Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: rant

  • We need to talk about sharing images.

    We need to talk about sharing images.

    I know, I know. I have this reputation for being a bit uptight. And to be honest, sometimes it’s true. Especially when it comes to my photography.

    Lots of photographers have a difficult relationship with Tumblr. The problem is, it’s a platform that encourages you to be pretty unethical. You see, if you want to add content to your Tumblr blog all you have to do is click the ‘reblog’ button (or whatever it’s called) and it just regurgitates it wholesale onto your own page. You don’t have to think about who created the original piece or if they had permission to upload those images and the content, you just click reblog, and it magically populates your own stream with interesting things.

    I try to get around this to an extent by automatically reposting my blog posts both here and on LARP.GUIDE to their own Tumblr feeds, hoping that people will reblog content from those feeds rather than pinching the images from somewhere else and then letting them out into the world without any effort at credits.

    I repost content myself on my blog all the time, but I make the effort to make it relevant to what I’m writing. For instance I wouldn’t just pinch someone else’s picture and post it with no explanation on my blog just because I liked it. I also wouldn’t just pinch someone else’s picture to use as illustration without asking them first. Especially if it had nothing really to do with the content of that blog itself. So, for example, if you’re writing a post on something random about LARP and you want to put a picture in – find one that is somehow relevant to your content and then ask the photographer if that’s ok. Don’t just think ‘I’m writing a post about making foam weapons, so any picture featuring a foam weapon is fair game’ because that’s not cool.

    If you want to use a picture by someone else to illustrate an article (or a YouTube video, a quote from someone, anything really) then try to add something to the thing you are using for illustration. Discuss the point made in a video. Talk about how the photograph represents what you’re writing about. Comment on the quote you use or contrast it with a quote that someone else made. We learn to do these things while we’re learning to write essays at school – don’t abandon those lessons!

    I photograph LARP because I love photographing LARP. I photograph it because I like the friends I have made and I have aspirations about shooting for film and TV one day. But I also photograph LARP because I feel that there’s a really strong community underlying the hobby and I like to help build up the community.

    So you might be wondering why I have a problem with people sharing my images of LARP if I like the idea of fostering a community. The honest answer is, that pinching and using an image on your own blog without taking the time to chat to me first isn’t building a community. It’s just taking something that I made and using it without asking. Part of building a community is talking and having conversations – so have a conversation with me and tell me what you’re up to. Involve me to make the community ties stronger. If you don’t want to have a conversation with me then don’t bother using my images – it’s not a compliment if you don’t like me enough to engage with me on any level, especially when you’ve not even bothered to tell me where I can find my images online. I might just want to take a screenshot of your use of my images for my own records, so that I can look back and smile when I see that people have loved my images enough to use them. (As you can see from my writing portfolio, I love keeping track of where my work has ended up!)

    A few people have suggested in the past that it doesn’t matter if someone takes my images down and puts them somewhere else, because I put my watermark on them anyway. Well, as I said above, firstly I like to see where they have ended up. That means something to me. But secondly, if people didn’t just pinch them and put them on their own Facebooks, their own Tumblrs, their own blogs, etc, without permission, then I wouldn’t have to watermark them in the first place. I watermark work primarily because I cannot trust the general public to not use my images without crediting them. I don’t ask for money for my pictures, I just ask for people to let me know that they love my work. And I don’t know what you love my work if you don’t tell me!

    So please guys, if you want to use my work on your blog, don’t just assume I’m ok with that. Just reach out, send me a message and start a conversation. And lets see how we can help each other out. (And as it says on the side of this blog above the Patreon logo – if you like my work and you feel you got something out of it, please consider buying me a coffee. It takes alot of time, effort, love and money to make great photos of LARP. Don’t be afraid to say thanks.)

  • Teaching basic study skills to those who don’t want to learn

    I know, a longwinded post title, right?

    My intention in this post is not to ‘call anyone out’ or to diss those who lecture me if they happen to somehow read this. My lecturers know how much I love the course I’m doing and that my feedback is overwhelmingly positive. With that said, here we go.

    As I settle into the second semester of my undergrad degree at the ancient age (compared to my classmates) of twenty eight there are some things that are bothering me. The hangovers of my colleagues I can just about manage. I can even mostly handle the irritation of people lacking respect for the lecturers by whispering to each other (no matter how quiet you think you are, you’re not) and the constant need to check phones. But one thing stands out.

    It’s the lack of ambition.

    I had this dream that university would be this place where everyone was there with a common goal. There would be hours lost debating art historical politics and investigating radical, revolutionary artists. On how we should deal with ‘the female problem’ and the canon of dead white guys. Or anything exciting. You know, time spent in the library together pouring over exciting journals and visits to exhibitions.

    Apparently not.

    I mean, I’d settle for just ‘interested in class’ and ‘does the minimum background reading’ but it seems that people don’t even want to do that.

    In the first semester one of our modules had two pieces of coursework. The first was a guided bibliography where we were directed to investigate, in steps, an artwork and basically compile a bibliography for a fantasy essay that we had not written. We had to write about why we selected those sources. The second piece of coursework was a guided essay with a set of questions to think about that led us through the process of constructing an essay. We had a similar one for our architecture course but it didn’t seem as forced. I treated these pieces of work with my usual level of contempt and go the

    The issue I have with these pieces of work is this. They should not be taught at undergraduate level.

    I appreciate that during A Levels you may not do subjects where you are taught how to approach research or write a bibliography, I certainly wasn’t taught these skills since I did physics, maths and music technology all those years ago. However when I came to do my first essay with the Open University we were simply thrown in at the deep end with nothing more than a ‘study skills’ guide and the phone number of our tutor. We were expected to go away and teach ourselves form the myriad of resources available how to write an essay.

    This stuff isn’t rocket science. I would expect anyone who is capable of studying at undergraduate level to have the ability and the drive to go and find this stuff out. It’s not as if writing essays is a surprise on the course, you have to do it on every undergraduate course. To be honest if you can’t even be bothered to look up how to write a correct essay then you’re not going to get very far.

    Lets put this in real terms. Each module costs me £1125 which is quite a lot of money to someone who doesn’t have very much. I want to spend that £1125 on learning and being tested to find out where my abilities lie – not being taught how to write an essay. Now obviously not all of the teaching on the module was spent teaching these skills, but a surprisingly large portion of it was. It was just frustrating.

    But the frustration is not directed at my lecturers, the course or the university system. My frustration is directed to my colleagues who do not seem to want to open a book and learn something for themselves.

  • Sexism again

    So today I was accused of being a bit of a hypocrite. A new online magazine has been launched by someone on a forum I use with the content of ‘cars and girls’. Fair play, launching an online magazine and finding content for it can’t be the easiest thing in the world and must take up a fair amount of time. I have to admit I doubt I’d ever attempt a project like this because my design skills are simply not up to it.

    The thing is, I object to this format. Cars and girls. Girls and cars. Apparently picked because the two ‘subjects’ go together. The way I see it though it’s just more encouragement for certain types of men to think about women in a material possession kind of way. By associating something which is a highly prized material possession (modified cars in this context) and showing naked chicks alongside on many of the pages it creates a link between the two. You’re saying to the impressionable “Hey you, buy this amazing car and you’ll get this chick as well”. It’s reducing a woman to a possession to be owned in the same way as a car and that isn’t a nice way to be thought of.

    The justification for accusing me of being a hypocrite is that I shoot naked men and portray them as sexual objects. Well quite frankly I try to avoid portraying them as sexual objects and would be quite upset if any model thought that this is the way that I had portrayed them. But I wouldn’t ever make a connection between one of the guys that I’ve shot and a material possession. Because guys aren’t just a possession to have. They’re beautiful, if mysterious, creatures that I need in my life. I’d like to think I show them a little more respect than comparing them to a piece of metal that goes at speed.

    Another aspect to this of course is the issue of how women are presented with their own gender. I’m not the only woman in the world into cars and motor sports. In fact there are quite a few female racing drivers out there now and personally I’ve known as many girls over the years with heavily modified cars as I have guys. I find it frustrating when I’m supposed to just accept naked glamour shots of women alongside my hobby. It’s as if it’s ok for men to be titillated along side their hobbies but women are told that that’s just the way it is because men are a bigger market. Well I’m sorry, but I think that’s rubbish. Perhaps if these magazines featured more of a gender balance (in the case of photography) or just no sexual images at all (in the case of cars) then more women would read their publications?

    Fundamentally I don’t understand though with certain car magazines and websites why we need to have sexually stimulating images of women in them anyway. It seems like a macho pissing contest. He with the biggest car will get the girl with the biggest breasts or something. Don’t get me started on the scantily dressed women at race tracks – people keep asking why there are no top female racing drivers? Perhaps the answer is that we as a gender are put off by the whole sexist approach to the low level car and motor sport industry.