[WikiEN-l] Free images?

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> ... Spectators can be blurred beyond 
> recognition...with photoshop...make 
> bystanders...look "incidentally out of
> focus" rather than "deliberately 
> anonymized"...

> ...When using a good camera, the 
> bigger the aperture (the smaller the
> f-number) the smaller the depth of 
> focus.  This also increases the
> amount of light hitting the film, 
> meaning you can speed up the 
> shutter speed...


Film?  Hahahahah!  And ... adjustable settings on little tiny digital
cell phone camera chips and their little tiny lenses?  Hahahahah!

"Good" is in the eye of the beholder, and on Wikipedia, the kind of
images presented as fair use are barely 100 pixels in either dimension -
about equal to 0.01 megapixels!  ANY camera captures  w-a-y  more than
that, and uploading ~100x pixel copies (even of other people's photos)
as fair use reference images probably would pass muster in an
encyclopedia.  Does anyone know of any case law in this new field?

Regarding the presumption that cell phones aren't going to be a useful
source of images, that's just blind to reality.  Cell phones are just as
"serious" image capture devices as any other camera.  They have arrived:
see National Geographic's "The Camera Phone Book" at
http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/product/175/3690/122.html  "... the
book explains how to choose good equipment; take better pictures; and
store, print, and send the best images...Featuring the technical savvy
of CNet.com's Aimee Baldridge and the creative skill of National
Geographic photographer Robert Clark, a camera phone pioneer, this
compact yet comprehensive reference combines up-to-the-minute expertise
with superb examples...this generously illustrated nuts-and-bolts guide
is the first of its kind to treat these units as genuine cameras instead
of novelties, and the only one to include a full-color photo-essay
demonstrating the full capabilities of the latest camera
phones...2007..."

PS - Off Topic - the smaller the image capture size, the greater the
depth of field focus.  The beauty of the cell phone camera is that it's
so small that everything is in focus near to far all the time - lens
aperture settings are pretty much meaningless and inaccessible.  As they
say, "take the picture now, you can always fix it in photoshop later!"
Photoshop legit copies start ~$5US for older version on eBay and there
are many free programs that offer tools to accomplish cropping,
resizing, sharpening, blurring and other image tweaks functions.