Kevin Whitworth / Jacurutu

Well, that's really annoying. I just spent half an hour writing this on the (now free!) wifi connection on a National Express East Coast train back up to York, and one wrong click of the mouse and it evapourated into the ether! Oh well, try again!

It's been a while since I last posted, mostly because I haven't had much time. A large part of this has been due to the flooding of the river Ouse. We live in Cawood, between York and Selby, and last week the Ouse burst its banks and flooded the area on the other side of the river to the village, known as Kelfield Ings. Whilst this may look pretty, it means that the road we normally use to get between Cawood and York has been under about 8 feet of water. Journey's have to be made via Selby, significantly increasing the journey time. I'm getting the train down south a couple of times a week at the moment, but Jenny has to do this every day to get to work, and unfortunately the local bus service has become rather erratic as a result. Still at least we weren't flooded, unlike some people, including those who've only just started recovering from last autumn's floods.

The image on the right, showing the B1222 vanishing under water, is part of a series taken the night the Ouse burst its banks. I've also a number of other shots showing how close Cawood bridge came to being swamped, and how the flood defenses kept the river out of the village (the river level was about 6 feet above Old Road, which runs along side the river).

I also took a few shots on the morning of Thursday 24th, after Kelfield Ings had completely filled with water. I haven't had time to process these fully yet, but I did have a quick experiment with the shot on the right. The aim was to take the sunrise over the flooded fields, but it wasn't particularly spectacular, resulting in some rather dull, grey images. With a little tweaking in Photoshop (rather more than the exposure correction and sharpening I normally do) I was able to produce the image on the right. There's a few issues with it - mostly the sky is blown out - but overall I think I'm pleased with it.

To produce it, I used the shadow/highlight tool to bring the grass bank on the right out of the shadows, and then applied graduated tints to the sky and foregound. These were done with a new, completely orange layer, with a gradient applied to a layer mask. I fiddled with the blending mode until I got the desired result - I think it was using colour dodge. The opacity was then changed, stronger for the sky, weaker for the foreground, until the right balance was acheived. A touch of vignetting was added using the oval selection tool on a new layer, heavily featherd, then inverted and the corners filled in black, again blended with the rest of the image to acheive the right look. A touch of dodging and burning on the sky brought out the clouds, and finally a touch of sharpening to finish things off.

When I get time, I'm going to go through the rest of the set and see if I can find a better starting image, to avoid the floating bit of grass on the lake, and the blown out sky. Or failing that, I might use the same image but edit from RAW instead of JPEG. (This is what I'd normally do, but this started as a quick experiment.)

The full set (Cawood Flooding January 2008) can be found on Flickr, and as and when I finish editing the other shots of the floods, I'll post them there too.

A couple of days ago, I received the following via Flickrmail:

Now, I must admit to being quite excited. When I first read it. But then I thought about it a bit, and decided to file it for further reference. (Plus until I got somewhere with a decent Internet connection.) I tend to be sceptical about things like this (and offers of large sums of money to help move someone's husband's/dad's/etc ill-gotten life savings out of some African country), so I wanted to do a bit more digging.

It turns out that it's legitimate. But I still have this nagging feeling that Schmap are asking me to give them my photographs so that they can make money. OK, they're not selling my photographs, and they're not selling their product to their customers, but their business model is supported by advertising revenue. So, at the end of they day, they want my product (a photograph) to improve their product (a city guide) in order to make money. And they don't want to pay me for it. I know they're offering a photo credit and a link to the original on Flickr, but is that of any real value to me?

There is much discussion, on Flickr and elsewhere, about how amateur photographers (and sites like Flickr) are killing the photography business, making it difficult for professionals to make a living when amateurs will give away their photos (or photography services) for nothing (or a link). As a keen amateur with wanabee-professional aspirations, I have mixed feelings on this. I've done a couple of jobs for friends for little or no financial profit, no doubt depriving a real pro from some income. However, I've gained experience and (hopefully) references, and they've had to take a risk that I'm actually capable delivering what they've asked me for. Clearly this isn't a long-term sustainable business model, so the amount of work I'm taking away from pro photographers is limited, and hopefully it helps me get to the point where I can start to earn a real income from photography.

Anyway, I digress. Having searched around on Flickr and elsewhere, there quite a few articles about Schmap asking Flickr users for a free license to use their photographs (eg Editorial Photographers UK, telescreen.org, Joe Gratz). Having read a few of these, and the discussions that they've provoked, I was still initially undecided.

However, on further reflection (and a couple of cups of coffee), that the excitement of being "discovered" was clouding my judgement. It's my work, if someone wants to make money from it, I want more than a photo credit and a link to a photo on Flickr. Schmap are welcome to license it from under commercial terms, and until they're prepared to do so, they can't use it.

Clearly plenty of Flickrites think otherwise. I'm not going to have a rant about how they're eroding the commercial photography market - plenty of other people have done that (and no doubt many more will do so in the future - perhaps even those who've crossed over to the pro side!). I'm not even going to have a rant about misleading people that Schmap is non-commercial (Joe Gratz did that).

What I am going to do is have a rant that I've got much better photos of London, and of the Royal Observatory, in my Flickr stream (although maybe I need to learn to separate myself from my photographs). Actually, I'm not going to have a rant about that either (mostly because I'm running late - I'm off for a curry and need to wrap this up), but I will express some level of mild annoyance about it.

Grrr...