Photos
Some assorted photos, and some thoughts about public posting of photos:
Thanks to my Uncle Dobe for providing a really nice set of photos of my father. I like these better than any of the other recent ones I've got; they capture several of his common expressions.
There's an odd sort of tension to them, though, because I believe the cap he's wearing in them is one of several that Nancy knitted for him. But he wore those caps a lot--he's wearing one in most of my recent photos of him--so it's certainly representative of how he often looked.
In unrelated news, my WisCon 2006 photo gallery proceeds apace. There are now 16 photos there; there are several dozen more that I'm waiting to post until I get permission from the people shown in them.
You can download full-resolution copies of the photos by clicking the download link. If you want a lower-resolution copy, then just go to the page showing the photo and right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac) the photo, then choose the save-this-image-to-disk option.
Btw, Picasa Web Albums lets you post comments on photos, but I think only if you have a PWA account. So if any of you have signed up for an account, feel free to post comments on the photos.
. . . In the past, I've always asked for explicit permission before posting photos, but it was largely moot because I didn't have any easy way to post them publicly anyway. Now that I do have an easy way to do it, I think I may change my policy/approach.
I think maybe from now on I'm going to post a private version of a set of photos, then send a note to the people pictured, saying something like, "Please take a look at this secret album and tell me which images you want me to remove; on such-and-such date, I'm going to make all remaining images in that album public." I think that might be good enough.
I know that a lot of people just post photos without asking, and nobody seems to mind. But I also have several friends who are very private and who would probably be pretty upset with me if I were to post photos of them without permission. And some people care about which photos of them get posted; I'm no good at figuring out which ones people will or won't want to be public.
Also, I'm not a particularly skillful photographer. (Not fishing for compliments here, just stating fact.) When I take photos, they're generally snapshots, primarily intended as aids to later memory for my own use; a lot of the time they're crooked or out of focus or have a lot of red-eye or big shadows, or they're washed out, or they make people look fat, or the person's eyes were closed or they were grimacing. And let's not even talk about composition. Sometimes I get lucky, but most of the time my photos are not going to be the most attractive photos available for a given person.
So I'm not ready yet to switch to just posting everything publicly from the start. But getting explicit permission is time-consuming, especially because in response to the question "May I post these photos of you?" people often say things like "Hey, nice photos!", which sometimes means "Yes" and sometimes means "No", so then I have to ask again, which takes more time and probably annoys the people I'm pestering. Also, many of my photos contain multiple people, which means I need to get explicit permission from each of them, which is also a pain to keep track of.
So I think next time I'll try opt-out instead of opt-in.
