Rally for Concerned Photographers is a protest by Australian photographers in Sydney this Sunday. Nick Rains explains the big deal:

It’s about it being a criminal offence to sell a photo you have taken of all sorts of places like Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Bondi Beach, any National Park and so on. Even if you are an enthusiast who happens down the track to have the opportunity to get an image published, or even win a prize in a competition.

This affects both pros and amateurs alike, not to mention it making it very difficult for a pro to do any sort of travel or street photography with out being pestered by council employees or having people assume you are a pedophile.

And another thing, it’s really tedious for camera buffs with half decent cameras to be assumed to be pros when out following their hobby. This means they get approached all the time by over zealous officials and have to defend their rights to go about their lawful pursuits.

As with the Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign in the UK, the less one distinguishes between “amateurs” and “professionals” the better.

No less a sage than Martin Parr provides handy advice to Guardian readers on taking better holiday photos:

When you are away, why not record all of the food that you eat? If someone has spent a lot of time cooking a meal, or if you’re going out for a treat, photograph the food. You could make a series of each breakfast, lunch and dinner that you ate. That would be fascinating.

Photograph the caravan, guest house, tent – wherever you are staying. Think of yourself as a documentary photographer; up the ante and take yourself more seriously.

Guardian readers probably appreciate Parr’s style, but wouldn’t it be fun if it reached into the aesthetic sensibility of Daily Mail and Sun readers. Now that would wonderfully subvert the nation’s memories!

My latest article on re-enactment photography is in Digital SLR User magazine Sept 2010, out now.

6 pages of hot tips on shooting beards and gunpowder….

And if that isn’t enough, last week the Sealed Knot were on the BBC’s Celebrity Masterchef programme!

Wildlife photographer Andy Rouse nested doubts about the now-disqualified winner of the wildlife photograph(er) of the year and writes about them here:

When I first saw the image I was amazed. To my knowledge no image has even been taken like this of the Iberian Wolf. It is an incredibly rare and shy animal, avoiding human contact at all costs and highly suspicious due to years of persecution in its homeland….

My suspicions kept nagging at me. Thinking I was alone and that to raise my head above the parapet would get it shot off, I kept quiet. I heard that the photographer explained everything at the Wild Photos conference and so naturally, like everyone else, I believed him.

Like anyone, I’ve been impressed with previous years’ winners of the wildlife photograph(er) of the year, but 2009′s winning wolf had left me cold.

I’m not pretending to have any ability whatsoever to identify that such a picture was a fake – though now its description as “a model wolf” makes me wonder why no-one outed it for not looking as anorexic as its counterparts on the catwalk. But the reason I never linked to it when it won the award was that aspects other than its authenticity provided doubts that nagged away at my appreciation of the picture. I just thought – oh someone’s set up a remote flash and triggered it with a motion sensor. And for me, that seemed a sufficiently big hole in the King’s couture. What do you think?

I really enjoyed reading David Ward‘s The Landscape Beyond during my recent trip to the Lake District. Apart from enjoying the photographs by this “t-shirt winning professional landscape photographer working on large format”, what stuck with me most was his comment about landscape photographers being inordinately concerned with the location where a picture was made.

I couldn’t find the quote just now and will add it later (the book’s worth another read) but this picture which isn’t in the book really illustrates the point. Can you guess where it was taken? Does it remotely matter?

Very amusing kerfuffle at the Luminous Landscape where Michael Reichmann posted this picture from his recent Amazon trip and called it “Lolita”. In no time at all the poor bloke was being called an old paedo on the (coincidentally) Amazon-acquired dpReview and discussion of the “Amazon Perverts Trip” now stretches to 3 pages at his own forum.

His own response seems rather self-justifying:

In this case I titled a photograph of a clearly sexually provocative young woman with a word in the popular vernacular that, I believe, adds to its overall effect. It is not an editorial statement. It is the title of an art work.

So, to those that think me immoral, or worse for titling this photograph Lolita ? all I can say is ? you have me shaking my head in both annoyance and wonderment. Try pulling your heads out of that dark place where they are so obviously stuck.

He’s floundering a bit, isn’t he? I’ve little but contempt for prudes like the Sky post-match interviewer who chided Wayne Rooney for saying “fucking great” when asked how he felt about winning back our title. And I feel equally alienated from those who say you should not even use words like “nigger”, “Paki” or “cunt”, to pick 3 obvious examples (amusingly, I just had to change my blog’s censored word list so they didn’t appear with asterisks). In a discussion such as this I’m not going to go through the contortion of saying “N word” or whatever just because the downtrodden group decides only it can voice those terms. Equally, I’m never going to refer to any black guy as a nigger, call anyone a Paki, or shoot porno-gynaecological snaps and title them “Cunt”. Commenting and using are different.

And that’s what Reichmann’s done by (I believe) lazily calling this picture “Lolita”. It could have been simply a picture of a girl becoming a young woman, and labelled just as neutrally as Weston’s studies of various peppers. Left alone, the viewer might have arrived at the Lolita analogy, might have been titillated or worse – or might have thought nothing of the image and moved on (which is what I first did). Hold the front page – a picture should speak for itself, beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

But a meaningful title implies the photographer says this is the interpretation I want to convey. It’s even more stupid when your careless title opens up a Pandora’s Box of meanings and dubious motives that people can impute to you, and bring upon your head accusations ranging from paedophilia to exploitation of our third world sisters (where are the tedious carbon offset police when you need them to lighten up the debate?).

In other words, don’t give photographs clever-clever titles. You’re never as clever as you think you are.

Mike Johnston writes about why Canon don’t do in camera anti shake systems:

Call me cynical, but I’ve been observing this business a long time, and how I translate Canon’s explanation is more or less like this: “We make more money on in-lens stabilization, and since we’re the biggest dog in the pack we’re going to stick with that. Like it or lump it.” (I hope the good folks at Canon will forgive my colorful mode of expression. But you get the point.)

Another objection I’d raise to Canon’s explanation is that I think you need another clause behind the statement “Short and ‘normal’ focal length lenses need stabilization much less often than long lenses…” to wit: “…when you’re shooting in good light.” When you’re shooting in low light, on the other hand, image stabilization can come in just as handy, just as often, with shorter lenses as when you’re using long lenses in normal daylight. That’s how I use the feature, anyway.

At Greenwich market over the weekend, I chatted with New Zealander John Currin who was selling his 1 metre wide digital images. These are multimedia compositions with photos, drawings, and even screengrabs of TV reports combined via Photoshop layers, masking and blending modes. Fascinating and often apocalyptic stuff.

Researching northern Russia, I noticed this colour picture was captioned “Kem 1911″. 1911? The photographer turns out to have Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii whose archive is in the Library of Congress:

Prokudin-Gorskii created his negatives by using a camera that exposed one oblong glass plate three times in rapid succession through three different color filters: blue, green, and red. For formal presentations, he printed positive glass slides of these negatives and projected them through a triple lens magic lantern. Prokudin-Gorskii would project the slide through the three lenses, and, with the use of color filters, superimpose the three exposures to form a full color image on a screen.

National Geographic’s Earth from the Air style feature Views of Africa by J Michael Fay has photographs by George Steinmetz such as this one of a flamingo-covered lake. In some cases he used a paraglider to get close.

You have not experienced true stench in your life until you have stood downwind of 30,000 Cape fur seals on a hot day.