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I started going to school in the early 1970s and finished my illustrious educational career in 1990. I hated pretty much every nano-second of my schooling (with the exception of my university years) from the day I walked through the gates of St Thomas More Roman Catholic Primary in 1970, to the day I left Stevenage Six Form College in 1986. I never felt like I fitted in and I was continually bored out of my mind. I was a disruptive force, a trouble-maker, a truant and I was seemingly destined for a life collecting supermarket trollies from shopping centre carparks. I grew up autistic in an era when nobody knew what autism was, let alone how to manage people who had it. It wasn't until I was middle-aged that I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and by the time I was I had discovered my own coping mechanisms. Principle amongst those coping mechanisms was photography.
I've never been much of a people person and I have always been happy in my own company. I find spending time with people to be problematic and, in all honesty, I can only stand it for so long. When interactions with groups of people do occur, it's not always a smooth ride. One aspect of Aspergers is an inability to pick up on normal social cues. As a result of this, those of us with this brain chemistry can come across as insensitive, aloof, arrogant or inconsiderate. We don't always lack empathy (although that's partly true in my case), just that we don't see the visual clues that everyone else picks up on. So being in groups can be awkward for folks like myself and, while I do (sometimes) make an effort to socialise, I'm really not very good at it.
I realised that I need a way to get myself back on an even keel and I chanced upon photography almost by accident. One day I was skipping a lesson at school and, while I was exploring the recesses of the teaching block I discovered the school darkroom. I didn't know the school had this room and I didn't know how to use it, but I absolutely loved all the equipment in there and the bottles of chemicals and how it felt exotic in an environment that was otherwise relentlessly, mind-numbingly, sleep-inducingly dull. So I joined the photography club and I learnt how to take photographs and to develop film and produce prints. I loved it so much that I bought my own second-hand enlarger and used to develop and print in the family bathroom, with a large towel wedged against the small window to keep the light out.
After that I started going out into the landscape with a camera and taking photographs on a regular basis. The point of being out there was to be on my own and to recharge my batteries. I got immersed in the process of landscape photography, in the process of finding good compositions and also in the technical aspects of making the photograph, but it was also about simply getting away from it all. Admittedly, craving solitude is hardly unique to people with Aspergers, but it is one element of the reason that photography helps keep me sane.
Coping mechanisms aside, my Aspergers manifests itself in sometimes disruptive ways in my photographic hobby. If I turn up at a location and there are a couple of photographers already there then I'll just go elsewhere. This is partly because I usually don't want to talk to anyone and partly because I don't want to photograph the same scene as them. My idea of a horror show is a line of photographers, shoulder to shoulder, cameras on tripods, all photographing the same thing.
While many photographers enjoy the social aspects of the hobby, for me that is certainly not the case. Photographers I know often head out with friends to photograph certain locations, but this is something I do only very rarely. In fact now I think about it, it's only happened three times in my entire life. For someone who's working on their Instagram follower numbers, this can prove problematic. Many photographers get together, go to Instameets and Photo Walks and share their work between their various accounts, thereby increasing each others follower numbers. I've been to two Instameets in my life - one because I was paid to be there and one because it was associated with a Facebook group I help run. So I have to rely on my own efforts alone to get noticed and I'm fine with that.
Another aspect of my autism is the triple-whammy of obsession, repetition and routine. People with Aspergers often have highly focused interests and my photography certainly qualifies. When it comes to my favourite photographic themes, I seek out strong colours and that means I love sunrises and sunsets. Not it's not the most original photographic subject, but it's the one I love. However, while many people like photographing the beginning and end of the day, for me I suspect it goes a step or two further than that. The truth is that I obsess about capturing those skies and feel physically anxious if the sky is starting to colour and I do not have access to a camera and a location to photograph that sky from. I have been known to get up from the dinner table, leaving hot food steaming on the plate and drive somewhere because the sky has been unexpectedly colourful. I have left restaurants for the same reason. If I agree to go out somewhere and am unable to capture a colourful sky, I get incredibly anxious. From the outside such behaviour just looks weird or immature, but the fact is that disruptions to routines and obsessions provoke an almost physical response in me. Most folks can put the camera on the shelf and get on with their lives, but I'm always checking cloud forecasts, double-checking sunrise/sunset times, looking at tide heights and weather forecasts, scoping out locations on Google Maps, double-checking every battery is charged up and that every camera has a card and a spare, making sure that wherever I am at that precise moment is drivable to my chosen photo location with at least 30 minutes of night-time or daylight to spare. Fortunately I have a very understanding wife.
In many ways, my autism has been a positive influence on my photography. There is no way I would have been to so many places and photographed so many different locations if it wasn't always in the back of my head, pushing me to get out and shoot. I don't think I would have learnt as many techniques and tried so many different styles had I not been compelled to by my photographic obsession. By means of repetition I have become dextrous with my equipment and proficient with the various post-processing applications that are essential when, like all sensible people, you shoot RAW.
I suppose that the $64,000 question is, would any or all of this have happened if I wasn't Autistic? Would I have got into photography to the extent that I have? Maybe. Do other photographers arrive at the same destination as me, without having weird brain chemistry to push them into it? Undoubtedly. Does my autism play a part in the kind of photographs I take and the way I process them. Definitely.
Autism doesn't define me, any more than the colour of my eyes does, but it is a huge part of my personality and has had an on-going and very direct influence on how I fill my days. Now that I'm over the humpday of life and cruising down the other side of the hill I'm beginning to realise just how big an influence it has had on me, without me even being aware of it. It's only now, reflecting on the twists and turns of my life, and in the part that photography has played in that journey, that I realise I'm always at my happiest when I have a camera in my hand.
Of all the reasons that the general public hate drones, the one that keeps on coming up time and again is spying. There is a certain sector of society, primarily the older generation, who seem to think that every Spark, every Mavic, every Phantom, every Evo and every Karma (alright maybe not every Karma) is a spy in the sky. And if you are one of those fine upstanding members of society that thinks that every quadcopter they spot in the wild is spying on them - I have news for you - they are literally the least of your problems.
So, leaving aside for a moment why anyone in the known universe would want to film packs of old ladies in activewear out on their morning whinge constitutional, let's consider what the drone can actually film. Now assuming that the drone pilot has managed to work out that the two pixels on the 5" smartphone screen (displaying their drone's live feed) is an actual live person, they would then have to fly to within about 10m of said person in question in order to get anything remotely wank-worthy.
The reason a drone would have to get so close is because their lenses are wide angle - they are designed to work best with fast movement and to capture as much of a scene as possible. The vast majority do not have zoom lenses and even those that do, such as the Mavic 2 Zoom, would be useless for spying because even with the improved focal range, they still have to get in close to capture anything resembling detail. Sure, you could buy a professional grade drone and stick a DSLR with a big old zoom on it, but nobody would go to those lengths because the drone would be extremely noisy and large and as visible as the Good Year fucking Blimp. So, given that a drone needs to get really close in order to capture anything close to resembling human features - they are singularly useless for spying because at that range they sound like a hornets nest on full alert.
So leaving aside the fact that the lens on 99% of drones is spectacularly ill-suited to creeping on people and the fact that they are about as stealthy as a pneumatic drill, there's the issue of battery life. If they want to get their drones home safely then most owners give their batteries a good degree of latitude when flying, which means that if they get 20 minutes of flight time from a battery they're doing well. That's not much time in the air to be roaming around the neighbourhood, making a racket, trying to find naked people. Then there's the lights. Now admittedly a pervert flying a drone at night would probably find a way of disabling or obscuring its lights, but if they didn't it'd be like having a Christmas tree hovering outside the bathroom window.
So, to recap - they're noisy as fuck, have limited battery life, are (usually) lit up like a Christmas tree and have lenses that are utterly ill-suited to photographing the intimate details of humans. The bottom line is this - commercial drones are about as well-suited to spying on people as a shopping trolley is to off-roading through the desert.
Let’s get real here. The kind of people that do spy on people in their backyards and at the beach do so with a traditional DSLR camera and a massive zoom lens. If you don’t believe me, have a look at Voyeurweb (the biggest voyeur site on the web) and tell me how many drone videos or photos you find. If you don’t want that site in your browser history then let me save you the trouble – you won’t find any – not a single one – because (and I’m not sure if I’ve made this clear enough yet!) – drones are shit at spying on people.
It amazes me that the same people who worry about a drone spying on them, will cheerfully send nude pictures of themselves via unsecured messaging services, or will have zero concern for the security of that little webcam built into their laptop and which government agencies can tap into any time they damned well please, or will not even consider the idea that someone can buy a Nikon P900 zoom for under $600 and admire their camel-toe from miles away.
The sad situation is that the mainstream media have decided that drones are this decade's designated object of hatred and they have done a sterling job whipping up ill-feelings towards them, but the level of delusion from the average member of the public is really quite staggering.
So before you get on social media and hit up your local community Facebook group, complaining that a drone was spying on you – consider this. There are a hundred perfectly valid reasons why a drone might be flying around your neighbourhood and virtually no chance it is a pervert spying on you. In the vast majority of cases, a drone in the neighbourhood will be a real estate agent taking photographs of a property they’re selling. But it could equally be the powerline company employing a licenced drone pilot to inspect wires, or the police using a drone for surveillance purposes, or a farmer running a crop or cattle inspection, or a building company surveying a site. Just because you see a quadcopter up in the air, does not mean it is looking at you and, to be honest, the fact that you’d think you were being spied on says way more about you than it does about the dude controlling the drone. So calm the fuck down and direct your anger at your government and big businesses, who spy on every minute aspect of your life and couldn’t give two shits about your privacy.
I read several articles by people on sites like Medium who suggested that giving away your photos was a brilliant way generating interest in yourself and your work. Those articles made some interesting arguments, suggesting that giving your photos away was a great way of picking up new clients, of increasing your 'visibility', of promoting your personal brand, and most weirdly, of leaving your mark behind before you die. So, as much as I thought that the whole argument smelt like week-old roadkill in the midday sun, I thought fuck it, let's dip a toe in the water and see if any good comes from it.
So in July last year, I uploaded a batch of 18 photos to Unsplash. I chose photographs which I thought would have limited commercial value to me as stock photography because the locations were generic. I do make a bit of money selling my images to local companies and tourism agencies but they generally want photos that clearly show a specific location. The images I picked from my Lightroom library could have been any beach, any road, any waterfall, any sunset. By way of a theme, I chose images which looked like they'd be right at home on the cover of some trendy paperback New Testament bible or the latest edition of the Watchtower. You can see them all here.
Let's take a look at the licence that I was agreeing to when I lubed up the old back passage and uploaded my photos to Unsplash:
All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible. More precisely, Unsplash grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Unsplash for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Unsplash. This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.
As you can see, uploading your photo to Unsplash really is giving everything away. The photographer still owns it, but everyone on planet Earth has the right to do anything they want with it whether it's commercial or non-commercial. You will note that the only major caveat, apart from the word 'nonexclusive' is that the owners of Unsplash are covering their own arses in that last sentence in case you were thinking of writing a spider script to download every photo on the site and set up FunSplash or SpunLash and fill it with those photos.
Now the Unsplash guys are canny enough to butter up potential contributors like myself. On the homepage it says, "Beautiful, free photos. Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers". They also encourage people who use the photos to include a photo credit when the image is used, but as they themselves point out - there's no actual need to do this. So the first question I had was - had anyone actually credited me for any of the 17,530 downloads (at time of writing) of my photos.
Finding this out is actually pretty easy to track. Since Unsplash include some copy/paste text every time you download a photo, all you need to do is search for a specific string - in my case that was Photo by Andy Hutchinson on Unsplash. So I put that string into Google (in double quotes so Google searched for the exact phrase) and it turned out that there were five pages of results amounting to a grand total of 154 hits. So of the 17,530 people who got to use my photos, only 154 of them could be bothered to credit me and that's not even accounting for the duplicated search returns and other gobbledegook that Google throws up. Not the most impressive attribution is it - about 0.7% by my reckoning. Of course this doesn't account for those people who used my photo but used their own attribution string, so I did some more general searching for my name and turned up nothing but my own blog posts, my own social media accounts and my own (legitimate) stock photos.
My conclusions from this investigation would suggest that you probably shouldn't pin your hopes on getting publicity from the cheapskates that are downloading your photographs for free. They clearly couldn't give two shits about you - they're just happy that they've got your amazing image for free and that they didn't even have to pay the few cents it might have cost from someone like iStock or Dreamstime.
Let's consider then, the other claim that has been touted by Unsplash's cheerleaders - that you might get actual paid-for work as a knock-on effect of giving away your photos for free. Now admittedly my Unsplash portfolio is small and admittedly it has only been six months - but I can report that I have received not one single piece of correspondence with regard my photos. Nobody has thanked me, nobody has reached out to me, nobody has contacted me and said, "Andy, you fucking rock, we're a swimsuit company and we'd like you to photograph busty chicks on a beach at sunset." I should add that I never expected anyone to big me up - I'm in my 50s now and by this point in my life have a fairly solid understanding of human behaviour. My point is that while there might be a couple of people (out of the hundreds of thousands of contributors) that have done well out of their Unsplash portfolio the vast and overwhelmingly majority will gain nothing - worse, their work will be used by multinational companies who could easily afford to pay for their photography but choose not to.
I found the entire experience of giving away my photos on Unsplash to be one big depressing exercise in self-hate. And I wasn't just depressed about my photos - I felt genuinely sorry for all the poor bastards whose photos were being used commercially and for which they will not receive one lousy cent of monetary compensation. I've visited some fairly soul-destroying web pages over the years, but I don't think many come as deeply dispiriting as this page on Unsplash, which showcases hundreds of commercial uses of photographs. All those high quality photos, all those photographers whose skills were applied to produce those photos, all that expensive equipment they used to take it, all the time they gave up in taking their images, all that money they will never see. You know, even crack whores get paid.
As someone once said, "If you can't tell what the product is - then the product is probably you." Unsplash seems to be the ultimate incarnation of this philosophy. What makes me even madder about the entire set-up is that Unsplash Inc, the company, is making boat-loads of money on the back of the generosity of photographers worldwide. They've been funded to the tune of $8m and they've done deals with Apple (using photos both in-store and on Apple devices), Medium, Squarespace, Trello, FiftyThree, Product Hunt, Adobe, Google, Ghost, and Tencent. Everyone is profiting from all of these photographs with the single exception of the poor bastards that took them in the first place. Unsplash is not altruistic bastion of freedom - it is a business. They are not a philanthropic organisation, they are not a charity, they are not in any sense public-spirited.
Photographers, I urge you, stop giving away your hard work for nothing to these parasites. Learn to value the photographs you take. If you want people to look at your images then share watermarked low resolution versions on social media where you can build your own brand, sell your services and funnel traffic towards your own website. Understand this - the only person that benefits from an image shared on Unsplash is the person that downloads it for free.
Oh and by way of a foot-note I have decided to leave my 18 photographs up on Unsplash to remind me every day to value my own work. I look forward to the regular updates on the number of downloads I've got but will be manfully resisting any precocious requests from Unsplash to add to my portfolio. Oh and should Apple, Volkswagen, Vogue, Smirnoff or Nike come knocking on my door I'll be sure to update this article.
But then things started to change. One day you brought along a lady friend with you and you decided to photograph her in silhouette in front of the setting sun. Sure it’s something a bit different from your traditional landscape photographs, but that’s cool because it’s good to experiment. You upload it to social media and your audience go nuts over it. “Those tones,” they cry. “#travelstoke,” they chat. Maybe there’s something in this, you ponder.
Over the next few months, your style starts changing. Where once your photography was all about the location – now it’s all about the mood. You are displaying all the signs of a transition. You’re transphotographic. You’re becoming a lifestyle photographer.
And you know what? That’s totally cool. You do you.
Official advisory: if you or a photographer you know is making big changes in their life, try and support them. To assist you, we have compiled a list of nine signs of transphotographic behaviour that are early manifestations of photographic reassignment from landscape to lifestyle photography.
Nothing screams lifestyle photographer louder than the old tan-and-teal Lightroom filters. Those muddy oranges and dirty browns are the unofficial colour scheme of this tight-knit group and they are happy to apply them to each and every shot they post on their Instagram feed. So strong is the desire to recolour the world in these 1970s throwback colours, that they have been known to retouch their old high school photos. If a photographer you know has bought the Sunkissed Traveller Lightroom Preset Collection – it could be a sign that they are transitioning.
She might be the girlfriend, she might be the wife, she might be an aspiring model who they connected with on Instagram, but the important thing is that she looks sen-fucking-sational in a bikini. She’s the perfect foreground interest for a beach shot, the ideal muse for a waterfall medley, the perfect picture postcard poser for a rainforest creek. Get her to turn around and aim those perfect little butt cheeks at the camera, get into a flighty arms-aloft stance or, for the quintessential lifestyle image – pull a yoga pose – preferably one that accentuates tits or arse. This is an absolute mainstay of the lifestyle photographer’s toolkit – mastering it is the very key to mastering the style.
If landscape photography is all about creating a sense of place, then lifestyle photography is the absolute opposite. An image taken by a lifestyle photographer often contains no identifying features whatsoever. It could be any beach on the planet, it could be any field in the world, it could be any woodland trail on the continent. Bomb shots taken with a drone are absolutely perfect for this kind of imagery, but if they do shoot from ground level, they always choose an angle that disguises all identifying features of the location.
Remember – it’s all about mood. Anonymity and mood. Anonymous moodiness. So a sure-fire sign of photographic reassignment is the ‘lonely wanderer’ shot. Yes, it has a person in but they must always, ALWAYS, have their backs to the camera and they must always, ALWAYS, be on their own.
If, while out shopping with your transphotographic friend, you notice them browsing the selection of quality boho hats in that little boutique, then they could be entering the ‘That hat’ phase. The hat is a key element of lifestyle photography and no self-respecting lifestyle photographer would ever send their bikini-wearing muse out onto that windswept rock without wearing one.
Yes, tan-and-teal is a sure sign of a photographer going through ‘the change’ to lifestyle photography, but it’s not the only colour scheme that gets the certified lifestyle stamp of approval. If there’s an abundance of pastel shaded imagery appearing in someone’s Instagram feed it’s a safe bet they are transphotographic. Watch out for dreamy beach scenes – in particular those featuring a bikini-babe.
Landscape photographers will go above and beyond to get a perfectly crisp photograph, even to the extent that they will focus stack to achieve maximum crisposity. So if you notice your friend is starting to open up that 50mm prime of their’s and venturing into the forbidden zone beyond f/4, it’s a pretty safe bet they’re transitioning. If you spy any images of raindrops on windows at night then it’s already too late.
Caveat: no – I’m not being serious – so please wind the old outrage meter back to its idling speed. I understand that heavily sarcastic writing sometimes goes over people’s heads, so to save you a bit of trouble I’d like to point out a couple of things.
Yes – I’ve been known to take the occasional lifestyley photograph myself. Guilty as charged. So yes, in a sense I’m poking fun at myself too. However I do know folks that have abandoned traditional landscape photography completely in favour of highly stylised Instagram-friendly lifestyle imagery and this article was inspired by them. Many times I’ve been flicking through my Instagram feed and the same thought occurs to me over and over again – why do they bother mentioning the location of their images when they could all be the same completely anonymous looking place?
Finally, thanks to all the photographers from Unsplash whose images adorn this page. Your photos rock.
🙏
When it comes to putting music on your videos you have three options:
The problem with option one is that the signal-to-noise ratio with copyright-free songs is very high and the number of decent tunes that are available for free use is limited. If you’re not to fussy it is perfectly possible to travel this route.
The problem option two is that if you use a copyrighted song you risk getting a copyright strike on YouTube or worse still actually getting sued by the artist or their legal representation. For a long time myself (and I suspect many other people) ploughed a furrow between options one and two, risking infringing someone’s copyright because we’re a small fry.
Option three seems to be the way ahead. The emergence of royalty free subscription music services has changed things drastically and it’s now possible to be both completely legal and have decent music in your videos for the price of a Spotify-like monthly fee.
I've been seeing a fair bit of traffic visiting this post and, as it was originally written two years ago (in November 2018) I've decided to refresh the content. New companies have joined the market and others have changed the size of their libraries and pricing. The big players are still Epidemic Sound and Artlist, with these two companies fighting over the patronage of the popular YouTubers, but popular is not always best …
Founded in 2009, this Swedish RMS has a library of over 30,000 tracks to choose from and (according to Alexa traffic logs) is one of the busiest subscription music site of them all. They offer several subscription types, the best value of which is the Personal option although this is locked to a single YouTube channel, so if you operate more than one channel, even if it’s under a single Google account, you will need a subscription for each channel you upload their music to. Up until quite recently the accounts were also restricted to just YouTube but you can now add a (single) Facebook page and put in a request for an Instagram account too. When your subscription ends you can no longer use Epidemic Sound tracks in your videos, but anything you uploaded prior to your subscription ending will remain valid.
The music player on the site was recently revamped and is now faster. The library covers 25 genres of music from acoustic through classical, electronica and reggae. The bulk of the songs seem to be (unsurprisingly) in the acoustic and electronic genres. You can also browse by mood (angry, dark, suspense etc), movement (frantic, smooth etc), places (newsroom, jungle etc) along with energy, tempo and length. One unique version of Epidemic Sound’s service is that you can download the tracks in MP3, WAV or Stem formats. Stems are tracks where the compoments of the song (the drums, the baseline, the melody etc) are split up so you can remix the track to work the way you want. They also have an SFX library full of sound effects and stings.
2020 Update
Epidemic have changed the name of their subscriptions since I wrote this article - they're now Personal, Commercial and Enterprise. For most people, such as folks with YouTube channels, the Personal account at $15month or $144 a year is the best option. My biggest complaint about Epidemic Sound persists though - unlike pretty much every other royalty-free music library you are only allowed to use their music on one single nominated YouTube channel. If you operate a couple of channels then you need a separate account for each one.
Ultimately with most of these services it's a question of having a good listen to the various libraries and working out if the music is the sort of thing that will work with your content. I actually had a paid subscription with these guys but cancelled it because I grew to dislike the music which all seemed to blur into one big jangly-trappy-4/4 blob. I've dropped their score from 4/5 to 3.5/5 - big is not always best.
Founded in 2009, this Swedish RMS has a library of over 30,000 tracks to choose from and (according to Alexa traffic logs) is one of the busiest subscription music site of them all. They offer several subscription types, the best value of which is the Creator option although this is locked to a single YouTube channel, so if you operate more than one channel, even if it’s under a single Google account, you will need a subscription for each channel you upload their music to. Up until quite recently the accounts were also restricted to just YouTube but you can now add a (single) Facebook page and put in a request for an Instagram account too. When your subscription ends you can no longer use Epidemic Sound tracks in your videos, but anything you uploaded prior to your subscription ending will remain valid.
The music player on the site was recently revamped and is now faster. The library covers 25 genres of music from acoustic through classical, electronica and reggae. The bulk of the songs seem to be (unsurprisingly) in the acoustic and electronic genres. You can also browse by mood (angry, dark, suspense etc), movement (frantic, smooth etc), places (newsroom, jungle etc) along with energy, tempo and length. One unique version of Epidemic Sound’s service is that you can download the tracks in MP3, WAV or Stem formats. Stems are tracks where the compoments of the song (the drums, the baseline, the melody etc) are split up so you can remix the track to work the way you want. They also have an SFX library full of sound effects and stings.
2020 Update
My biggest complaint with Artlist is that they only offer a yearly sub - and for a lot of people monthly fees are the only way they can justify and/or manage paying the fees. But at $199USD a year it's good value and if you can bite the bullet and pay it all up front, it's well worth it.
In terms of music I always found Artlist to have the most high quality tracks. Epidemic seems to have a huge number of trap/electronic songs all of which sound the same, but there's genuine variety and genuine quality on Artlist and that alone makes it a better option as far as I'm concerned. I hope they continue to focus on the quality of the music they licence to their service because it's much easier to find the right piece of music for some footage when you're not having to click through several hundred near-identical sounding trap songs.
After a bit of sleuthing, I’ve managed to work out that this RMS service has about 23,000 track in its library, putting it on a similar level to Epidemic Sound. The bulk of the songs are in the ambient, electronic, indie and rock genres, but there’s pretty good representation of all kinds of music including spoken word and jazz. Of all the royalty free music services, MusicBed have the most comprehensive (and/or bewildering) range of subscriptions, which vary according to where you’re going to be sharing your videos, how big your company is and whether you’re going to be paying monthly or yearly. The Creator/YouTube subscription is the best value at $9.99 per month, which covers you for YouTube, Patreon, Instagram, Facebook and other usages. Unlike Artlist, when your subscription runs out you can longer include the music in your videos though of course any you previously uploaded are fine. I know it’s all highly subjective but I found the quality of the music to be better than most of the other sites. The big drawback to the cheap Creator subscription is that it's only valid for one single YouTube channel.
Of all the music browsers I found MusicBed’s to be the cleanest and fastest. You can filter by genre (indie, electronic etc), mood (eerie, peaceful etc), artist, attributes (a capella, solo etc), instrument (accordian, cello etc), advanced (BPM, build, song length and vocals) and you can also isolate further by limiting to just lyrics or just instrumentals. The waveform browser is extremely speedy with no lag present at all. You can download in 128K MP3, 320K MP3, AIFF and WAV formats, the latter two of which are of course lossless. All things being equal I think MusicBed is the strongest of the current RMS service offerings available today.
Update 2020
The pricing of Musicbed seems to be the same and, as with my original review, you'll need separate subscriptions for each of your YouTube channels. I can't help feeling that they're missing a trick here - surely they could offer a slightly more expensive subscription (say $15 a month) that let you add up to three or perhaps five channels?
I had a sub with these guys until the middle of 2019 and I let it go because, as with Epidemic Sound, the music just wasn't doing it for me anymore. I suspect that this kind of library 'burn-out' will be an issue for lots of people who have no problems finding tracks they like initially, but as the months wear on they find it increasingly had to locate that perfect song for their video and end-up, as I often did, just using the same songs over and over. The music doesn't appear to have improved greatly since I last visited a year ago, but we all have different tastes, so work your way through the previews and see if they appeal to you.
Like Artlist, Soundstripe reckon that their small library (3,000+ tracks) is that size because of their focus on quality over quantity. I spent a bit of time browsing through their library and found the music to be typical of the jangly (and instantly forgettable) tracks that seem to back every travel vlog on YouTube. It felt very similar musically to the weaker parts of Epidemic Sound’s library but as I said it’s all highly subjective so have a listen yourself to decide if it’s up your street. If MusicBed’s subscriptions were a bewildering array of options, then Soundstripe’s is the polar opposite – they have just two. There’s an all-you-can-eat option at $135 per year ($15 a month) and a premium $245 option which adds 10,000 sound effects and 400 stem songs to the deal.
Soundstripe uses the familiar waveform music player interface and I found it to be lag-free and easy to use. It has one of the better filtering facilities in the main browser window that enables you to shortlist your track selections by mood, genre, pace, instruments, artist, duration, BPM and (extra points for this one), key! Like most of the RMS’s there’s also a playlist facility that groups tracks by theme such as ‘Action and Sport’ and ‘Inspiring Cinematic’ – these are often a good starting point for any music hunt. That being said, I found Soundstripe to be one of the weaker subscription royalty-free music sites and while its subscription fees are low, the size of the library and the quality of the music there-in is lacking.
Update 2020
Doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed over at Soundstripe in terms of interface - the filtering is still amongst the best-in-class. The catalog appears to have grown quite a bit, but that's true of all these services. It's a very similar library to Musisbed and Epidemic Sound so if you liked those, you'll probably like this.
The pricing model hasn't changed since 2018 either, with Soundstripe offering the same $135 for unlimited music licences, $252 for music plus sfx and stems and a business subscription for $795 which includes team member accounts and on-demand playlist curation. It's not spelled out, but it looks like you can use their music on multiple YouTube channels etc.
This American service has gone through a few changes over the years and began offering single use licences back in 2011. I had to jump through some hoops to even see the pricing information for their subscription service, which comes in at a hefty $60 per month (and that’s on special). Song Freedom’s USP is that they also enable you to individually licence ‘commercial’ tracks (those being tracks created by musicians with actual record deals) but the list of artists is underwhelming (I didn’t recognise a single name) so don’t go expecting to find Kanye or Beyonce in there. The ‘standard’ music included in the subscription model is pretty average, with a big emphasis on bland guitar music and extremely cheesy electronica.
Like most of the RMS services, Song Freedom utilises a standard waveform style browser for their tracks and I found it to be lag-free. The filtering is on the simple side with options for genre (only 16 listed), mood (only 9 listed), vocals (9 listed), instruments (16 listed) and track length (8 listed). No doubt thanks to the longer history of the site, there’s a relatively decent library of 10,000+ songs, but after a lot of skipping around and listening to various genres and styles I didn’t hear a single track I’d consider putting in one of my videos. When you combine the sky-high price with the patchy interface and the bland musical offerings, it’s not a service I could recommend.
Update 2020
These guys have rebranded and moved to a new web address. Their website appears bugged as when you click 'All Songs' you just get a blank screen - if you choose a filter or flick to the next page you get music, but nothing on page one. They're slightly different to the other services in that they're also offering unlimited video hosting as part of a $200 all-you-can-eat package, so they're like Vimeo-with-a-music-library.
Where these guys are slightly different to others is that you'll notice well known recording artists such as Ed Sheeran and Aloe Blacc in the library. So if star-appeal is important to you, this may be the library for you. I've upped their score from 2/5 to 3/5 because of their real-world roster.
Must admit that this particular RMS was a bit of a dark horse. I hadn’t actually heard of it before researching this article, but in checking its Alexa page rank it’s the most popular service online at the moment. The site began as a stock photo/video site, but has expanded into audio and claims to have over 100,000 tracks to choose from, but I believe that number includes sound effects and loops along with full audio tracks. The all-you-can-eat Unlimited Audio plan comes in at a very reasonable $15 per month ($150 per year if you prefer) and offers a full and wide-ranging licence that enables you to use the tracks on any platform or service you like.
I found Audioblock’s interface to be one of the best I tested. It’s not as flashy as some of the services, but it’s incredibly snappy to use and completely lag-free. You can easily click rapidly between waveforms as the mood takes you. Filtering is excellent too, with options for moods, genres, instruments, tempo and duration – even better you can mix and match the filters. I was also quite impressed by the music – it might not be as hipster as some of the other RMSs, but the tracks seemed solid and useable.
Update 2020
Listening to the songs in their music library, I think I was a bit easy on them - it's all quite cheesy music in here - derivitive and quite uninspiring. I spent about an hour clicking through songs and there wasn't much that caught my attention. I think it'd work well for very corporate stuff though, so if that's what you're after, get stuck in.
In terms of pricing they've really jacked their prices up, with the all-access costing a whopping $49 a month or $588 annually. Admittedly, that figure does also give you access to sound effects, loops and stock image - but who pays for stock in the era of Unsplash anyway? I've dropped their score down to 1/5 from 2/5 because the music's crap and the fee's over-the-top.
Another service that was new to me before I researched this article – Filmstro’s original claim to fame was that they produced repeatable music that you could loop forever. Earlier this year however they switched things up and announced the release of their first 1,000 song library. They offer YouTuber, Pro and Pro Plus accounts – the YouTuber being the most reasonably priced at $14.99 per month or $99.99 for a year. This gives you unlimited use of the (small) library on YouTube, Vimeo, social media, personal websites, showreels, short films and podcasts. I found the quality of the library to be better than average, but it’s hard to look past the tiny inventory, particularly when you consider that RMS services with the same subscription pricing have as many as 50 times as many tracks.
One of Filmstro’s USPs is that it has plugins for Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro that enable you to add music to any video without having to leave the application. You can also browse the music in the traditional way of course, using the web interface, but I found this to be slow and clunky. Songs seem to have to buffer entirely before they play and there’s no waveform to visualise how the song will play out. You can filter by mood, film genre, music genre and instrument. There are also three esoteric sliders labelled ‘momentum’, ‘depth’ and ‘power’ which seemed somewhat gimmicky.
Update 2020
Of all the services, Filmstro's is definitely the most innovative. They're one of the few that offer an embedded plugin for Premiere Pro or Final Cut, so you can choose music for your project without leaving your editor. Their library has grown in size quite substantially in the last two years and I really like the genre types, the instrumental palette feature and I've even grown to like the filtering feature.
As to the quality of the music itself - this is excellent too. It doesn't feel as bargain-basement as some of the other services - instead it feels curated and high quality. In terms of pricing they now offer a YouTuber subscription for $99 a year, a pro subscription for $249 which includes clearance for weddings, corporate and online ads and a pro-plus version for $499 which also adds broadcast TV and film to the licence. It's good value, good sounding and includes innovative song filtering.
It used to be hard to include music in a video and stay legal, but that is no longer the case. There is now a strong variety of royalty-free subscription music services that mean you can add as much background music as you like to your films and not have to worry about copyright strikes or the possibility of legal action. The average monthly cost of a subscription to one of these services is $15, which gets you unlimited access to all of the music in that service’s library. That should be affordable for most people. The table below breaks down the costs and small print for each service – I’ve included each site’s Alexa Rank because it’s a good indicator of how popular it is in the real world:
| Service | Monthly Fee | YouTube | Formats | Filters | Unlimited | Number of Songs | Track Licencing | Alexa Rank | Star Rating | ||
| Epidemic Sound | $15 | One channel | One page | One feed | MP3, WAV, Stem | Yes | Yes | 30,000+ | Yes | 12,297 | 4 |
| Artlist | $16.60 | Multiple channels | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV | Yes | Yes | 6,000+ | Yes | 17,219 | 3 |
| Musicbed | $9.99 | One channel | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV, AIFF | Yes | Yes | 23,000+ | Yes | 30,718 | 5 |
| Soundstripe | $11.25 | Multiple channels | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV | Yes | Yes | 3,000+ | Yes | 51,147 | 3 |
| Fyrfly | $16.60 | Multiple channels | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV | Yes | Yes | 10,000+ | Yes | 228,594 | 2 |
| Audioblocks | $49 | Multiple channels | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV | Yes | Yes | 100,000+ | Yes | 11,645 | 4 |
| Filmstro | $8.25 | Multiple channels | Any page or group | Multiple feeds | MP3, WAV | Yes | Yes | 1000+ | Yes | 35,113 | 3 |
In my testing, I found a big range in the quality of the music on offer by these services, ranging from tracks that you wouldn’t think twice about hearing on the radio, through to annoying elevator music that could accompany an infomercial. Before you sign up for any of these services you really need to go and listen to the tracks yourself in order to find the one that’s the best fit for you and for your videos. Some have great electronica and crappy indie, some have awesome classical, but terrible ambient – take them for a test drive.
Of all the services, the ones that hit the sweet spot for me this time around (September 2020) were Artlist and Filmstro. The tracks on these services are excellent, the libraries are large, the interfaces are excellent and the pricing is good value. The other two services that are worth checking out are Epidemic Sound and Soundstripe. At the end of the day your choice of service will more likely come down to style of the music you find on it, so road-test them all before signing up.
One of the most popular types of drone videos on YouTube relate to the harassment of drone fliers. Whether they're getting hounded by members of the public, law enforcement, park rangers, bikers or neighbourhood crack-heads, more and more perfectly reasonable, perfectly law-abiding quadcopter owners are getting an unacceptable amount of shit aimed at them by people who, typically, do not have a single fucking clue what they're talking about.
Perhaps the most common type of quad-hater is the not-so-friendly neighbourhood privacy nut. These loonies seem to think that they're being snooped on. They do not realise that your average consumer UAV would have to be metres away from a person to see any detail on them and, to be honest, these nut-jobs probably don't care. They also never stop to ask themselves why any self-respecting human would ever want to spy on them. Fully qualified professionals out shooting video for real estate companies, building contractors and even the the government get it in the neck on a regular basis by paranoid idiots convinced that an evil eye-in-the-sky is watching them when they shit. They harangue the pilots, they throw hissy fits and when they feel things aren't going their way they call the cops who inevitably point out that the drone pilot is doing absolutely nothing wrong.
The most bizarre complaints often come from people out in public. You might be flying your drone at the park, or at a beach and some insecure goon will accuse you of invading their privacy. Even assuming that said person has actually been filmed by the wide angle lens of the drone, they have no right to privacy because they are in a public place. And have you ever noticed how it never enters their heads that there could be someone a block away with a powerful zoom lens on a DSLR photographing or videoing them in way more detail than any drone camera can capture? Seriously, swing by VoyeurWeb (better use a Private tab!) and tell me what the ratio of drone footage to DSLR/zoom footage is. If there's even one clip shot on a UAV on that entire site I'd be amazed. There are $300 point-and-shoot cameras out there that could video a camel-toe from a mile away and these jokers are worried about an f2.8 lens the size of a pea?
Another common complaint about UAVs is the noise they make. Now admittedly, when they're taking off, they can sound like a bunch of angry wasps, but how many drone pilots fly at ground level? As soon as a drone's above about 10m they're far quieter and once they're above 20m you can't hear a damned thing. And even if someone was flying a drone next to someone's head, it's still going to be a metric shit-tonne quieter than, say, a pneumatic drill, or an accelerating Harley, or any one of about 5,000 modern inventions that we all encounter on a regular basis without having a fit. Do the same people who complain about noisy drones tap work-men on the shoulder and tell them to shut their concrete saw off because it's too noisy? No they don't. Besides, the noisier a drone is, the less useful it is for perving on your wife's pendulous titties. Because you'll hear that drone and be like, "Hey baby, some arsehole is spying on your pendulous titties, cover up pronto." And she'd be like, "Thanks baby." And you'd be like, "No problemo, you know I always have your welfare in my thoughts." And she'd be like, "Awww - thanks baby - let's put the kids to bed early tonight and have a bit of you-and-me time." So there's that.
Then there's the you-can't-fly-there brigade. I'm pretty sure there isn't a drone owner on the planet who hasn't encountered one of these clueless idiots at one point or another. You'll know really quickly when you have met one of these folks, because "you can't fly there" will literally be the first words out of their mouths. They watched an episode of a consumer affairs show about drones this one time and that makes them a world expert in airspace regulations. Inevitably they will stick a pointy finger in your face and suggest that you're breaking the law. You could try talking to them while you're simultaneously trying to keep your drone in sight (like you're legally required to do) but they don't give a shit. They're endowed with the righteous fury of the myopically obsessed moral crusader (and probably alt-right, black-hating, immigrant-loathing, Israel-loving, Trump-rimming toss-bags too) and nothing you can say or do will divert them from their course.
Another common cause of drone-hate is caused simply by proximity and, in this instance, I can see where people are coming from. The law varies around the world, but in most countries you're required to stay the fuck away from humans. Here in Australia it's a 30m boundary, which you can reduce to 15m by spending $5000 on an otherwise useless UAV licence. Personally I've always respected that distance (and then some) but I know for a fact that some recreational quadcopter fliers don't think twice about piloting their Mavic over the top of a beach crammed full of families. I'd like to say that it was a small percentage of people that dodged this particular rule, but based on my experience out in the world, I know that's not true. I see it regularly and have, on one occasion, witnessed a twat fly a Mavic Pro Platinum into a Norfolk Pine which then fell to earth and landed approximately one inch away from a two year old girl's head. So unfortunately, this one's on us. Stop flying your goddam quadcopters over the top of people.
Then there's the wildlife. The critters. The animals. The cetaceans. The ones that walk around on four legs, the ones that fly with wings and the ones that swim in the ocean. For some reason, a consumer drone is considered to be a bigger threat to birds, mammals and marine life than the plastic they're forced to feed on, the polluted air they're forced to breath or the effluent they're forced to swim through. Actual scientific studies have shown that whales and dolphins cannot even hear a drone through the water, let alone be even remotely bothered by one, and yet draconian laws (here in Australia at least) prohibit flying within 300m of them. The marine mammal/drone protection laws here are such a pile of shit that some drone fliers (just ordinary photographers mind you, not learned individuals in white lab coats) are granted exceptions by way of a 'scientific permit'. As if the humpback whale is going to look up and say, "You know, I was about to beach myself on the shore in a state of distress because a drone flew above me, but now I see that the pilot has a 'scientific permit', so I'm completely cool with it." When it comes to flying near whales, either all drones are bad, or none are. National parks also bring up the subject of disruption to wildlife when enforcing ludicrously over-zealous drone rules. This despite the fact that the only actual science that has been carried out on the subject show that birds couldn't give two shits about drones. In fact in the rare cases where a bird does take exception to a drone, it's inevitably the drone that comes off second-best.
For the most part, the hate directed towards quadcopters is unwarranted and unnecessary. The Internet and social media has helped create a society awash in people who are convinced that they know more than you (about any given subject) and if they see you flying your Mavic 2 Pro near them they're happy to prove it. Unfortunately this earthquake of ignorance has swallowed up UAV owners, just like it has with vegans, atheists, millennials, muslims, immigrants, jews, gay people, transgender people, ginger people and those who openly profess a love for the music of Ed Sheeran. Drone fliers are not currently included in research into the most vilified groups in society but I'm willing to bet that if they were they'd be up there with the car-wash owning ginger muslim immigrants.
It seems highly unlikely that the drone-hate situation is likely to improve any time soon. These bozos have made their minds up and nothing is going to persuade them that you're photographing the sunset and not their wife's pendulous titties. So what are the coping strategies that quadcopter owners can employ in order to deal with these people? Here are my suggestions.
Firstly, don't take any shit off them. If you're flying legally, somewhere you're perfectly entitled to be, then fucking well fly there. Assuming that they're not complete frothing-at-the-mouth wankers you could try showing them the images live from the drone in your DJI app - some fliers have reported success with this technique. But if they are frothing-at-the-mouth wankers then just tell them to fuck off. If they look like they can handle themselves (unlikely) then tell them to fuck off as you're running to your car and then fly your P4 right into the back of their heads.
You may also try the 'in plain sight' technique. Instead of looking all furtive and secretive when you're flying your UAV, you could simply own it. Get yourself a nice yellow high-vis jacket, a little 'H' landing pad, a bit of black and yellow perimeter tape and maybe a couple of small traffic cones and set it up where you're flying. The same kind of fuck-knuckles that whinge about this sort of thing are programmed to behave docilely around authority figures and if it looks like you're working in some quasi-official capacity then they might just leave you alone.
If you've paid a stupid amount of money to get your UAV licence, then consider getting that certificate copied onto 2m square plastic core-board so that if some psycho granny comes at you, you can show her your official credentials in 140pt type. Alternatively, put a factsheet together with the answers to common questions on it and then, the next time some broom-wielding shithead gives you grief, you can staple it to their forehead.
The simple fact is that it's far from easy being a quadcopter flier in the modern era. Governments have over-legislated these largely harmless devices so much that eventually they'll be confined to tiny strips of land in the arse-end of nowhere. Park and Reserve authorities have smacked blanket bans on them for no reason other than they don't like them. The media seized on them like Christmas had come early because it was something else they could scare the shit out of people about, because, you know, ratings. The entertainment industry only ever show them when they're being used to deliver a terrorist payload. The model aircraft community, who you'd have thought would understand, treat quadcopter pilots like shit on their shoes. Perhaps the greatest enemy of the recreational quadcopter owner is the licensed quadcopter 'professional' who thinks that all recreational fliers are criminal anarchists who won't be happy until they've piloted their Mavic into an A380's engine and killed 400 people.
So here's my message to recreational quadcopter owners. We need to stick together, because it's us against the world. And no more Bunnings snags - okay?!
#bnw_captures - took a photo that sucked, converted it to black and white in the vain hope that it might improve it - it did not
#nofilter - Maybe not applied in Instagram, but almost certainly processed to fuck and back in Photoshop. This tag is generally only used after a painful process of self-realisation in which the Instagrammer discovers that every single one of their 9,000 over-saturated eye-bleeding nightmare-like photographs is vile.
#travelstoke - unemployed hipsters photographing their feet in picturesque locations from a mattress in the back of a 20 year old Transit van.
#wanderlust - as per travelstoke only without the van
#natgeo - lol
#modelsofinstagram - Tiffany, 19 years old, failed hair-dresser, currently showcasing her spray-tan and bolt-on tits in the hope of becoming an 'influencer'
#sensual_ladies - As above only in a plus size
#dronestagram - bomb shot of a beach that could be anywhere on the planet (except maybe Woking) processed using a high contrast Lightroom preset
#ishootfilm - I'm edgy and desperately trying to differentiate myself from the million other photographers told by friends and family that they ought to 'go pro' because they're 'really good'
#fashionphotographer - Brian (22) photographing his girlfriend Nadine (20 - sucking on a lollypop) on city roof-tops and train stations
#boudoirphotography - Mature woman who has applied make-up with a trowel wearing ill-advised crotchless knickers posing on a brass bedstead with scarfs tied lightly around her wrists while her husband nurses a painful erection from the shadows behind the photographer
#uas - drone flier with a licence who stopped calling his/her drone a drone the day he/she passed a two day test in a sports field and was charged several thousand dollars for the honour
#picoftheday - just padding out to my 30th hashtag
#goldenratio - never, ever the golden ratio
#streetart - photograph taken of something artistic by someone who isn't
#moodygrams - light rain and a street lamp
#justgoshoot - quantity over quality
#photography - I've given up the will to live
#fineartphotographer - Wanker with delusions of grandure
#foodgram - Eggs benedict on sourdough that went cold while the photographer tested all 900 filter permutations in Snapseed
#concertphotographer - Postage stamp sized stage about a kilometre away from the photographer
#urbanphotography - piss-stinking alleyway filtered with crushed blacks
#explorer - gap year snapshots of monkeys in Thailand
#dronebois - drone shot taken in contravention of at least three national airspace laws
#astrography - bloke shining an LED torch up into the sky
#global_hotshotz - every photo ever posted on Instagram must have this tag, but nobody knows why
#jaw_dropping_shotz - 100% saturation and clarity
#wildlifephotography - zoo animals photographed with a long lens in order to look like they were in the Serengeti and not London
#madwhips - Suburu with a body kit, side skirts and an exhaust system
#leadinglines - a railway track
#abstract - blurred
#instagood - categorically shite
#selfshot - duckface narcissist
I only started selling my photographs because there was a demand for them. Some local businesses contacted me and wanted to use my images and then my Facebook page grew popular and there was some demand for prints. So I set up an online store with Zenfolio and that pays for a new lens every now and then. I’m not going to get rich doing photography but that was never my intention when I started going out into the landscape and photographing it. However none of that means that I do not place a value - a personal or a monetary value - on my photographs.
Like many photographers I am approached - fairly regularly - by organisations of one kind or another with a view to using my photographs for free. The communication always follows a similar pattern. They start by buttering me up, telling me how much they love my photography. Then they move on to this incredible opportunity that exists. Then they suggest a coming together of their opportunity and my photograph and, in return, they will give me a credit and perhaps the promise of 'exposure'. Or sometimes they will just talk about the opportunity and ask for the use of my photograph and when I say - sure thing, that’ll be $myveryreasonablefee - they say - oh sorry, we have no budget - but think of all of that 'free' 'exposure'.
Now the kicker, from my point of view, is that the organisations that ask to use photographs for free are nearly always businesses of one kind or another. I’ve been contacted by various non-profit groups or charities over the years and they have always offered to pay for my photographs. And in many of those cases, having looked at their organisations, I have thanked them for offering to pay and then given them the image for free. Compare and contrast these two situations.
I was emailed by a local non-profit Aboriginal Child and Family Centre. They reached out to me with a view to purchasing a high resolution digital image from me. They didn't quibble about it - they just offered to pay. So I had a look at their website and immediately offered them the image for nothing - they're doing a great job and I'd rather they spent their money on their mission.
Then there's the massive real estate company. They produce a glossy magazine every quarter and they like to stick a photograph of a local scene on the cover. They emailed me and said how much they liked my photographs and asked to use an image for 'credit' on the cover. Just to qualify this - we're not talking about a lifestyle magazine or a regional guide - this is a commercial brochure full of nothing but real estate listings. So I declined the offer.
An organisation with a $26.4bn turnover asked a bloke with a beat-up three year old Canon camera and one decent lens to give up a photograph for free.
It's all very depressing. And while, in my example above, it's a successful regional real estate franchise that thinks it's perfectly acceptable to use people's property for nothing, all sorts of commercial entities try it on. Perhaps the most staggering example I've personally experienced was from KPMG - a company that employs 189,000 people and had a turnover of US$26.40 billion last year. One of their employees emailed me from an address with a Sydney 2000 postcode asking "if you would be happy for me to use some of these images provided that I credit you." What, the actual, fuck? An organisation with a $26.4bn turnover asked a bloke with a beat-up three year old Canon camera and one decent lens to give up a photograph for free. Fuck you, KPMG. Fuck you very much.
Of course the reason that companies try it on, is because they keep getting away with it. For every photographer that makes a stand there are twenty more who don't. In the case of the real estate company I mentioned above, I was intrigued to find their quarterly brochure bundled in amongst the supermarket flyers that came in my post this week and wondered what would be on the cover. Turns out they had secured an image by a young local lad who takes landscape photographs round here and he had given up his image for the sake of a tiny credit in about 8 point text on the bottom of the cover that nobody (save his family - and me) will ever read.
One of the reasons this problem persists is that people like having smoke blown up their arse. If someone emails you and tells you how awesome you are and how excellent your photographs are - it feels great. This after all is what sits at the very core of social media - strangers telling you how great you are. And if someone pays you a compliment you're going to be open to the idea of reciprocating in some way. They also tell you that you'll get great exposure from the opportunity, which is of course a complete lie. The zero sum outcome of you giving your photograph away to a company is that they save money at your expense. That's it.
The other reason that 'for a credit' situations persist is that photographers do not value their own work. They might be a hobby photographer, an amateur, or someone who just goes out occasionally with a camera and takes photos. And if some swanky company approaches them and flatters them and offers them 'exposure' and 'a credit' then of course they're going to say yes. Even if they did want paying for their photograph they might be too embarrassed to ask for payment and they would almost certainly have no idea what to charge. If they ask for payment then this amazing opportunity might go away and they'd miss out on all that amazing exposure and a microfiche sized credit line. As far as the hobby photographer is concerned they're doing nobody any harm and, besides, it's their photograph and they can do what they want with it.
So here's my plea - photographers, please stop giving it away. When you let a company use your photograph free of charge you devalue everyone else's photography along with your own. Just because photography is not how you pay the bills, does not mean that your photograph does not have a monetary value. The only winners in the 'for a credit' scam are the companies, who get a nice photograph that they don't have to spend a single cent on. So don't be a dummy, ask for some money.
I set up my camera in Gerroa and I was uniquely situated to watch the storm cell for the duration of its transit over Seven Mile Beach and Seven Mile Beach National Park. I saw it arrive from the south, I saw it pass right over the top of Mount Coolangatta and Shoalhaven Heads, I saw it track along the bay of Seven Mile Beach, I saw it pass right over my head and then I saw it move north-easterly, out into the Pacific. I had my camera trained on it the whole time it was moving north and then I followed it out to sea with the zoom lens too.
During the storm’s run I saw plenty of lightning strikes, but there were two particularly big ones and they both touched down in Seven Mile Beach National Park, about 8km to my south. I photographed both of those strikes and got great images on both occasions.
Meanwhile, a car travelling south down the Bolong Road between Gerroa and Shoalhaven Heads reported seeing a lightning strike and smoke and, being community-minded folks, phoned it in. The call was directed to Shoalhaven Heads Rural Fire Brigade who responded to the call and sent a crew out in the tender to investigate. When they arrived on scene they found one very badly damaged tree and a small bushfire. There wasn’t much they could do for the tree, but they extinguished the bushfire and returned to base.
Later that evening I saw their post on Facebook about the lightning strike and realised that I must have photographed the every moment the tree got struck. I looked at my photographs and, from the location information about the strike and the timing, worked out that it was this precise moment …
As you can see, a couple of sizeable bolts touched down on the edge of Seven Mile Beach National Park and it was that bad boy on the left which I reckon did the damage. If you’re curious as to what a lightning bolt of that size does to a poor unsuspecting tree, then feast your eyes on this …
Now most of these rules have been in place for some time, but the law was updated quite recently (just last year in fact) and they now include direct reference to 'unmanned aircraft' - meaning UAVs or drones. Many of the regulations around approaching marine mammals make perfect sense - a helicopter is not the quietest of machines and I can understand why they are banned from getting within 500m of a whale. Tourist boats that go out for whale watching trips cannot get within 300m of a whale and, should a whale surface near them, they are required to move slowly away at a constant speed to get to that 300m separation.
Under the new legislation, drones are banned from getting within 100m of marine mammals, horizontally or vertically - although from their own illustration (above) you might think it was only 100m vertically. In the Schedule 1 Penalty notice offences tables of the Biodiversity Conservation Regulation 2017 (Section 2.6) the fine for getting within those 100m is listed at $880. Depending upon the offence it looks like you can also cop a fine for a further $1,320 too, but it isn't very clear at all.
Now all of this would be well and good but for one thing - if you have the right permit, you can fly much closer to a whale - within 20m with a 'scientific' permit and even closer in some circumstances. This makes absolutely no sense to me. If this law is in place because drones are, in some way, harmful to whales - then surely that is true for all drones? There is nothing special about the drones being flown for scientific purposes and so if the Biodiversity Conservation Regulation 2017 legislation exists to protect whales and dolphins then scientific exemptions, as they pertain to drones, make a lie of it.
Case in point is Jamien Hudson. Jamien is a drone photographer out in Western Australia who made a name for himself by taking beautiful footage of dolphins with his Inspire drone. Recently he started releasing video footage of migrating whales that was quite obviously closer than 100m. It turned out that Jamien had got himself a special licence. When Tourism Australia shared one of his clips, they made a point of saying that, "Jaimen Hudson is an experienced drone photographer based in Western Australia and has a special Department of Parks and Wildlife Scientific permit that allows him to capture incredible moments within 20m of wildlife." You can see some of his amazing footage below.
So hold on a second. What exactly are the scientific outcomes of Jamien filming these marine mammals? On his website he is selling the photographs and video that he takes, which is fine because he's a commercial photographer, but his permit is a 'scientific' one. This is quite obviously an admission of the fact that flying a drone near a whale or dolphin will have no harmful effects on these amazing creatures. Jamien's footage has been of huge benefit to the local tourist industry and so he's been given a special get-out. How could such a licence prove anything less? He flies a DJI Inspire drone - an off-the-shelf consumer drone that makes the same amount of noise as my Phantom 4, but because he has a 'scientific' licence he can fly 20m from the whales. I am not, in any way, shape or form, having a go at Jamien - I am suggesting that the legislation as it pertains to drones - is bullshit. Either all drones are bad - or none are. Or maybe - all drones are equal, but some are more equal than others?
So are drones harmful to whales? That's the $64,000 question. Well, it turns out that there has been an actual scientific study done to answer this precise question and that answer is the least surprising thing I've read since Ricky Martin announced he was gay.
Professor Lars Bejder, formerly of Murdoch University's Cetacean Research Unit in Western Australia, and now at the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, lead a study into this very area and released a paper on the subject called Noise Levels of Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Implications for Potential Underwater Impacts on Marine Mammals or my slightly snappier para-phrased title Do Noisy Drones Irritate the Piss out of Whales.
In the study, conducted in conjunction with the Marine Bioacoustics lab of Aarhus University in Denmark (who you'd like to think would know something about the subject), they rigorously tested how well drone noise carried into the water. And what they found is that drone sounds do not, in fact, carry into the water and that even if they did, the marine mammals couldn't hear them anyway. To be precise, they found that the noise that a drone makes is very close to the ordinary background noise level you get in shallow water habitats anyway. They also tested the noise of drones against the known hearing thresholds of dolphins and whales and they found that they were below those auditory thresholds. Here's a quote from Professor Bejder's paper:
"The acoustic effect of UAVs on marine mammals in water, even when flying <10 m above the study animals, is likely to be absent or very small, and far less than that of conventional aircrafts, as long as the type of UAVs used generate noise at similar or lower levels than the types (Splashdrone and Inspire) used in this study."
So in conclusion we can say, with some confidence, that if you find your drone in close proximity to a marine mammal, the critter is highly unlikely to even notice your aircraft, let alone be 'harmed' in some way by its presence.
It should be evident by now, that drones are not harmful to whales or dolphins, unless, you know - ingested. There would be no such thing as a scientific permit if this was the case and, anyway, all the actual scientific work done on the subject shows that they are not harmful.
Also - no such legislation exists in many other countries where the whales and dolphins live and migrate to and from and they are regularly filmed by drone photographers in these locations - to no ill-effect.
There is no report anywhere, ever, of a drone causing harm to a marine mammal.
The amount of obfuscation (and let's be honest, bullshit) surrounding this subject is quite amazing. For instance over at the Marine Mammal Foundation website they have a blog post on their site which includes this statement from Craig Oldis (the Planning Program Manager Compliance Operations officer for the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) in which he says "While drones don’t have large motors, many marine mammals are very sensitive to noise, and buzzing from a drone’s motors has the potential to cause distress to them. There’s also potential for amateur operators to unintentionally strike the animals." Firstly note the use of the word 'potential' - which is shorthand for 'this has never happened'. Note also the suggestion that the noise from drones can cause distress to whales - as I've shown this is complete bullshit. Note also the suggestion that a drone has the 'potential' to strike a marine mammal - which is again shorthand for 'this has never happened'.
So why does this legislation, as it pertains to drones, exist?
If we give the authorities the benefit of the doubt, then we could say that what they fear is a veritable squadron of nasty noisy drones over-flying unsuspecting whales and upsetting them. So let's looks at the possibilities.
Given the number of drones out there (not actually that many, particularly decent ones capable of flying over the ocean) and the number of whales in the ocean (not a huge number) and the size of the ocean (pretty big) and the weather conditions being right (not windy, not raining), the chances of a drone owner actually being at the coast, sighting a whale and being close enough to fly said drone to said whale are unlikely. So the possibility that some drone infestation would ever blight the poor old whales is improbable to say the very least. At best you're only ever going to get one drone anywhere near a whale.
If we do not give the authorities the benefit of the doubt then we could say that this legislation, as it pertains to drones, is a glorious example of equal parts of over-reach and complete nonsense. The worst-case scenario for flying a drone near a whale is that we get some awesome video footage of these glorious creatures. The horror!
It's hard to take any of this legislation surrounding the supposed protection of marine mammals seriously, when the Australian government chooses to do absolutely nothing about Japan's illegal butchering of whales in Australian territorial waters. I would suggest that a Japanese 'Research' vessel with a a harpoon stuck on the front is of far more pressing concern to your average whale, than a tiny plastic drone with a camera stuck on the front.
