Archive for category: Our Modern World

Market Basket ‘Climber’ spreads wings; a look at your photo rights

Motorized scooter riders going crazy at Market Basket (Photo/NOAH R. BOMBARD)

It was just one of those moments when I happened to have my iPhone in my hand. I was standing in an aisle at the Leominster Market Basket looking up ingredients for my granola recipe when I glanced up and saw two motorized scooters heading down the aisle. The two older individuals looked kind of cute in their mini motorized parade procession. So, I opened the camera app and took a shot. Then, things got a little crazy.

The older man — who was on the heavy side of heavy — dismounted his scooter. He walked over to the chips and began climbing, yes climbing, his way up shelving to try to grab a bag of chips off the top shelf. His inability to navigate the store aisles on his own two feet failed to inhibit his stout mountain climbing skills as he stepped off the bottom shelf and — using his hands — pulled himself up to reach the top shelf.

I’ve heard of journalists who have been in situations like this before — the car crash you come upon with the passenger who needs help. Do you follow your instincts and document what’s unfolding before you? Or do you throw down your virtual notepad and lend a hand. Naturally, I just took a picture.

That was back on Aug. 1. I tweeted it and went back to shopping (the man successfully acquired his chips without incident).

Thankfully this man’s need of a motorized scooter doesn’t preclude his agility at scaling supermarket shelving. twitter.com/Noah_R_Bombard…

— Noah R. Bombard (@Noah_R_Bombard) August 1, 2012

Last week I saw a post in my Facebook news feed from a friend linking to a site called People of Market Basket. I clicked on it. There was my photo with a “People of Market Basket” logo on it. But there was more. There were other photos — many other photos. Photos of my “climber” on the Titanic, bull fighting, on the moon. There’s even a whack-a-mole type web game. There’s an entire section on the site labeled “King Climb” with various homages to my photo.

The ‘climber’ had sprouted wings.

Your rights to your photos

Social media has created a vast river of sharing of ideas, information and photos. That river has practically obliterated intellectual property rights like a tidal wave against a solitary sandbag (remember Napster?). Granted, my photo leaned more toward the “rights” than the “intellectual” part of that phrase, but regardless, when you take a photo, whether you are a professional or just some schmo with your camera phone, you own it.

In this case, the issue was easily rectified. When contacted, the owner of the website was more than happy to add my credit to the original photo and I granted him the right to alter it, which I don’t usually do, because, well, some of those photos were pretty damn funny. I sensed no nefarious motives on the part of the website owner. From my original tweet, the photo had been shuffled around the web until he saw it, thought it was funny and went from there. But the situation does illustrate a problem with maintaining control of the photos you shoot (and own).

Of course, you also have the right to grant others the right to use your photos and there are ways to use the web to find those photos. I’m a regular visitor to Flickr’s Creative Commons page, where photographers have posted photos that they’ve OK’d others to use, with varying degrees of permissions. It’s a great source to mine when you’re looking for a photo to illustrate a story and you don’t have one of your own. I’ve used it in this blog regularly and for various online publications. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not OK to simply find a photo on the web and credit the source. You need permission. Of course, there are fair use allowances in some cases for photos with news value, but I won’t get into that here.

Here’s some people who can give you the low down on photo rights better than I can:

• Know your rights — photography in public
• Copyright, fair use and how it works for online images

Kindles, iPhones and children in our modern world

About 5 a.m. the other morning I reached over and grabbed my iPhone from its resting place next to me in bed (I think there used to be a woman there). I opened my email to find three emails from Amazon.com alerting me to purchases I’d just made. One was a Loony Tunes episode of a certain Wile E. Coyote.

Stumbling through my darkened house I found my way into the living room. There on the couch wrapped in a blanket and cuddling a fluffy stuffed dog was my 7-year-old with the Kindle his grandmother had just purchased him for his birthday. I realized at that moment there was a downside to that one-click purchase feature on Amazon.

By 5:30 a.m. we’d completed a crash course on personal finance and responsibility. Thankfully, he’s a quick learn. Wish I could say the same for Wile E. Coyote.

How ‘coming home’ has changed

From useful gadget to ornamental antique -- my old cordless phone and answering machine.

This is a picture of my wall phone and answering machine. I stopped using it in 2006 and had the landline disconnected in 2008. It remains on the wall as homage to a routine that no longer exists for me. I figure if it sits up there long enough it will gently slide into the lucrative realm of antique. But probably not.

That old routine — coming home to see that little blinking light indicating I have a message ended when I got a cell phone. From then on, if anyone was looking for me during the day, they already found me. Of course, even that has changed because at this point it’s more likely they would text, instant message, Facebook or — if they must — email me. I can barely remember what it was like when I had to be home to get a call — or tethered to the wall prior to cordless phones. Go back before answering machines and you actually had to be at home within earshot of the phone at the precise time someone called to make a connection. Remember that? I don’t. It was too long ago.

Writer, blogger and poet Victor Infante and I were talking about this the other day.Victor hit on the whole subject of technology from an angle I hadn’t considered before — the experience of coming home.

Coming home always meant checking the mailbox to see if anyone had sent me a letter, open the door and the dogs would greet me, the answering machine was blinking. There was a lot waiting for me when I came home. That experience has changed. The mailbox has mostly fliers now (even my bills are paperless) and the phone is dead. My dog Indiana is 15 now and has finally realized that I actually am coming home every day and not leaving him forever each morning. Up until two years ago I’d at least eagerly turn the computer on to see if I’d gotten any emails. These days I’ve already read them on my phone as I walk from the garage to the house. Communication no longer happens at intercept points in our day like “coming home.”

Like a lot of us, I live in a world of seamless communication. Tweet, Facebook, phone, email, text or instant message me and no matter where I am (unless I’m out of cell range) you’ve got me instantly.

Does communication technology improve our lives or complicate it? The answer: Yes.