For reasons inexplicable the normal camera-to-screen time for each picture of about two seconds was pushing out to two minutes. It worried me a little but as the Aperture Activity window suggested progress was bring made, albeit slowly, I pushed on. We wrapped up the shoot and packed up the set.

But when I got back to it the computer was in a world of hurt. Aperture crashed and it crashed. The Finder had a mind of its own. All that remained was to reboot. But the risk in doing so was to lose that last handful of pictures from the day’s shoot which remained unaccounted for somewhere between the camera and the computer.

Let me tell you the feeling of having had a particularly successful day’s shoot fades very quickly against the prospect of catastrophic data loss. But let me also tell you that we have our ducks in a row to ensure that’s just never going to be allowed to happen.

The location computer for tethered shooting has two external drives attached to it at any given time which are home to a back-up — and a back-up of the back-up. That puts each and every picture that leaves the camera during a shoot in three separate places within a couple of seconds of shutter actuation.

Aperture can be set to manage this for you and it’s a workflow I just never deviate from. On this occasion it meant I could quickly put my heart at ease by confirming that 1124 files were safe and sound on external discs notwithstanding the outcome with the coughing and spluttering Aperture and its library file.

But the whereabouts of that final handful of pictures shot in the midst of the meltdown remained in question. They weren’t on the backup drives and they weren’t in the camera. So here’s hoping they were in the library.

The most common concern I hear about Aperture from prospective users relates to its default inclination to store your pictures within its own library file. They tell you they’re nervous at the notion that when something goes wrong, like this, Aperture owns your pictures and you can’t take control of them as you would be able to had they been kept as regular files inside of regular folders.

On the face of it that’s a fair and reasonable concern to have and so the program gives you just such an option. But the truth is the Aperture Library file is for all intents and purposes just another folder anyway, albeit one which avoids making the average user aware of this point in order to discourage them from poking around inside of it. But when the proverbial hit the proverbial for me last week, and Aperture just would not load (nor could I even reinstall it), that’s what I had to do to locate my missing pictures.

(Right-clicking on the Library file and choosing “Show package contents” will reveal a window with the folder hierarchy of your Aperture library. Within this there exists a folder called “Capture” which, logically enough, holds pictures captured during the tethered shooting process before they’re passed onto the library proper. That’s where mine were. And as with any folder, from there you can drag and drop them to to safety. Simple.)

Of 1,200 raw image files from over eight hours of shooting and ten costume changes, we recovered each and every one of them.

But this particular happy ending didn’t come about by chance or good luck. It’s about acknowledging that you’ve just got to back-up everything, every step of the way — twice. For when scenarios like this arise, as they will, you’ll want to have the right answers.

Tethered shooting with Aperture.

The Profoto Giant Reflector. It comes with its own postcode and is known to affect the earth’s orbit.

]]> http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/disaster-averted/feed/ 0 http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/its-because-they-can/ http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/its-because-they-can/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 02:51:24 +0000 Wade http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/?p=4098 I know we’ve spoken about this before but the madness continues. Just as I was reaching into my pocket to pull out my credit card to buy a license for the freshly minted Photoshop CS6, the Adobe online store noticed I am Australian and instantly adjusted its offerings to reflect the most expensive price point for any customer of that product world-wide.

Adobe’s regional pricing policy means the same software downloaded by an Australian IP address, while coming from the very same servers that it does for US customers, nonetheless costs us substantially more.

That vendors like Adobe and Microsoft operate this way is not news, and the matter has gotten front page coverage of late on account of Federal MP Ed Husic working to set up an inquiry into such price disparities across the IT sector. So while I was expecting an Australian price markup, I wasn’t expecting one of nearly forty per cent!

Adobe Photoshop CS6 – US Price $US699

Adobe Photoshop CS6 – Australian price $AU1,062 (excluding GST)

When asked why this is so, the developer presents such factors as local cost of business pressures, the impact of economies of scale on providing support services to our smaller customer base, and the premium on shipping and logistical support for such a far flung market.

Another way of putting it is that American customers (where Photoshop is at its cheapest) should not be asked to subsidise Australian customers (where it costs Adobe much more to do business). That would all be fair enough if it wasn’t for the fact I don’t actually believe them.

I am sure those factors are truthful ones in principle, but it’s that overwhelming tendency of modern business to centralise resources and remove duplication, saving millions, that has me doubtful. If you aren’t sending your support functions to India, your manufacturing to China and your inventory to wherever the cheapest warehouse space happens to be at the time, then you’re the odd one out.

But then again I am a photographer and not a captain of industry so what would I know? Let’s have that inquiry to see.

In the meantime it’s not as though Australian developers are on the Adobe payroll to localise each edition of Photoshop, or that they have an Australian call-centre to fund, or they’re paying Australian warehouse rents to hold their products and that we are just absorbing this in the final retail price. There are certainly no delivery trucks and global supply chains to fund with digitally delivered software. So why are they really charging us a 40% premium? It’s because they can and Adobe admits as much.

In attempting to defend themselves Adobe referred to “customer research that assesses the value of the product in the local market”. In other words, the price is set by what the market is willing to bear.

It’s not uncommon in business for price points to be influenced more by what the market will pay than what it actually costs to produce a good or provide a service. And so Adobe is charging Australians as much as it thinks it can get away with.

It means Adobe is profiteering from Australians who are in effect subsidising its US customers and helping to maximise Adobe’s market penetration there. But options exist for those of us who might object to this, and may eventually force Adobe to mend their ways just as others have had to do.

It wasn’t long ago that a professional Canon camera or L-series lens would cost half as much in the US as it would in Australia. A photographer with a big enough shopping list could book a return fare to New York, buy what equipment they needed and have change for spending money and the GST once when they got back. Canon argued the same rationale at the time: we have local overheads to pay. But with such a price discrepancy, customers voted with their feet and today we can buy locally for the same prices as offered by the big US discounters.

With Adobe’s regional pricing policy I’ll also vote with my feet and buy from the US.

Due presumably to supplier-agreements with Adobe, Amazon and the like won’t ship Photoshop to Australia from the US, but there are other entirely lawful methods available. A US mail redirection and credit card service is all it takes, and they will save you hundreds of dollars in this transaction alone.

I’ll be doing that either until somebody renders it illegal or Adobe is forced by law or market pressure to stop ripping me off.

UPDATE: I’ve noticed that the Australian price quoted above is ex-GST making the discrepancy that much more difficult to justify. Meanwhile, Lightroom 4 has been released on the Mac App Store for US customers, priced at $149, but it’s failed to appear on the Australian store. Here a buyer of the same product pays $205.70. Aperture, meanwhile, is sold for roughly $80 to all comers.

In a liberal democracy the adversarial expression of different points of view before an audience that gets to make up its own mind is a process central to lawmaking. But it would be no more than a fringe view that says there should be no limit to this and that free speech ought to be absolute. The rest of us adopt varying interpretations of what should and shouldn’t be ruled out on grounds such as defamation, national security, profanity, privacy, public interest and personal offence. If we get that balance wrong public debate fails to reflect public values.

But the limits to what writers might write are just a shadow on the restrictions that already apply to photography in Australia. Our legal limits of expression are not so much marked by racial vilification laws or those intended to prevent incitement to violence, but by things like the excessive enforcement of “national security” precautions or an imagined “right to privacy”, by trade mark legislation or the conflicting definitions of art and pornography — or even by political censorship.

If you own a professional looking camera chances are you’ll already have piqued the interest of an over zealous security guard while using it. “Terrorism,” they might have explained. Use it in a public place and you’re more likely than ever to meet with the wrath of some citizen who believes their limited right to privacy somehow extends to the footpaths of the high street.

Whether nudity constitutes art or pornography is a debate with tomes under its belt yet one still far from any resolution, if ever there will be one. Until then artists risk jail.

The Bill Henson saga of 2008 saw the artist threatened under state and Commonwealth law over photographs of under-aged subjects, the accusation being they were pornographic in nature. It’s just that they were very similar to so many pictures he’d already exhibited at institutions like the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia without question. In that case the Classification Board decided he hadn’t offended those laws at all, but not before police raided his gallery and confiscated his prints.

The story of art censorship in Australia has many more chapters than Henson. South Australian Police once confiscated a Mapplethorpe book (“Pictures for Sale”) from a retailer — a publication also available at that time from the bookshop of the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 1995 artist Concetta Petrillo was charged with indecency offences after photographing her sons in some classical poses. She was acquitted.

To my mind the most insidious of all are the restrictions imposed by the Federal Parliament of Australia, a building designed to let the public walk across its roof as an expression of the primacy of the electors over the elected. But when some very important events play out inside that building it can be virtually illegal for the news media to photograph them — important events like Senator Bob Brown’s interjection during US President George W. Bush’s address in 2003, or when a member of the public invades the floor of Parliament during Question Time.

If an attempt were to be made on the life of an MP in the House of Representatives it would technically be forbidden to shoot it as that would constitute a disturbance and you can’t photograph those. As the same rules protect MPs from “ridicule” and “satire”, it would also be to their violation to photograph an MP asleep during Question Time, or one doing his university homework in that same place.

In the face of this madness publishers regularly break the rules and face the consequences, but that they’re not free to record the goings on of the national parliament in the first place is a reflection of institutional values that need to catch up with community ones.

What’s emerged recently is a new, covert censorship where big business shoots and supplies its own material when they know it’s necessary to face the news media but when they’d prefer to avoid tough questioning. Sometimes there are legitimate circumstances to accept supplied material, such as White House pictures or some of those supplied by the military. Surely, though, not from a bank having filmed its CEO defending an interest rate rise in what looks like an interview but is in fact made without a single journalist in the room. They supply it to the TV networks on a take it or leave it basis, knowing they will invariably take it out of fear that their competitors will. The right questions don’t get asked, much less answered, and whether the public knows any of this depends on whether the network owns up.

At the same time editors regularly and rightly self-censor, not under the guidance of law but in response to community expectations. For instance, European and Asian newspapers will publish photographs of death that most Australians would object to, and so as a reflection of this you’re unlikely to see those pictures in print here. That’s not censorship as much as it is editors editing — asking themselves what good would come from publishing that picture and whether, with their hand on their heart, they think it’s in the public interest or merely gratuitous to do so.

The problem arises when they have to decide what’s in and what’s out, not on the basis of community values, but laws that not only fail to reflect community values, but that the community doesn’t even know exist.

For me it’s an eye opener on two counts. First, the latest digital cameras continue to still struggle to meet this quality of output, especially in respect to skin tones. We’ve come a long way, but perhaps not yet as far as 4×5 Kodachrome of the 1940s.

Second, the technical standard of these old pictures is not derived from film stock alone but from the approach to photography of a pre-Photoshop era, where the perfect exposure was always sought before the shutter was tripped because there was no such notion as fixing it in post.

This is not an argument of the film versus digital variety, which is far more complicated than can be contained in 600 words. It’s just an acknowledgement that while digital has its strengths and they are many, better pictures and better photographic practices may not always be amongst them.

(Find many more here.)

 February 1943. Lucille Mazurek, age 29, ex-housewife, husband going into the service. Working at the Heil and Co. factory in Milwaukee on blackout lamps to be used on Air Force gasoline trailers. 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Howard R. Hollem for the Office of War Information.

June 1942. Army tank driver at Fort Knox, Kentucky. 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.

942. Inglewood, California. Riveting team working on the cockpit shell of a C-47 heavy transport at North American Aviation. “The versatile C-47 performs many important tasks for the Army. It ferries men and cargo across the oceans and mountains, tows gliders and brings paratroopers and their equipment to scenes of action.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.

June 1942. Inglewood, California. “Punching rivet holes in a frame member for a B-25 bomber at North American Aviation.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.

June 1942. Engine inspector for North American Aviation at Long Beach, California. 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

October 1942. Inglewood, California. “Young woman employee of North American Aviation working over the landing gear mechanism of a P-51 fighter plane.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

October 1942. “Lieutenant ‘Mike’ Hunter, Army test pilot assigned to Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, California.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.

October 1942. Workers installing fixtures and assemblies in the tail section of a B-17F bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach, California. 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

October 1942. Engine installers at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, California. 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

May 1942. Langley Field, Virginia. YB-17 bombardment squadron. “Hitler would like this man to go home and forget about the war. A good American non-com at the side machine gun of a huge YB-17 bomber is a man who knows his business and works hard at it.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer.

Whether it’s courtesy of mother nature or it’s the kind you bring with you in a Pelican case, get it right and it makes up for the most imperfect of subject matter or the most uninspiring of locations. It will turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

So whether you’re building a major photographic set or waiting for a picture to present itself on a street corner, turning your mind to light is a pretty good place to start. Naturally enough for many this would already be pretty obvious, and is the very reason you carry a boot load of Elinchroms around with you. But it deserves to be pointed out that you don’t always need a Leibovitz lighting truck to achieve first grade illumination. Nor should there be an absolute assumption that light is always something that’s taken to the subject.

At the most basic level that’s the question to answer: whether to bring the light to the subject or move the subject into the light (unless you shoot wars for a living in which case you probably don’t get to choose). Many good street photographers have shown how you might turn normal thinking on its head in this respect: rather than identifying your subject and then hoping for the best, discover the best patch of illuminated streetscape and then wait for someone or something interesting to occupy it.

Likewise, you might move a portrait subject from their default environment to somewhere completely unrelated and abstract because it’s stunningly lit.

Light before subject, so to speak.

In a broader sense there’s the magic hour (both of them in fact) which makes a world of difference to anything and everything we shoot in the great outdoors. If we’re lucky, twice a day mother nature serves up for free what we otherwise task thousands of dollars worth of equipment to do for us – cast a gorgeous, golden, glow. Of course it seldom actually works out that way when you want it to, and you’d hardly schedule everything you want to shoot for the pre-breakfast time-slot. So you play the cards you’re dealt which might well be high noon.

That’s when scrims, reflectors and diffusers come into play. But these don’t have to be the kind you find in a camera shop with a 500% profit margin. The right leafy tree will soften the harshest midday light perfectly, just as a wall painted white will bounce light, or drawing transparent curtains can create a diffused light source adequate for the purposes of producing the most beautiful portraiture.

I guess an important difference between mother nature and a fully fledged Profoto system is that while one is completely unreliable the other will do as it’s told. Seeing opportunities for great light of the free variety requires only that you know what you’re looking for. Once you’re attuned to spotting it, they start popping up everywhere.

For instance, chances are five years ago your mobile phone was a Nokia, as were most of those you were calling. But now that company’s market share is just 12.8% and falling. The technological landscape shifted beneath their feet, they made no meaningful effort to keep up and now it’s too late.

Closer to home, I give you Kodak, which ensured its own demise by inventing, and then not backing, the very technology that would ultimately defeat it.

Or take Microsoft, impervious to competition just five or six years ago, their only real threat the US government regulator. But then out of near bankruptcy comes a certain Californian fruit company, and all they’ve been able to do since is play catch-up. Redmond really must be scratching their heads wondering what on Earth just happened.

The evidence is that even the most iron grip monopoly will be threatened by an unwillingness to change with the times.

In this industry we’ve already been on the receiving end of a great technological shift and anyone who hasn’t kept up is by now most likely only reading this as an interested bystander.

None of those developments were so great as to affect the underlying fundamentals of what we do, which remain as they always were. But looking at some of the emerging technologies in photography today, you’ve got to imagine that could well change.

Take Lytro for instance, a camera that shoots a scene in a manner that allows you to change the subject of its focus after the fact. Who’d have thunk it? Crazy stuff only a few short years ago. But in the modern era you’ve got to conclude there are probably no longer any crazy ideas.

Logically the next step for them is to offer retrospective control over depth-of-field and perhaps even shutter speed, and who knows what comes next?

That’s just one tech company, with one product idea, thinking outside of the square. Considering that the most important advances and the biggest changes are often the ones you never saw coming, we really have no idea how the camera and photography itself will evolve.

There’s reason to believe that a digital camera is on the drawing board at Apple. If that’s true we’ll probably see photography reconsidered from the ground-up, both in tools and process. Their pitch will be for the consumer market no doubt, but if whatever they come up with has merit there will be flow-on effects. No doubt any number of other tech companies are working on their own projects of significance, too.

If, like me, you plan to remain in this business for some decades yet, the lesson offered by the Nokias, Kodaks and Microsofts of the world is that we need to remain open minded to bright ideas and worthy technologies wherever they might come from, lest we find ourselves obsolete, irrelevant and out of business — no matter who you are.

It’s true that scarcely a vacancy is advertised in the news game nowadays which is in the eternal doldrums it seems. But that doesn’t condemn photojournalism as a discipline. It just means the market that once paid for it no longer actually does.

But then nor has it for a long time anyway. With editorial rates at a tenth of commercial fees and unmoved in a decade, for most it’s a pursuit largely subsidised by one’s self. The only people making good money out of photojournalism are those of a previous generation still occupying well paid staff jobs (and we know what publishers the world over are doing about them).

But this isn’t the end. It’s just that photojournalism is now becoming at best a part-time job. In fact if you’re not staff, and you’re without a trust fund, it probably already is. That even the highest profile bylines in TIME and Newsweek now pursue commercial clients and run expensive workshops on the side should tell you all you need to know.

Umpteen thousand others have been forced to ply their trade beyond the media, leaving a well worn path to the commercial sector, but also leading to the discovery by many that the grass can in fact be greener on the other side. It turns out they have skills, clients want them and are happy to pay.

If the result for many of these people is that photojournalism must become a sideline pursuit, things won’t in fact be that different. It seems so much notable work is already self-funded at least in part, which also allows it to be self-paced, more nuanced and free from arbitrary deadlines, and so finished when it’s finished.

In this sense it’s not unlike what so many artists have done since day dot: excluding the odd commission or grant, they pay their way with sideline work, subsidised by a gallery sale here and there (until their first Archibald at least). And so they get to call the shots on what work they do and how they go about it. As will more photojournalists.

You can bet what won’t change, though, is that unlike art there will remain a desire amongst publishers to pay peanuts for the finished product.

It has a history of introducing technology ahead of the curve, withdrawing it before users are quite finished, and declaring standards obsolete while they’re still in everyday use. They really do run their own race at Cupertino.

Evidently it’s part of a company culture that’s working for them because in most categories their competitors are only getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.

Such nonconformism applies to software release cycles too. While Microsoft and Adobe have fairly rigid schedules for Office and Photoshop, Apple’s updates tend to arrive when they arrive. If there’s an exception to that rule it’d be Mac OS X. If there’s to be a second, it really should be Aperture.

I am told (by Adobe) that Lightroom’s pro-market share on the Mac is several times that of Aperture, although the latter has acquired many more non-pro users since the arrival of Mac App Store pricing, where it was the top grossing title for a long while.

But a respectable pro market share (which I don’t doubt it has) is essential for Aperture if developers are to keep producing plug-ins and if it is to maintain a decent user community. So, with Adobe posting a public beta for Lightroom 4 a month ago, Apple would realise they need to even up the ledger before too much of their user base decides to take up the offer of a free test drive.

The public beta is no doubt in part a marketing manoeuvre intended to do just that, and the threat it poses wouldn’t have escaped Apple’s notice, who by one reading of the tealeaves is scheduled to announce Aperture 4 tomorrow in the US.

I say tomorrow because it’s been two years since 3.0, which by one measure is historically right (there’s also this), and Apple likes to do these things on the second Tuesday of the month for some reason. That’s tomorrow California time.

The things Aperture 4 might deliver come in three categories. There are the countless quirks and bugs that impact the day-to-day use of some users and aren’t ever noticed by others (like special character recognition in metadata fields, or overlooked camera model compatibility). There are the features that have become industry standard since the last version and realistically need to turn up in the next (like HDR and lens distortion correction). And there is the surprise technology that Apple dreams up all by itself that none of us were expecting and is likely to be central to the sales pitch of Aperture 4.0.

Opinions on the specifics are a dime a dozen, so I won’t go down that path except to say a multi-user friendly library (à la “Aperture Server”) would help me a lot and I would be surprised if we don’t see some form of Aperture companion app for iOS sooner or later. And although I have no complaints about either, speed and a hunger for memory continue to be consistent complaints that would hopefully be addressed.

When it turns up , whether that be tomorrow or not, I’ll be writing a full review for MacWorld which I’ll also post here as soon as they let me. So check back in if you remember.

You might have heard by now of a particular deputy picture editor at a UK paper who, in an email to a photographer whose work they’d illegally published, sought to defend their copyright violation this way:

“[Due to the] ever-shifting nature of news – in particular with the advent of online publishing – [...] it is not always possible to secure copyright clearance before pictures are published.

Our industry therefore adopts the stance that if a picture has no overwhelming artistic value and if there is no issue of exclusivity (ie it is already being published online or elsewhere) then no reasonable copyright owner will object to its being republished in exchange for a reasonable licence fee. The only alternative to such a stance is not to publish pictures at all unless they come from a commercial library, the available range of which will inevitably be inadequate.

“[...] In this instance, and in light of what you have told us, we have no reason to doubt that you are the copyright owner for this picture. However the blog from which it was taken gave no indication as to the copyright owner and no contact details. We therefore used it (in fact we inadvertently used it again for some four hours this morning) in the normal way, which is to say that we were always prepared to pay the industry standard rate.

“Clearly it is open to the copyright owner to adopt the position that we have “violated” their copyright. The legal position in cases of breach of copyright is generally that the publisher is required to pay double the industry rate to take account of any ‘flagrancy’ of the breach. Inevitably the outcome is that publishers tend not to use pictures from such copyright owners in future.”

We’re lucky enough to have some very experienced people driving picture desks in this country and perhaps Fleet Street is these days less so. Perhaps it’s the same old story, whereby paying peanuts tends to deliver you not much more than monkeys. I don’t know this particular fellow from a bar of soap so I can’t say. But if we are to judge him by his actions then the verdict isn’t good.

To be honest, when I first read that email I began to wonder whether Old Matey might have ducked out for a bit of a tipple after Conference. And if he wasn’t drunk, that might be worse.

First things first. The underlying assumption in this by now I hope embarrassing email is that it’s the photographer’s burden to assert copyright and it’s their responsibility to make it easy for the likes of Old Matey to get a hold of them if they seriously expect the Telegraph Media Group to ask permission before they publish and profit from their work. Twaddle, of course.

Deadline pressures and the internal pace of tea breaks and smokos at The Telegraph are Old Matey’s concern to manage. And The Telegraph’s understandable desire to beat the opposition to publish doesn’t negate for a moment their responsibility to comply with the law while doing so.

I do enjoy the irony that follows when he explains how the “industry stance” is to self-assess the relative value of the pictures they lift, and on that basis decide whether to flagrantly break the law or not. Now think about that for a moment. We want it because it’s good, but we only publish it without your permission because it’s not that good. You might just as easily read it this way:

“We so desperately wanted to publish your picture that we didn’t delay by getting your permission (a measure of its value to us), and nor could we find a similar one anywhere else where permission was attainable (a measure of how exclusive it is). However we’ve simultaneously assessed its merit on both of those counts to be so, well, garden variety, that personally, I feel it would be indecent of you to make a fuss. In fact aren’t you just thrilled to bits that we raised an eyelid of interest at such mediocrity anyway?”

That little paradox should serve as a useful formula when it comes time for the prosecution to assess damages.

And all the while here’s silly old me thinking the seller sets the price and the buyer elects to meet it or not, perhaps with a little negotiation along the way.

Such a parallel universe seems a fun place to be, but back to the real world for a moment if I may. Copyright protections exist whether there’s a great big “©” watermarked at 1cm intervals and twenty per cent opacity or not, just as the speed limit applies to the publisher’s Range Rover whether he can see the road signs or not. In some jurisdictions you’ll need to jump through a few hoops if you ever want to act upon it in court, but the notion that a picture already existent on the internet is somehow therefore fair game simply because Bill Gates invented ‘Right Click, Save As…’ is as valid as a publisher putting page one of the competitor’s print edition through the scanner and pinching their pictures that way (which, incidentally, happened to mine once).

Having said that, there are scenarios where publishing a picture without the author’s permission is actually lawful (see fair dealing). And there are times when it’s so good or so important the editor is just going to publish it anyway, come what may. But it’s then the job of one of Old Matey’s more competent colleagues to raise the legal implications that should inform such a decision. And after that, well, it’s their signature on the damages cheque.

Neither of those excuses applied here. This bloke should obviously have opted for less of a laborious lecture and more of a sincere sorry. And paying the bill would have been such a better outcome for the Telegraph Media Group than serving up that email to ten thousand photography bloggers looking for something to write about.

But back back to that alternate reality we snap, and instead we find the victim being threatened with commercial retaliation when he dares to utter a word about due process.

If The Telegraph does nothing else, could they please at least remove Old Matey’s outbound email facilities?

In the shadow of big anti-globalisation protests in Seattle weeks prior, Australian organisers were expecting much of the same here. Back in those days I was in the army, looking for a route into professional photography, and I was shooting everything that moved. So I took a few days’ leave and travelled to Melbourne.

Dozens of  ”violent incidents” at the hands of police were reported with breathless gusto, and outrage flowed from all sides during those three days. But the reality with these things is that you never quite know the truth in its entirety unless you’re standing there yourself. For what happened on the evening of Tuesday 12 September I had a front row seat and it still rates as the most vile police action I’ve seen in Australia.

It ended with protestors alleging police brutality and with police claiming they were the victims. All hearsay without proof, so you might think my photographs could serve as a convenient arbiter in settling the matter.

Instead, this saga illustrates how easily photojournalism might be undermined by a dishonest photographer or editor, and how a picture, as merely a moment in time, might betray the moments either side of it. And it all drives home just how much rests on the integrity of the author. The picture might be telling the truth, just not the same truth it’s purported to be telling.

It began with protesters standing in front of a temporary barrier (probably about two hundred of them but it was twelve years ago so who honestly knows), which was erected to secure the perimeter of the Crown Casino which hosted the conference. On the other side was a number of police, including their evidence gathering cameramen. It was around dusk and in no man’s land stood Cairns photographer Brian Cassey, who was working for AP that day, and I.

It was a quiet enough group right up until the point that it wasn’t. That was when riot police emerged in military formation from the Casino’s underground car park on the other side of the barrier, closed with the fence line at a jogging pace, and then deployed at equal intervals along it. Then, with their helmets and batons they scaled the fence and landed amongst the crowd.

Preceding this were no verbal warnings. No orders were issued by police and disobeyed by the protesters or otherwise. No orderly escalation took place from verbal request through to the actual application of force in the manner expected of professional police.

Instead, the officer in my picture landed on his feet and started swinging. Swinging his baton wildly, indiscriminately and repeatedly across a one hundred and eighty degree arc, connecting with the skull and drawing the blood of a teenage school girl. When it came to my turn, his baton was defeated only by the metal body of my Nikon F5, which was all that impeded its path to my head. Better a broken flash than a broken skull, though.

Police horses moved in and the crowd was blocked and wedged — a perplexing tactic if the intention was to move them on. But soon enough the protest was dislodged, a protective police corridor was installed and conference delegates could leave on a bus, which was evidently the police objective all along. This was all over and done with after about ninety seconds (and nine hospital admissions), but I wonder what would have happened if only they’d been asked to move first.

The Ombudsman’s report notes the police explanation for the actions of the officer in my picture. A young child had been spotted in the crowd atop its father’s shoulders, police thought he was in danger and sent five officers out to protect him. But when the officer you see landed crowd-side, they say he was punched to the ground where he was kicked, and they claim the picture shows the moment he managed to regain his feet.

I can only account for what happened in front of me and not for anything further along the barricade, and so what I can say is none of that did. This was said to have occurred all within baton swinging range of me, and so I call nonsense. The police version of events bears no relationship with reality. It’s a fabrication.

Now it must be said that confected outrage follows police action at a protest just as night follows day. But you could hardly have accused me at the time — an off-duty paratrooper — of being a party to the anti-globalisation push, or bearing some sort of ideological grudge against the police.

Putting my testimony aside for a moment, if you looked at that picture and were told that the stretched arms it shows were threatening police, that the protesters were grabbing at him and clutching at his baton, and that the policeman was well and truly on the defensive, having just gotten back up after being kicked to the ground, well you’d probably have no reason to disbelieve that explanation on the face of it. Such is the implicit trust the viewer places in the photographer to contextualise and to explain their picture.

But what the picture actually shows is protesters holding up their arms to defend themselves from an unprovoked physical attack by a man with a weapon. I know that because I was there.

But for the Herald Sun to publish the opposite meant they had to ignore my written caption, they had to disregard our phone conversation, they had to forego any accounts from their own reporters, and in spite of all of the above, they had to take Victoria Police’s word for it.

The Ombudsman’s report viewed the police explanation as a reasonable one and it makes reference to my photograph as published in the Herald Sun in support of that case.

So it’s a crying shame they didn’t at some point think to ask me about it.

A one man police baton charge. Photo by Wade Laube