Words to Lyrics Ben Ho's observations from the cloud

28 February 2009

Part Rivalry

Filed under: Reflection — Ben @ 12:26 pm

Last night was the Europe Tour reunion. It was a great night, with the collages and the video unveiled. I was particularly interested in the collages, as most of the photos came from me. It’s good to get your work shown to many many people. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was a conversation came up during the night.

I was talking to Anna, one of the “Year 12s” that came with us. We were talking about how things were in the past few months. Slightly obviously, choir was one of those things. The first thing I mentioned was that the Alto section were now much better than the Sopranos. “My job is done,” she replied. This triggered a thought.

As our conductor said earlier on during the day, “Don’t disappoint those who sang your part in the past.” People who sang in the choir, especially those who are in the Chamber Choir (top choir) or those who were in the Europe Tour are very passionate about what they did. And rightly so, you are working with talented and dedicated people. It then becomes a light-hearted competition on which section is best. That’s where the title came from.

Now in 2009, the choir sections are vastly different to last year. Now that the Altos are much better, the Sopranos are ‘struggling’ to match the volume of the Altos. For the guys however, it seems the Basses are falling behind the Tenors. This game shall continue…

20 February 2009

I hate the photo nickers!

Filed under: Rant — Ben @ 8:10 pm

So yesterday was a relatively free night. Therefore, I spent some time looking around on Facebook at people’s photos. Only several minutes later, I noticed some pictures that I had taken on people’s profiles. This triggered a big thought.

I hate the photo nickers.

Now, I am a big believer of photographer’s rights. All the photos on my flickr are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. That means that you can use this photo for whatever you want, as long as you don’t make any money from it (unless you ask me) and you license your work the same. I believe that creativity is something that should be shared by everyone for them to enjoy. Almost in the same spirit that photographers have when it comes to sharing techniques.

The copyright laws in major countries around the world state that every self-made work is copyrighted immediately. So technically if you use a photo from a website where no copyright notice is placed, you are breaking the law. It’s that simple.

Anyway, back to the point. A good example of this was the recent Europe tour that our school choir and orchestra did last December. We had website (run by yours truly), with photos from some of the students, plus our tour guide, who is an accomplished photographer. Now, people nick these photos and dump them on Facebook or some other site, and people treat it as if they took that massively sharp and beautiful shot. There’s no recognition either!! I find that a bit disrespectful, really. It saddens me that people treat photos like that silly shot of your cat or dog. They don’t respect the hard work and effort that someone has put into composing and taking that shot.

There is my short-lived rant. I hope you understand to look into the copyright status of photos if you want to use them, then give the photographers credit where credit is due!

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