I enjoy Moose Peterson’s photography and blog. He’s a great photographer and an interesting writer. However, he recently changed the way he embeds photos to “better protect them”.  Instead of a simple image embed, he’s now using Flash.

We’ve made some changes here on the blog that you might not have noticed. The images are now being posted as Flash. This is curtosey of my bud Roger,RC (of Layers fame who also created the Moose Gallery) and of course my longtime webmistress Jan. We’ve gone to this because it offers the greatest amount of protection for the images in a web environment. (Oh yeah, forgot to mention, might mess up RSS feeds too.)

I’m not sure what he’s protecting exactly by using Flash for a tiny 350 pixel wide image?

I totally respect his rights as a photographer — that he owns the pictures he’s taken and he doesn’t want others to use them. But, hiding them in Flash just makes the honest people more honest … if you want to steal the tiny image, it’s still REAALY easy to do.

I’ve intentionally distorted the section of the blog containing the image and rotated it to show it’s so easy to do (I used SnagIt 9). It took me a total of 10 seconds to do the fancy work. It would have taken less if I just wanted to grab the bear.

(image and content owned by Moose — clipped here for editorial demonstration and distorted as an example)

What impact does this have on me? Well, as suggested in the quote above, the new technique is causing my RSS Reader of choice (Google Reader) to not show any of his beautiful images. And that’s a big loss!

I’d still recommend his web site and content nonetheless … but here’s to hoping he can find a better way to “protect” his images while retaining the ability for RSS readers to show the photography.

We picked the first pumpkin of the season today. My wife is going to make something edible out of it … although I don’t consider pumpkin edible at all, so I’ll just have to take her word for it. :)

We took a walk again this morning (since we have the day off), and I only took 2 shots, both of this flower. There wasn’t much else that caught my eye this morning.

Definitely worth checking out the National Geographic’s Photography web site — lots of great photos and tips.  (I wish they had an RSS feed though — I don’t see one). The photo of the day feature would be awesome if it had an RSS feed.

They do have a set of email newsletters available (how quaint! :-) ).

Although I’m doing some Adobe Flex coding today, I felt inspired to share a few very recent photographs I’ve taken (all within the last week).

I was standing about 10-12 foot away from this unpicked corn cob when I snapped the camera shutter with my 80-400mm lens attached.

Yes, there’s corn in our neighborhood.

I was walking with my wife, and we had the odd sensation that we were being watched.

Whenever I had the camera ready, she wouldn’t show up. Whenever I put it down, she’d fly up for a drink at her feeder.

 

 

 

 

The currant tomatoes didn’t move though … (it would have been freaky if they had!). The currants are my favorite tomato in the garden. We’ve got practical tomatoes, but these taste great and are fun to eat just like grapes!