Show Notes

Greetings, you’re listening to the Liam Photography Podcast, I’m your host Liam Douglas and this is Episode 426 for Thursday October 31st, 2024. Here are this week’s stories of interest from our friends at PetaPixel.

Influencers Drowned

Two influencers drowned after reportedly refusing to wear life jackets on a boat — fearing it would ruin their selfies.

Influencers Aline Tamara Moreira de Amorim, 37, and Beatriz Tavares da Silva Faria, 27, were found dead after their bodies washed up on Itaquitanduva Beach in Brazil earlier this month.

The influencers had attended a large party on a luxury yacht near Sao Vicente on the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

On their way back from the yacht party, Aline and Beatriz (along with five other people including the captain) boarded a speedboat that capsized in the rough seas and killed them both.

Moments before the tragedy struck, Aline had posted photographs on social media showing her aboard the luxury yacht on September 29.

Now, according to local media reports, police believe that the influencers drowned after they refused to wear lifejackets as they feared it would ruin their selfies and tans.

“Some didn’t want to wear it [the lifejackets] because they were taking selfies,” Sao Vincente police commissioner Marcos Alexandre Alfino reportedly tells Brazilian outlet TV Tribuna in an interview.

“[They] kept talking and really, that [life jacket] gets in the way of getting a tan.”

Commissioner Alfino made the claims based on the testimony of an unnamed boat’s captain, not named by police, who has given extensive interviews to cops over the deaths.

The speedboat that sank was supposedly also overcrowded, with seven people on board despite only having a capacity for five. Local media reports claim that the vessel was too heavy to ride out and began to sink.

Police are now trying to establish if the influencers’ deaths were simply a tragic accident or could have been prevented, according to a report in The Daily Mail.

“All this is being determined very calmly to conclude if the fatalities were based on recklessness or negligence,” Commissioner Alfino says.

Local media have reportedly named the survivors of the tragedy as Vanessa Audrey da Silva, Camila Alves de Carvalho, Daniel Goncalves Ferreira, Gabriela Santos Lima, and Natan Cardoso Soares da Silva.

Earlier this month, PetaPixel reported on an influencer who fell to her death after she tripped over a wall while she was filming a video.

Occupied France

A years-long investigation has uncovered the identity of a photographer who risked his life taking hundreds of pictures of Nazi Occupied France — and paid the price for it.

In April 2020, an album containing hundreds of photos of daily life during the German Nazi occupation of Paris from 1940 to 1942 was discovered in a flea market in Barjac in Gard, France.

Le Monde journalist Philippe Broussard began a four-year-long investigation to discover the mysterious photographer who took at least 700 pictures of Paris during the first two years of the Occupation — a time when unauthorized photography was banned by the Nazis.

In a series of articles for Le Monde published this summer, Broussard revealed how his investigation identified a man named Raoul Minot as the heroic photographer of this unprecedented collection.

Minot, who was born on September 28, 1893 in Montluçon, central France, was an amateur photographer who risked his life to take pictures of the Nazi occupation — ultimately paying the price for his bravery.

Minot worked as a handkerchief salesman at the Parisian department store Au Printemps. However, in his spare time, Minot was passionate about photography and regularly took pictures of his wife Marthe Bedos and their daughter Jacqueline.

However, when the Nazis began their occupation of France in 1940, Minot took over a thousand photographs of day-to-day life in Paris.

The Nazis had made unauthorized photography illegal in France and taking such images could lead to the death penalty.

According to Le Monde, Minot used a “little Kodak Brownie 6/9 camera” and developed prints using the photographic laboratory of the department store where he worked.

Minot’s photos capture wartime Paris and its nearby suburbs, filled with Nazi soldiers occupying the capital.

Some images depict buildings and streets while others show military equipment, propaganda posters, and anti-German inscriptions in the city.

Minot would sell hundreds of his images to Louis Juven — an occasional agent of the French Resistance (a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation during the Second World War).

However, Minot’s courageous photographic mission came to an end just two years later in November 1942 when an unidentified informer reported his activities to the Nazis.

Following an investigation, Minot was imprisoned the next year and deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in upper Austria on April 20, 1943, to perform labor.

Minot was later sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. The photographer was later liberated by the by the U.S. on April 23, 1945.

However, tragically, Minot died just a few days later, on April 28, 1945, at the hospital in Cham, Bavaria.

Broussard says he was blown away by Minot’s life and images. The journalist questions how his legacy and identity remained unknown for over 80 years.

Minot accomplished an incredible feat with his images — especially given that many of the images that exist today of Paris between 1940 to 1942 are solely Nazi propaganda.

According to Le Monde, on September 11, 2024, Minot was awarded the honor of “Mort pour le France” (Died for France) — a posthumous recognition of his sacrifice in the service of France.

 

 

Photographer Only Awarded $3K

Supermodel Gigi Hadid was ordered to pay $3,000 in damages after she failed to respond to a photographer’s copyright lawsuit.

Last year, photographer Ulices Ramales sued Hadid for posting a 2020 image of her sister Bella Hadid on Instagram Stories.

However, according to a report by Copyright Lately, Hadid didn’t attempt to settle or litigate.

In fact, the supermodel didn’t even bother to hire a lawyer over the photographer’s suit.

Instead, Hadid chose not to respond to Ramales’ complaint altogether which led to a default judgment. The publication reports that as a result of her lack of response, Hadid effectively defaulted in Ramales’ copyright lawsuit, leading to a judgment of only $3,000 in damages. The court awarded the photographer the small settlement — a small portion of the $30,000 he had originally sought — along with $1,140 for attorney’s fees and $440 to cover costs.

According to Copyright Lately, it appears that Hadid may have “got off easy” as a result of her actions – or lack thereof.

The publication points out that Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara seemed to adopt a similar strategy in 2021 when she allowed a copyright lawsuit over an Instagram post to pass without response — ultimately leading to a judgment of just $750 with no additional fees awarded.

This is not the first time Hadid has been involved in a copyright lawsuit with a photographer and took an unusual approach. In 2019, Hadid was sued by a photographer for posting a copyrighted image of herself on Instagram. However, she argued that it was “fair use” because she had contributed to the photo by smiling in it.

The supermodel’s lawyers argued that she had the right to the photograph as a “joint author.” As Hadid had cooperated with the photographer and posed for the picture, she therefore established herself as a co-creator. While courts generally reject this argument — as did the judge who ruled over Hadid’s case — the supermodel’s lawsuit later got dismissed for other reasons.

U.S. copyright law is quite straightforward when it comes to intellectual property and clearly states that the person who “authored” a work is the copyright owner, such as a photographer who takes a picture of a celebrity. But despite this crystal-clear definition of intellectual property in the eyes of the law, some celebrities still refuse to license images for their social media and adamantly believe they should own the photos taken of them, not the photographers.

Future of Photography, According to Apple

A few weeks ago, I tried on a Vision Pro for the first time. The one aspect of the technology that really caught my breath in my throat wasn’t the immersive movie Submerged, it wasn’t browsing the internet, nor was it trying out the digital workspaces. No, it was looking at my spatial photos.

Apple has a monumentally challenging task: it has to convince people that its Vision Pro and visionOS are worth it with the huge barrier of “you have to try it to understand” in the way. Yes, you can make an appointment to try a headset out at any Apple Store, but even that is asking a lot of folks who look at the price of the Vision Pro and immediately dismiss it. I don’t blame these people: it is expensive.

Some might believe that Apple isn’t invested in the future of the platform either given the niche appeal or the high price, but after speaking with Della Huff (a member of the Product Marketing team at Apple, who oversees all things Camera app and Photos app) and Billy Sorrentino (a member of the the Apple Design Team who works across the company’s entire product line), I left feeling that Apple has every intention of pushing forward in this space.

The two explain that Apple is very much invested in Vision Pro and visionOS because it views the experience they provide as integral to the future of photography. Coming from the company that makes the most popular camera on the planet, that opinion carries significant weight.

“We kind of have thought about our photography suite as helping people capture and relive their most cherished memories in powerful ways, and I think our colleague John McCormack said this recently, but we see these as personal reflections of something that truly happened, but we’ve been doing that for a lot longer than spatial photography,” Sorrentino says.

“We’ve been doing it with Live Photos, panoramas, Memory videos and photos, and even in maybe more personal expression — places like widgets on our lock screen wallpapers, but we want our camera and photography ecosystem to celebrate the best moments of our lives. And again, while folks love using the term memories in many aspects of photography, hopefully, you saw earlier today, nothing comes close to reliving a moment or a memory quite like spatial, right?”

Sorrentino is referring to my first experience using Vision Pro to turn photos I shot on film, spatial. The latest version of visionOS added this feature and it works shockingly well. While the most recent iPhones are capable of capturing rich amounts of data for spatial viewing, Apple recognized that it was also important for older archived photos — memories — to be enjoyed in spatial, too. The tool works in seconds and with stunning accuracy.

Seeing a photo I took turned spatial triggered something in me that seeing the photo in the original flat space did not. It felt like being back there, at the moment the photo was taken. It tickled my brain in a way that is difficult to explain.

“I think what’s truly incredible about spatial photography is that it is literally adding another dimension to photography in a way that has never happened before,” Huff says.

“And to your point about it just triggering memories in ways that a still photo just cannot, I was actually a psych major in college and I studied memory and what blew me away when I first experienced these spatial photos is that it triggers memory differently because your brain encodes memory in three dimensions. If you go back and think about a memory from your childhood, you don’t experience that as a 2D photo or video replaying in your head,” she continues.

“It’s a spatial memory. That is what our brains are doing. We record 3D space and time and people, and so that’s why it is so evocative. I think when you see these spatial memories in Apple Vision Pro, it triggers your brain in just a different way than looking at a still two-dimensional photo or video, which I think is just so incredibly powerful. So it makes you feel like you’re back in the moment in a way that really nothing else can. It’s just like how you remembered it because it’s literally how your brain encodes it.”

“We’re capturing a moment disparity between two lenses, playing it back into your two eyes, and then we process the image or the video just like we process the real world. So that’s why it feels like a memory,” Sorrentino explains.

“Your brain is really the thing that is making it so much more than if it were a CG scene or a perfect 3D-created moment. It really is the disparity of the two coming into your brain, pulling that together and it’s sort of that conviction in making these memories that led us to pull on it further than just capturing on Vision Pro, certainly bringing it to iPhone — which we’re so excited about — but then also designing this powerful spatial ecosystem and end workflow that we’re excited about bringing this to more folks and to more content creators.”

There has been plenty of conversation recently about photography, memory, and how AI can play a part in that. After introducing AI features into its new smartphone, a Samsung executive claimed that there is no such thing as a photo. After Google launched its new phones that were packed with AI, it said we as users should be more concerned with how a memory made us feel than the reality of it.

Apple has taken a different stance, stating that it wants to keep photos true to life — to how something actually happened.

“There’s nothing more authentic than recording a memory spatially. I think it’s almost the fullest expression of authentically recording a memory is when you record something spatially,” Huff says.

Even using visionOS to turn an existing photo spatial, Apple does so with integrity to the original capture.

“We’re still using the original pixels of that image. We’re not creating anything that wasn’t already there in the image. We are creating a depth map, but it’s still all of the original pixels. So again, it’s very authentic to the original image. It is the original image, just projected into a 3D plane,” Huff continues. “We think that a moment or a photograph or a video is a celebration of a moment.”

The feeling of seeing a photo spatially — one that Sorrentino admits is difficult to imagine until a person tries a Vision Pro — is one that Apple firmly believes is the future of photography. The company believes in it so much that it is shifting its entire company’s outlook to accommodate it.

“We’ve invested a ton into building the incredible technology, hardware, and user experience that Vision Pro is, but to create this spatial video and photography ecosystem, almost every team at Apple is touching it at this point,” Huff says.

“Everything from the Final Cut team to the WebKit team, to all of the teams that you would expect on Vision Pro, to the photos team, the camera engineering team, the camera hardware engineering team who did the impossible of moving the camera modules around to accommodate for this. There’s tons of teams that are invested and I think that just speaks to we’re literally putting our money down on this future because we think it is so important,” she continues.

Huff explains that Safari is becoming more spatial on Vision Pro and starting later this year, web developers will be able to easily add spatial photos and videos to their websites, which greatly enhances the experience of browsing the web on Vision Pro.

“And the cool thing is that they’re all fungible into 2D assets,” Huff adds. “So the people, your 2D readers on a MacBook Pro, will still be able to see the photo and video. It will just be 2D.”

Both Sorrentino and Huff heavily stressed that Apple firmly believes in this future of enjoying photos, which is why the company believes that if you’re using an iPhone that can capture spatial photos, you should be doing so even if you don’t have any way to view them in spatial yet. They strongly believe that users of iPhones today will be grateful for that spatial information in the future.

iPhone 16, Apple’s latest series, of course, can shoot spatial photos and videos, but one thing that may have gone unnoticed is that the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max gained the ability to shoot spatial with iOS 18.1.

“We’re trying to make it as available as many iPhones as possible,” Sorrentino explains.

“The one other thing that I would say is the idea that we recognize the reality that most people are still enjoying their content in 2D. That’s why spatial videos are very carefully made so that you can share them with other people who are on flat platforms still. Same thing with facial photos,” Huff says.

“If you capture a spatial photo, you’re also getting a 24-megapixel high-res still. You’re also getting a Live Photo. And we’re also, if you’re capturing a photo of a person or a pet, capturing that portrait depth map so that you can then make it a portrait photo and post. So you get all of it all at once. And so you don’t have to make these trade-offs.

“We’re invested in ideas that emotionally resonate with folks, and we know some of these things take a little bit of time and we want to invest in things that feel exciting and feel creative and feel emotionally connected,” Sorrentino says.

“So to us, that is very much in the spirit of how Apple has done things for a very long time. So I’d be curious to look back at this at a later date and see if people are emotionally connected to it like we certainly hope.”

Sorrentino says that spatial media is, obviously, something he feels very strongly about. But he explains that is just one thread that expands out from a web where at the center is just the idea of making something that brings joy to people.

“I think our job, certainly in the design and engineering end, is to just make sure that we are delivering delightful experiences that get people excited about it, want to try it, and want to tell friends and family. As long as we’re making delightful connective experiences, we feel really great about pushing this forward. And again, it being day one, we’ve got a long run ahead of us, but it’s one that we’re really excited to be on.”

Filmora 14

Wondershare’s award-winning Filmora 14 video editing software promises groundbreaking new features, including new artificial intelligence (AI) technology that ensures video editors and creators can spend more time doing what they love, creating fantastic content, and less time on their computer, all without sacrificing the quality of their work.

Filmora 14 embraces AI in numerous beneficial ways and includes more than 10 new AI-powered tools to improve efficiency and help creators deliver even better content.

Among these is an innovative Smart Short Clips feature. Smart Short Clips uses multiple AI capabilities to independently process video clips, find and extract highlights, and perform fully automatic editing.

No matter the user’s video files, Smart Short Clips will find the most exciting moments to create short, vertical clips ideal for sharing on popular social media platforms. The final video features AI-created subtitles, clever sound effects, stickers, and even transitions while simultaneously supporting scheduled publishing across multiple platforms.

Short-form content is a major deal for brands and creators, and Smart Short Clips makes the editing process easy.

Filmora 14 offers much more than automatic video editing; it also includes a ton of user control. With Filmora 14, creators can edit video from multiple camera angles on a single timeline track, including footage from various cameras.

With Multi-Camera Editing, it’s easy to switch perspectives during editing. This is ideal for content like interviews shot with multiple cameras, tutorials with different camera angles for the presenter and action sequences, recording and sharing video content from stage performances and presentations, and even showcasing replays from sporting events.

Planar Tracking is another sophisticated new feature available in Filmora 14. This editing and effects technique enables editors to track the movement of flat surfaces within a video clip. Thanks to this advanced tracking technology, which analyzes four points on a plane such as a screen or a billboard, users can easily attach images, graphics, text, or another video clip to flat surfaces in their footage.

Good video editing goes beyond video and relies on immersive sound. With simple text prompts, Filmora 14’s advanced artificial intelligence can automatically generate smooth, context-appropriate sound effects and transitions.

Imagine a scenario where primary footage of B-roll shows a busy city environment, but you don’t have high-quality audio to work with. AI Sound Effect can automatically generate fitting background sounds to match the setting, ensuring the viewer remains connected to the final video

But what if your video isn’t up to your or your client’s expectations? No problem, as Filmora 14’s AI Video Enhancer uses AI to improve video quality by restoring detail to blurred-focus or low-resolution video. This is great for times when you don’t have access to a high-quality camera — like when you must use a smartphone’s front-facing display or computer webcam — or when reusing footage shot on older, lesser cameras.

Filmora 14 includes robust color grading and correction tools for experienced video editors. However, not everyone has the skill or time to retouch and tweak their video’s colors manually. AI Color Palette uses smart AI to replicate the color scheme and look of reference photos and videos, instantly transforming your video into a cinematic masterpiece. Don’t worry — the AI is clever and won’t create unnatural skin tones, even if you have chosen an aggressive new look for your video project.

Many brands and creators make content for global audiences, meaning they rely on subtitles to connect with all their viewers. Filmora 14 takes that further by using AI to translate audio accurately and clone the speaker’s voice into a newly selected language. It can even sync their lips, making the edited content look natural. This is a powerful way to connect with a broader audience, and Filmora 14 supports this new feature across 23 languages, including English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi, among many more.

From new features designed to enable novice video editors to quickly and easily create, schedule, and share high-quality content across all the major platforms to sophisticated new tools designed to provide robust control to professional editors, Filmora 14 has groundbreaking improvements for everyone.

Video is an increasingly common and essential way for influencers and brands to connect with their audience. Whether a seasoned videographer or a marketer, Filmora 14 ensures everyone working with video can work faster and smarter while creating better content that connects more deeply with viewers.

Filmora 14’s new AI features comprise a meaningful evolution in video editing and expand the boundaries of what users can do with their content.

Filmora 14 is available to try for free. The video editing software works with Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Android.

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Also be sure to join the Liam Photography Podcast Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/liamphotographypodcast/ You can reach the show by call or text @ 470-294-8191 to leave a comment or request a topic or guest for the show. Additionally you can email the show @ liam@liamphotographypodcast.com and find the show notes at http://www.liamphotographypodcast.com.

You can find my work @ https://www.liamphotography.net and follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @liamphotoatl. If you like abandoned buildings and history, you can find my project @ http://www.forgottenpiecesofgeorgia.com. and http://www.forgottenpiecesofpennsylvania.com.

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