I hope everyone spent a great time with their families and friends over Christmas and New Year. Now the new year has begun and is moving on fast to become another exciting year! After last year’s huge worldwide economic problems the future can just look brighter. However, if you’re going to get married this year it will become one of the most exciting years of your life! For the rest of your life you will look back and remember the blue sky on the wedding day, how the sunlight hit the windows of the church and let the smiling bride glow in this terrific white wedding dress, the little girl that was singing in a church that seemd to hold its breath and how the smiling couple left the church with a whoop of joy of their family and friends.
The beginning of the year is also the time of all the wedding fairs here in Switzerland. This market was exploding in the last years, culminating in 2 different wedding fairs taking place in Zurich on the same day last year. Crazy. I guess everybody is happy now that we are back to normal and this weekend everybody, the couples and the vendors, can concentrate on just one wedding fair in Zurich. I will visit it myself tomorrow, not just to see what’s going on in the industry, but mainly to meet good friends, wedding photographers, coordinators, graphic artists. A great opportunity to connect! Hope to see you there!
While I’m editing down the images of Iris’ & Alain’s wedding I photographed last Friday, I stumbled over this shot worth a quick blog post. As a photographer you can’t ask for more than awesome eyes, a terrific dress and – once again – some kickin’ sunlight – on a said to be rainy day :-)
When I’m editing down several thousand wedding images I go offline and don’t check any emails, facebook or twitter (I do answer phone calls, if you have something important ;-) I try to concentrate on editing and reduce any distraction.
It’s always good to break the rules and do exceptions so I just wanted to post quickly my favorite image of Janice’s & Andreas’ wedding last Saturday.
Ingredients: beautiful bride, awesome dress and some kickin’ sunlight.
If you are one of my happy clients that ordered a KISS wedding album, you can be sure that your book will ship safely from the US to Switzerland or the rest of the world. Check out how Kevin, famous wedding photographer and co-founder of KISS Wedding Books, is testing the awesome new packaging. Enjoy :-)
I’m the owner of this image. So what’s all the fuss about copyright?
Readers of my blog noticed that it was quite calm here lately. The reason is that I started using Facebook and Twitter and was more active on these social networking platforms than on my blog. As I found out they were good tools for networking and sharing with photographers, clients and friends. If you didn’t want to be a member of several different social networking platforms, I thought it was best to just join Facebook. It’s free, so everybody is there and it’s not just business or not just private like other platforms. Facebook gave me a good mixture between business and private life.
Now if you are my friend on Facebook you might have wondered that I am not in your friend’s list anymore. Do I hate you? Did I cancel our friendship?
No, not at all. I just left Facebook. That’s it.
The reason: Recently it was in the news that Facebook doesn’t make enough money and that they were thinking about selling the personal data of its users.
Wait. Whaaat?
That was some time ago. Now it got worse. Facebook already did change their Terms of Service (TOS) at the beginning of February this year. Without telling their users. What if you don’t agree with the new TOS? Don’t worry. You don’t have an option. And it’s already too late anyway.
As a professional photographer you just can’t agree to Facebook’s new Terms of Service. As a photographer you always did care about your copyright. You have to protect your work, that’s what you live of. And of course you want to protect your personal data. But from now on everything belongs to Facebook. Right. Everything. All your personal data. All your pictures, images, videos. Everything. And the best: FOREVER!
If you were a facebook member and didn’t leave before February you’re lost. You belong to Facebook. Even if you decide to quit now and delete your profile, Facebook won’t delete your profile and your personal data. With the new Terms of Service they keep the right to sell everything now and in the future.
Actually I am not that much affected by the new Terms of Service than others. I’m used to read the fineprint and I am always aware of what it means to share personal data on the internet. So I didn’t have much on Facebook that was not public on my blog or website anyway.
More on the subject on today’s news program “10 vor 10″ on the Swiss National Television:
The good point about the Facebook desaster: My blog is going to get a revival. Instead of investing a lot of time into Facebook I will post more regularly on my own platforms, my blog and my website. Everything is under my control, on my servers. And for connecting with my friends, I just call them more often. Good times to come :-)
[UPDATE] After all the worldwide protests Facebook returned to their old Terms of Service. Now they will take a bit more time to carefully develop new terms and also include member feedback in the process. Read more about it in these two blog posts by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:
