It took much longer than I intended, but I finally posted my 100th Blip on Blipfoto.com today. It was also exactly one year since I posted my first Blip. I can hope that the next year will be better, but I also know I shouldn't expect that to happen without some solid effort on my part. Wish me luck!

If you're a photographer, you should check out the chance to win an all-expenses-paid private workshop with Crave Photography, and other bonus items. You'll find all the details here:

http://cravemyphotography.com/blog/world-wide-giveaway/

And if you're not a photographer, but you have a small business that could use some valuable marketing, check out that link anyway. It's an excellent example of using social media and business collaboration to generate valuable and free marketing.

(Yes, I know, my last blog post here was much too long ago...)

Today I was on Flickr, which I don't use all that much anymore but which can be convenient for some purposes, and was skimming through their FAQ to find something. I was distracted by a question about copyright, from which I pull the following extract:

How can I copyright my photos? ...The nonprofit Creative Commons offers six default licenses as an alternative to full copyright so you can choose the one that best suits your needs.

No. No, no, and no. Hey, I'll be the first to acknowledge that copyright is a pretty complex topic, but can we at least keep a few basic facts straight?

As I recently mentioned in the morgueFile.com forums, I set a goal for myself to build my tiny portfolio of images on Shutterstock up to the not-quite-as-tiny size of 250 images before the end of 2010. In January, I only added one (and it was a fractal, not a photo), so I'm not exactly making good strides toward that goal, yet.

The big news in the microstock photography world today is that Shutterstock (where you can buy or sell stock photos, illustrations, and video clips) acquired BigStockPhoto, another microstock site that uses a more typical "credit"-based system instead of the subscriptions used by Shutterstock. I have photos on both sites, so it will be interesting to see how the two companies merge their operations.

Not a single post to this blog all year! That's not just a commentary on this blog, it also leads into the topic of this post. My time has been stretched thin, and things have not been working out as well as I'd hoped. Therefore, I've decided it's time for a change in my "strategy" (if you can call it that) when it comes to photography. This is true across the board, but especially so regarding microstock.

This isn't exactly about my own photos, but it's about my involvement in photography in a more general sense.

I decided to dump my infrequently-updated, rarely-visited, virtually-pointless blog in which I recommended various stock images, usually by photographers other than myself. A key purpose for the blog was to use the referral program of Shutterstock to earn more for myself, Shutterstock, and other photographers. I never had the time to promote it, though, so it was just one more blog lost in the wilderness.

Has it really been over three months since I posted something to my photography blog? ugh... I'll let you guess whether that's because my life is boring or because it's exciting.

Speaking of exciting, I finally had a chance to use a service called TinEye, about which I'd read rave reviews from other photographers. TinEye lets you search the Web for your digital photos. Now, why would you want to look for photos that you already have on your computer? Because, innocent reader, the sad, dark truth is that if you have ever put a photo on the Web anywhere (Flickr, Facebook, etc.), there's a chance that somebody grabbed a copy and used it somewhere, without your knowledge. (Probably without your permission, too, unless you specifically licensed it for that sort of thing.)

It wasn't very long ago that I mentioned in this blog that I had been accepted as a contributing photographer on Lucky Oliver. Well, the news is out that the site is closing its doors. That was short lived, at least for me... I didn't make any sales there in that short time with what few images I had online, but apparently there are some who are wondering about their accumulated earnings. I don't envy the position of the site owners at all!

Last week I bought a lens off eBay for the first time, and it arrived yesterday (sooner than I expected, which is just the kind of surprise I like). It's a "double-X" Minolta Maxxum 50mm 1.7 lens, which -- if I can believe what I read on multiple sites prior to bidding -- means it's a model from early in the production run for this lens, and may have better optics than later-produced units.