In other words and in more practical terms, an orphan work is any of our photographs that has not a clear and convincing attribution so that we are both the authors of the image and its copyright owners. As the new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act recently passed by the UK government points out, any creative work that is considered orphan may be used for free without its author receiving any monetary compensation or recognition for his creation.

This would apply to any of the photographs published in social networks that we photographers use to broadcast and advertise our work without having included in them an easily noticeable watermark or having carefully written all necessary IPTC fields and metadata with our names, contact information and copyright and that anyone who would usurp our creation could use for free without any legal restriction or impediment.

The fact is that many social networks eliminate our metadata when we upload photographs to their servers -always read the Terms of Service- and that it is more than likely that this legislation will be imitated in many other countries leaving us as image creators soon in a very difficult position on a near future.

I guess that we photographers will need to more spiritedly reclaim our role as professionals, as authors and artists to receive from our legislators the consideration that our creation works deserve because, after all, behind our cameras there are thousands of people photographing the world each one of us differently and in an unique and unrepeatable way.

There is always a living person behind the camera and therefore, no work is never orphan.

I’ve been through something similar to this once here in Spain some years ago, by the legal attempt to reduce the creative work of photographers to a simple mechanical action to purely deny them both their rights as image creators and their copyrights.

But this attempt failed, and the truth is that we still breathe and that we want our rights to be respected.

The post Orphan works do not exist appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

It is not enough striving to be the best photographer and creating images that attract the greatest attention to get the results that those who trusted your talent expected from you. It is absolutely vital to show your work to as many people and in as many platforms as possible because it depends on the more exposure for your photographs that you get through them exciting new and better assignments.

I have already mentioned the importance of being present in social networks, being active and sharing information and knowledge. There are many of them and very different ones and surely there is something in each one that you may find useful to continue publicizing your work.

In regards to photographs, just keep in mind what the Terms of Service for each network are to exactly know their policies on copyright and what type of rights usage they ask for the content that you publish. Most of them demand a free license for your photographs to be used in advertising the platform or its related websites, and some may even also require a certain lease to trade with your pictures somehow.

You can also find social networks that clearly state in their Terms of Service that all the property of copyright solely belongs to the photographer and that there is nothing that the platform can do without the photographer’s consent, but it is important to always check the Terms of Service because they frequently change and, in any case, it is a good precaution to attach your contact and copyright information in the image file metadata and adding a clearly visible watermark in the photograph.

I have just joined Behance, a community to showcase and share professional portfolios well connected with Facebook and Linkedin and with a good copyright policy.

It is necessary to gain visibility on the internet social networks but even so is protecting copyright.

The post Care for your rights appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

If you are a photographer like me, who works all alone in an almost handmade way controlling every aspect of your profession, you will assume that one of the most important -but I would say a really vital one- is the constant and continuous diffusion of your work to improve the impact of your photographs.

In the vast majority of cases, is through the good references that old clients give about your pictures and your professional attitude that you get interesting contacts and opportunities to work with new ones: always the word of mouth is the best recommendation .

Thus, it is a good strategy to amplify the volume of these recommendations taking advantage of the internet echo to make your photos more noticeable and give them also the possibility to be shared and discussed in order to attract those who may be interested in you and interact with them.

That’s why I have not long ago released my Facebook professional page to increase my visibility on the internet and I would love you to visit it and know about you: if you also want to give me a like, it will sure make the experience of sharing knowledge even more richer.

You can also find me on Linkedin and visit my public profile.

Your feedback is always welcome.

The post Give me a Like appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

Arnau’s set at the Ruqueria shows an exact image of the night sky representing the 88 constellations that we know today and on which Vilardebò stages some captivating, amusing and funny stories on the mythology that created and drew those constellations into the sky. The audience participates in the show proposing its author the names of the constellations on who they want to know its story making each performance unique and surprising.

Among the constellations that were proposed the day I attended the show with my family,  there was Sagittarius.

Vilardebò then explained the history of the satyr Crotus, a skilled hunter who also had an artistic spirit and who lived in harmony with the Muses. Crotus accompanied the nine Muses and learned from them the passion and enthusiasm for the arts. When Crotus died, the Muses decided to honor him asking Zeus to represent the satyr as a group of stars in the sky, giving birth from this tribute to the constellation of Sagittarius.

What really surprised me when Vilardebò continued his narration was knowing that the Muses, the goddesses of inspiration of literature, science and the arts, were the daughters of Zeus and titaness Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology.

He clearly affirmed at this moment that art was then born from memory, from the ability of sensory processing and interpreting reality. Nothing more simple and nothing more true to what I could agree with and something that I was completely unaware of and that I did not expect to learn in the such relaxed mood of a theater performance on a Sunday evening.

I guess that’s the way it works if you are in the arts: you really never stop learning and you must never stop to amaze yourself, explore and continue learning if you truly want to interpret reality and, as it is my case, photograph it.

The post A Night at the Theater appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

Although my trip was short and the list of the visits I had to do was long, I considered for some days before leaving Barcelona the chance to take with me my photo equipment and take some pictures in London: since I know I am a photographer who definitely needs time and patience to find the best possible way to create and solve his photographs, I finally decided not to carry my professional gear and bring with me my beautiful point and shoot camera.

A small camera that I can carry in my pocket, technically limited and with a low resolution perhaps, but a good camera to take some sketches anyway.

But you never know when the opportunity to find a space that you never thought it could catch you  in a so powerful way may arise, as it happened to me when I visited the outstanding Great Court at the British Museum.

There I took these few pictures that you can see in this post, shooting without a tripod and at a high sensitivity that resulted in these remarkably grainy images. Somehow, everything that I never do when I carry all my professional equipment with me and I do play all the calm ceremony that I feel my photographic process requires.

I processed the pictures as I normally do and I finished them using Nik Software SilverEfex and ColorEfex to achieve the look of a pinhole camera, the first camera I used when I learned my first steps as a photographer in Fine Arts school.

 Remember, always have your camera ready.

The post Always Have Your Camera Ready appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

This class is scheduled at the end of the course accompanied by another one that precedes it taught by an architectural magazine publisher as a way to awaken in our students the conscience to understand that the last step that fully completes their entire architectural designs creative process is the vital and necessary very same public diffusion of their works.

My specific role is to provide my students the keys that enable them to know how to plan and how to execute the photographic interpretation of their projects so that they can benefit from the widest possible editorial and media coverage.

I show in my classes an image selection of some of the architectural and interior design projects I have photographed over the years and through these photographs I try to share and teach my students my always rigorous will of looking for the most simple graphically essence that successfully communicates the architectural project and I do specially strive in conveying them the passion that drives me to do it.

Perhaps much of what I try to explain in my classes seems emphasized by the sometimes exaggerated motion of my arms and hands but, anyway, I must admit that with each passing year I feel more comfortable in my role as a professor and I see in my students that my message gets clearer and stronger.

I guess that I will have to probably think more seriously for the future in improving this aspect of my professional career and maybe organize a workshop that can provide specialized training for those who want to share with me my passion for architectural photography.

It is never too late to find a new vocation.

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Among the problems that I have faced lately I’ve found myself in the situation of dealing with someone who has requested my photographs offering me a ridiculous price for my copyright with an aggressive “take it or leave it ” attitude, or the awkward situation in which someone has not only asked me to use my photos for free but has also required me to sign a legal document to certify it.

But maybe the most painful situation of them all has been the terrible surprise of finding my photographs published without my permission and having to start the time consuming and absolutely enervating process of claiming responsibility for the publication and further payment and compensation for my copyright.

I have already mentioned before in another post in this blog how unpleasant being forced to manage these problems is and how much damage they cause in developing a professional career that deserves the very same respect as any other one: the really sad thing about this is that this kind of complaints are becoming increasingly more common from photographers worldwide.

So in this post I want to mention the initiative of Italian photographer Enzo dal Verne, who has posted in his blog and shares through a creative commons license -I have also borrowed the clever title of his post- the animated short video that you can see below in which a resolute teddy photographer bear replicates each and every one of the attempts of an evil masked client bear to get his photographs for free.

I never thought that such a problem could be treated this way, but I can say that the loving teddy photographer bear seems to be very angry and that I feel I perfectly understand him.

The post Exposure Doesn’t Pay Bills appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

Cinematographers refer to this sunset light as “the magic hour”, the time of the day when the sun is hiding behind the horizon but in which its light is still visible before disappearing completely and giving way to night. A light that comes from nowhere and that sculpts relief to the landscape in an extremely subtle mood as color temperature cools from the last golden hues of the sun to the intense blue and mauve shades that precede the huge deep almost black Prussian blue of the night sky.

The so called magic hour actually lasts twenty-five or thirty minutes in which everything happens very quickly and where the light and the exposure values of the scene change at a speed hard to believe. In this same hectic time interval, all the street and domestic lamps that illuminate the city start to quietly turn on, almost imperceptibly, coloring with its own and unique color temperature each and every corner of your frame that the vanishing sunlight has shadowed.

There is a real difficulty in working in a so rapidly changing situation and this is to carefully anticipate how light transforms the scene and also to be prepared and having your camera ready to get both the right balance of the elements in the frame as also the right lights and colors that illuminate them.

Creatively using the combined colors of sunset and street lamps on location gives very suggestive results that confer photographs a very attractive plasticity. If besides, colors are more freely and accurately adjusted during processing plastic results can be very surprising.

But very rigorous attention has to be payed to the light that illuminates the photographic frame when everything happens so fast because its right direction, special quality and metallic gloss only lasts an instant and will not be repeated again until a whole day has passed. If patience, rigor and anticipation are important in architectural photography, they are even more so when the photographs are shot at dawn and dusk.

Waiting for the best possible light to illuminate a photograph is not a trivial matter: nothing can compare to a well-lit photograph if you really want to portray an architecture project in all its glory or convey a captivating emotion in a fine art photograph and then achieve the fantastic momentum when images speak for themselves and viewers get definitely caught by their presence.

The post Working on Sunset Light appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

It is then, when you actually move all the books you have accumulated for long, that you realize for your surprise how heavy the library you are trying to relocate is. And surely also, your surprise increases when you also realize how much you have enjoyed reading all those books and how many of them have educated you as the photographer you are now and how they have influenced the way you understand and appreciate your profession.

Photography books have a mysterious magnetism that makes them irresistible maybe because they keep on their pages many of the photographs you deeply admire and that you need to review from time to time to continue learning from them: the kind of images you would want to have their original prints framed and hanging in your home walls to contemplate them with all the tranquility possible.

From the photography books that occupy the shelves of my small library and from the ones that I still continue learning today, I especially appreciate some titles in addition to “Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller” that I reviewed in a September 2012 post in this blog .

These books are, among others, “The world on my doorstep” by Paul Strand, “Un paese”  by Cesare Zavattini and Paul Strand, “The Portfolios of Ansel Adams”, “The history of photography: from 1839 to the present” by Beaumont Newhall, “La cámara de Pandora: la fotografía después de la fotografía” and“Estética fotográfica” by Joan Fontcuberta, “On the body” by Imogen Cunningham, “Let truth be the prejudice” by W. Eugene Smith, “Walker Evans at work”, “Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism” by Stebbins, Quinn and Furth, “The moment of seeing” by Comer and Klotchko, and “Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the present” by Matthias Winzen.

I suppose that many books could be also on this varied list, a list with so many different names and authors: each of the books that are now included do respond to a vital interest and circumstance that led me to buy them.

Anyway, although this may sound as the topic that it really is, a book is truly an investment that always gives  good profit for a long time.

I love to read books and, when I had the opportunity, I loved to make them.

The post Some Photography Books appeared first on David Cardelús Architectural Photography.

The first one is the endless fascination of walking through the urban landscape and looking at reality to discover in it a new aesthetic sense in the elements that shape it and finding in the city in a form, a color, an essential quality or an unexpected ryhthm that empowers me to interpret reality with a new and interesting look.

From the first reason and completely tied to it, my second reason is to transfer and share with those contemplating my photographs the tremendous feeling of intense excitement I experienced both in my search as in the discovery.

No photograph exists without an effective dialogue between reality and the photographer nor another beckoning one between the image and the viewer. The real purpose of a photograph is to subtlety disclose reality and to express a new vision of the world in the strongest possible manner.

With this motivation in mind I work and produce the photographs I professionally take and with the same resolution I create my most personal fine art photography works that I am presenting here.

Always at the end of the entire photographic process of viewing, finding and sharing, the ultimate intention of photographs is to tease and deeply touch you.

You can read more about this series of photographs that I have titled ‘The Silent City’ in my artist statement and see the full set of pictures in my store.

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