User:Ram-Man
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NOTE: For stock photography licensing or other questions email me, contact me, or see my website.
About Me[edit]
Hi, I'm Derek Ramsey. I'm a prolific Commoner photographer and English Wikipedian. I'm known for a lot of things on Wikipedia, but here on the Commons I focus on photography. I'm passionate about photography having taken many tens of thousands of pictures, many taken just to illustrate an article. It's a never ending process of uploading more. My ultimate goal is to help Wikipedia articles contain high quality, professional-looking pictures and to support the Commons goal of a free source of quality images.
You can see the complete list of my work:
Please see those pages for information on licensing the work for other uses.
Photography[edit]
I'm often very pragmatic rather than artistic about taking pictures for upload, sometimes resulting in "boring" but useful images. Artistic photos are not always appropriate for encyclopedia articles (e.g. B&W vs. Color). While I strive to add only high-quality images, sometimes the only images I have are bad or mediocre images. I'd rather the project have a bad image than no image at all. When someone eventually takes a superior quality substantially identical picture, then mine can be deleted.
I upload most images at maximum resolution and license them under the GFDL v1.2. Occasionally I'll do HDR composites. The kinds of post-processing that I might do (in order of frequency) are cropping, sharpening/unsharp mask, curves/levels, and occasionally some color balance adjustments and background blurring.
Regarding freedom, some photographers will not upload high resolution images because they are concerned with losing money from licensing. I think this misses the point about how important freedom is. Still, one can always license the images under other terms. For example, almost all of my images are available for standard stock photography rates in addition to free usage under the terms of the licenses that I use. But some people want to use the images for proprietary purposes. The two are not incompatible for the professional photographer: you can make money from the images while simultaneously promoting freedom. Freedom is more important than absolutely preventing someone else from making money off of my images and I encourage others to do the same with their images.
Image Evaluations[edit]
A number of my photos are Featured Pictures and Quality Images (See list of FP and list of QI).
Image evaluations highlight and train photography skills and help build a collection of great images. Photography is art and art evaluation is subjective. This is especially true in FP and QI voting, where good pictures are sometimes rejected and bad ones promoted. Don't take it too seriously.
Here are my criteria for evaluating images. Note that I don't always evaluate images at 100% crops because a crop is a different image. 100% is different from user to user based on the dots per inch of the display (usually from 72dpi to 100dpi) anyway!
- Looks good at 16"x12" @ 100dpi (2MP) from a viewing distance of approximately 18"
- Low noise and sharp except for cases with acceptable mitigating factors
- Proper focus and depth of field
- Encyclopedic content
- Interesting and/or Artistic (subjective evaluation)
- See the Overexposure vs. Clipping and Depth of Field vs. Resolution guides.
- Note: Not all useful and theoretically best images of a particular subject should or need to be featured pictures
Cameras[edit]
For those technical-minded individuals, I typically shoot pictures from a number of cameras with a variety of lenses and filters. I currently use the following equipment:
- Nikon D7000
- Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8
- Nikon 50mm f/1.4
- Nikon Nikkor ED-IF AF-S DX 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
- Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro
- Olympus OM-D E-M5
- Olympus 25mm F1.8
- Olympus 12-50mm F3.5-6.3 EZ
- Canon Powershot S110