Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Got an email earlier in the week asking me for permission to use some of my Ancient Egypt-related pics that I have posted to Wikimedia Commons for use in a book. Turns out that it is for an illustrated version of the bible from a small press somewhere in the States.
I answered and told them that yes, they could have my permission, though I have to admit that I felt a bit conflicted, since as an atheist I feel like I am "aiding and abetting" to some extent. That qualm is a small one though, since when I uploaded the pics to Wikimedia Commons I relinquished any claim as to retaining ownership of those images, all ostensibly for the "greater good" of Wikimedia in general. Turns out though that that provision doesn't extend necessarily to print, hence the query to me about the pics was not just a courtesy.
Apparently they will use the pics (ranging from a wooden model of people working in a bakery to a stela of a late period pharaoh) and give full attribution to myself as the photographer, to Wikimedia Commons, and to the institution where the artifact in question is located. On the whole it seems like everyone is to be treated fairly, and I am disinclined to say "no" to a seeming equitable proposal.
The only real potential downside is that the home institution where the artifact resides might otherwise loose out on some money for licensing the photo directly, but in my experience they don't always have pictures of the more minor items available, and whatever is posted to Wikimedia will not be professionally shot -- the resolution for print will be low in comparison to whatever the home museum could provide, and in most cases there is glare or awkward lighting that inevitably degrades the quality of most of the images, even after a bit of PhotoShopping.
On the whole, I think the idea behind Wikimedia Commons is a good thing, and am happy to lend my support to people who want to include any of the pictures I have shot anywhere else.
Getting a photography credit in print is nice too.
Labels: photography, Wikimedia Commons
Sunday, January 21, 2007
In my spare time I have been occupying myself lately on Wikimedia, which is the open source repository for multimedia files, and a companion (and complementary source of info) to Wikipedia. I had been organizing pictures I had taken just before Xmas at some of the Royal Ontario Museum's galleries on the site. In the end I managed to get a good collection together of most of the more significant items on display in the Egyptian and First Nations galleries there.
<flashback>Back in September 2005 I heard on the radio that the dinosaur gallery was going to close down for renovations. So I made a point of heading there with my camera in hand as I knew that what they were likely to replace the gallery with would be a lot different. Undoubtedly improved and updated, but I wanted to capture that the essence of what was undoubtedly a dated display, reminiscent of the state of the art circa the late 60s. There were the small dioramas featuring attacking dinosaurs set at about knee-height for me, designed for young kids to peer at and ponder. Then there was the display of a dino digger at the Hunter Quarry, his jack hammer now a museum-piece, and a fine layer of dust covering everything. Or the gallery of primate evolution, featuring black and white pictures of people from many different cultures arranged on branches of a tree of life, with a picture or two of a hippie chick solidly dating the display to another era. Or the full-sized dioramas featuring the bones of animals posed around a section of a mock LaBrea Tar Pit, clawing away at the unfortunate animals that had already succumbed. I took pictures of the lot, with the intention of putting together a mini-gallery on my own blog site at some point in the future.</flashback>
So I have all of these photos from the old dino gallery. I had even invested the time into putting photo-collages together of some of the larger displays. So I found the original pictures I had shot, did some judicious cropping and retouching of them in PhotoShop, and posted a bunch of them as the preferred PNG format to Wikimedia. Voila! an online gallery of what used to be on display at the ROM.The sole exception was an animated GIF file I had constructed of a peephole display showing an Australopithecus skull "morphing" using light and mirrors into the face of living female of that long-dead primate.
If you are interested in a tour of the old dino gallery at the ROM, go to (url) to see what I uploaded. Until the museum opens the new dino gallery (supposedly for sometime later this year) this will have to do.
Labels: Ancient Egypt, First Nations, Royal Ontario Museum, Wikimedia Commons
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