DBrim News RSS

Update!

This is just a quick update. Sorry for the recent neglect, but new photos have (finally) been added to the gallery. I haven't had much time to take them, so there's a total of six new ones from the past few months. Hopefully, I will get back into the habit of updating and taking photos regularly again soon. Hope you enjoy the new content!

The End of an Era (?)

This probably won't seem much like news to most people reading this, but it's important to me. In a few weeks, the domain dbphoto.biz will be expiring. I will not be renewing it. DBPhoto was important because it was a very proactive step for me as a photographer. It marked the end of me using other people's webspace, and also was one of the first attempts that I made to gather all of my best work in one place, and it's also where I developed the framework for this site and the gallery. It'll be somewhat sad to see it go, but it was definitely worth the purchase.

RSS

In the past few days, I've fixed some issues with the RSS feeds on my site. The news RSS and the gallery RSS seem to be working correctly now.

Ever since I've coded the RSS feeds back on dbphoto, people have asked me what to use to read RSS feeds. Personally, my favorite is skyspine. It's very easy to use and is also aesthetically pleasing. Version 2.0 of skyspine just went live last night, and should work perfectly on all browsers, aside from IE 6.0. Check it out if you have the chance!

Updates

Some site updates will be going up over the next few hours. Do not be alarmed if everything is not how it should be. Everything should be normal by the time I go to bed.

Edit: It's done now. The last IE compatability issue is gone, and some changes have been made to the gallery.

A photographer's rights

I am not a terrorist.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, it's time for me to rant a bit. I'm not normally one to rant in a public space due to the ramifications, but I am upset. It takes a lot for me to rant like this, so I feel that what happened to me tonight was fairly significant. I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but I think that this needs to be said.

Earlier tonight, I took a trip to the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA. I've wanted to take night photos of this bridge at night for a long time now, and my father was nice enough to give me a ride down to the bridge and hang around with me. The draw to photographing this bridge, which is not shown in the photo in the link, is that they light up the rails of the bridge with blue LEDs at night. It's really quite pretty and I wanted to capture an image of it.

What is so controversial about this photo?

We got to a spot that I thought was going to produce a nice view of the bridge and I set up my tripod and my dad parked. I was on a sidewalk with no fencing around it (read: public property). Here is where things started to go wrong.

While my dad went to discuss how he was parked with an attendant of a nearby parking lot. I was already off taking photos with my new 12-24 lens. The attendant told my dad that the police like to "chase people off" echo '
'; who are taking photos without a permit. I came back to the car to get the 18-200 lens because I needed to zoom in further (24 wasn't in far enough). As soon as I got the lens changed and left the car again, I was told that if I took any more photos of the bridge, the attendant of the parking lot would call the police. I decided that it would be best if we just left, so we did. I would have stood firm if I was alone, and if I wasn't aware of the fact that I could have been held indefinitely if the police so chose.

The whole issue there is the rights that I hold as a citizen of the United States. This PDF file sums up things pretty well. The first ammendment should cover me, especially when taking a photo of public right-of-way on public property. Even if I was a terrorist, what could I possibly see of the bridge at night? Also, I would have stood firm for my rights if they would have been upheld by the authorities, but due to the patriot act, I really had no hope in the matter.

The reason why I am writing this is that this is not an isolated incident. It happens to other photographers all the time on public property. It's even happened to me once before (I was kicked off of an overpass). I want other people to be informed of what is going on. The home directory of the document that I linked to earlier describes the situation fairly well. It's really distressing that photographers can't create great images due to unconstitutional law such as the Patriot act. Hopefully this small essay will help people further understand the injustices that this administration is putting forth.