem like a lot of reading, but for me, that's about 10 more books than I've read in the last 3 years. I lost my love of reading books sometime in middle school. I'm trying to reclaim it.

I read tons of magazines, newspapers, blogs and other things, but I just stopped reading books for the fun of it probably 15 years ago. Reading for the purpose of writing a report of what I read wasn't fun for me. I hated being assigned things to read and reading and working became one. Now, I'm 4+ years removed from academia and I think I'm ready to go back to reading. I remember reading a book a day when I was in middle school (probably right around the time I started to hate reading) if I really liked what I was reading. I couldn't be ripped away except to eat or play soccer.

So far, I've read 3 books (and another one in 12/07). I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Robert Capa's Slightly Out of Focus. I'm 3/4 of the way through Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and our good friends got us In Defense of Food so that's on the shelf too. I also just picked up from the library Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels which I'll read as soon as I'm done with The Omnivore's Dilemma so it can go back into circulation again.

Lady's been an avid reader all along and has been quite happy with my new quest.

I haven't been excited to read a book in ages and it feels good to feel excited once again.