PG is aware that other people’s vacation photos can be boring, so he’s only going to show four.

Istanbul

PG had never been to Istanbul before and really liked it.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, commonly known as the Blue Mosque, was constructed in the early 1600′s and is one of the largest in the world. This particular area was fairly dark and required some tweaking to pull up the colors.

Mykonos

A tour guide told PG that because there is so little rain in most of the Greek islands, everyone captures rainwater that runs off their roofs into cisterns. Because they don’t want dirty water, many whitewash their roofs and the rest of their homes once or twice per year. The colors are overwhelmingly blue (Ageaen Sea and sky) and white (many of the buildings).

Burano

Burano is a small island in the Venetian lagoon. Before tourism, most of the men were fishermen and many of the women made lace for home use and to sell for supplemental family income. This lady was sitting in her yard beside a busy street making lace with a single needle and a single thread.

Rome

This is, of course, the Colosseum. It’s undoubtedly a crude American impression, but it reminded PG of a Big 10 football stadium as he walked around the outside.

Photographic Info 

Each of the images was created using High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques involving three photos – one at normal exposure, one over-exposed and one under-exposed – combined in Photomatix Pro with additional work in Photoshop.

PG has used HDR for several years, usually in ways that are undetectable by anyone other than a photo enthusiast. Some of these photos are obviously HDRish – the halo around the Mykonos church tower and the gauziness of the exterior of the Colosseum – but that’s the mood PG was in when he created them.

Passive Guy just discovered The Public Domain Review:

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into this whopping plenitude that is the public domain. We aim to help our readers explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and by offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

. . . .

Each week we feature an article exploring material in the public domain. Contributors include leading scholars, writers, critics, artists, archivists, scientists and librarians.

This week’s article is “Seeing Joyce”:

In 1931, Stanislaus Joyce wrote to his older brother, James, a letter that echoed with many voices.

I cannot read your work in progress. The vague support you get from certain French and American critics I set down to pure snobbery … What is the meaning of that rout of drunken words? … You want to show that you are a superclever superman with a superstyle.

It wasn’t the younger sibling’s first complaint, nor even the most bitter; as brother of the more famous Jim he had spoken out far more abusively at earlier, similarly “obscure” moments in the Joycean career. Nor was Stanny’s the only such complaint; in fact such allegations and dismissals would become more or less general. This time, the “work in progress” became Finnegans Wake (1939), a book that has defeated most of its would-be readers wholly and all partially, but that same frustrated opprobrium had begun with Ulysses (1922) and in due time would discolour everything that Joyce wrote.

To accept the general impeachment of James Joyce is never to know vast delight. The majority has ruled for a long time – Joyce is “difficult,” Prince of the Unintelligibles, out-Steining Gertrude and that’s that, no further argument.

. . . .

James Joyce attracted painters. Brancusi painted a portrait of the artist as an older man – one slender whorl and some thin tangential lines (prompting Joyce’s father to say, “Well – Jim has changed a bit since I saw him”). Matisse provided stunning illustrations for an edition of Ulysses (though by taking his inspiration from Homer he annoyed Joyce – who probably didn’t stop to think about Matisse’s language skills).

Link to the rest at The Public Domain Review

The website also includes both illustrations and photos. The following photo was taken during the ill-fated 1911 expedition to reach the South Pole lead by Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

The five men who reached the South Pole all died trying to return to their ship.

From PC World:

Photos and the Internet go together like peanut butter and jelly. For as long as there have been web browsers, people have generously posted photos online–which other people have then downloaded and used for their own purposes, whether or not they’ve actually asked for permission. To make it easier to legally and ethically reuse photos posted online, the Creative Commons license was created.

. . . .

Before we go any further, I should point out that every photo on the Internet has been taken and published by someone, and that means all of those images are implicitly under copyright. You don’t have to see an explicit copyright notice in order for an image to be protected by law. Indeed, all creative works are implicitly protected by U.S. copyright law.

Consequently, you shouldn’t save photos you find online and reuse them in your own work (such as on a website or in a blog post) without first getting permission from the copyright owner.

. . . .

Creative Commons is the name of a new way to make your work available to the Internet community. Of course, I say that Creative Commons is new, but that’s only true in comparison to our 200-year-old copyright law–Creative Commons was started in 2001by a nonprofit organization of the same name that has developed a number of licenses, all available for free, to help artists share their work.

In general, any Creative Commons license allows you to redistribute an image for noncommercial purposes, as long as you don’t modify the image. Dig a little deeper and you’ll discover there are a handful of conditions that can be attached to a Creative Commons license. The artist can choose to allow or prohibit commercial use of a work, allow it to be modified, or impose a “share alike” condition.

. . . .

If you choose to release your work under a Creative Commons license, that does not invalidate your copyright; it simply provides an easy-to-communicate license for distributing your work.

. . . .

The Internet is awash in photos with Creative Commons licenses, but there’s no question that the best place to look is Flickr, which makes it easy for people to license their photos as Creative Commons. When I need to finds a photo online for Digital Focus or any of my other blogging duties, I always head directly to Flickr’s search page and select both “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and “Find content to use commercially.”

Link to the rest at PC World

Passive Guy posted this for a bit of copyright education. With text documents, it’s not difficult to use an excerpt from the larger work and fall under the Fair Use limitation on the exclusive rights of a copyright holder to control publication of a work.

One of the elements considered in determining whether a use of copyrighted material falls under Fair Use is the amount and substantiality of the portion of the copyrighted work used. 100 words excerpted from a 1,000 word work will look pretty good under the amount and substantiality test.

A photograph is a different matter, however, because most often the person using it will want to use the entire photo. You don’t want to show 20% of a photo of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite, you want to show the entire mountain and its surroundings.

Randy Le'Moine Photography, Used Under Creative Commons License

In addition to Flickr, you can find a lot of photos and illustrations released under Creative Commons licenses on Wikimedia Commons and at CCFinder.

Wikimedia Commons will even provide html code to properly use a photo you find there. Hover your cursor over the following photo to see the license and attribution information Wikimedia automatically provided. This information accompanied the photo when it was uploaded to Wikimedia by the original photographer.

It’s becoming gray and cold.

When Passive Guy was reading a review of Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History recently, he started thinking about Italy. He knows it can be gray and cold in parts of Italy, but it never feels that way.

Since he can’t travel to Italy, he can look at pictures.

Lucca is an ancient (founded by the Etruscans in 1 zillion BC) walled city in Tuscany, not far from Florence. For centuries, it was a center of the silk trade. (PG has a very nice tie he bought there.)

More recently, Lucca is famous as the birthplace of Italian composer, Giacomo Puccini. (La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, etc.) You can visit the graceful old church where Puccini was baptized, visit another lovely old church where Puccini said he was “baptized into music,” and see a statue of the Maestro sitting in a chair, looking very relaxed.

In yet another ancient church, Italians sing Puccini arias every night, voices reverberating through the high stone spaces.

Medieval cities are not very conducive to automobiles. While a few cars make it past the walls, Lucca is mostly a walking and bicycling city. You can rent bicycles and ride around the city on top of the old wall.

PG took a photo of a typical Lucca street scene in the late afternoon, not far from the square where Puccini’s statue resides. If gray days are making you think of brighter places, you may like it.

For readers outside the United States, today is Memorial Day in the US.

While for many, the holiday is only a long weekend marking the beginning of summer, Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day because flowers were used to decorate gravesites, was established in 1868 to commemorate men and women who died while in military service.

I took this photograph of the American military cemetery in rural Tuscany. Most soldiers buried there died in World War II, fighting in Italy.