As a working photographer you expect that sooner or later you will find your images being stolen and used on the internet. In some ways it’s a cost of doing business in this day and age. And in many ways you kind of have to enable it. Just maintaining a website and filling it with images puts you at risk. Then if you do any type of social media marketing, which you should, you only increase the risks you take.

Even being aware of the risk and possibilities it is still incredibly annoying to discover your work is being ripped off. On Monday I worked a full day and then went to photograph an indoor bandy game, a sport which is surprisingly popular in Sweden. The match started at 19:00 so I needed to be there by 18:00 just to get in place and get my equipment in order. The match went on until 21:00 and then I had a little over an hour of work tagging and uploading pictures. After than I drove a half hour home, and continued to look at and work on pictures. So all in all it was a pretty long day, as it often is when you are doing sports photography.

The next day I saw a newspaper, UNT, had printed one of my pictures from the indoor bandy match and felt pretty good about my work. Then I got an email from another photographer at my agency, who sent me a link to the website of one of the teams from the bandy match. There on their website was my picture front and center. At first I thought maybe they licensed it from our agency, but the picture was identical to the one used by the newspaper. The same picture, the same crop, and the same size. Hmmmmmm.

Now even though I said that as a photographer I anticipate this, it still pisses me off to no end. You expect this from the random fan blog. However to see a club blatantly steal images and use them, well it’s on another level. It’s incredibly disrespectful, and what made it even more annoying is that they have done this to other photographers in our agency. They have been caught doing this and asked not to behave in this manner. Yet it seems they continue to choose to take pictures post them on their website, and roll the dice.

I immediately called the club and asked them to remove the image. I was given a lot of apologies and excuses. It seems the webmaster is new and doesn’t know what is expected of him. I found it awfully convenient that his predecessor also did not know what was expected of him. And for all the apologizing they it on the phone it still took an incredibly long time for them to remove the picture. Apparently the webmaster not only doesn’t know what’s expected of him, but is also incredibly difficult to track down. It was only when I threatened to mail them an invoice for using the image that I got some results. Imagine that!

Now I don’t want this argument to be strictly complaining from my part. So I’m actually going to take some time and write a post about how small clubs can leverage the internet and their fan base to build more multimedia content with resorting to ripping off press photographers.

For that you will need to wait for the next post.

Last night I went and photographed Stockholm’s hockey derby between AIK and Djurgården. Normally the Stockholm hockey teams play at a smaller stadium called Hovet, but for the derby they move next door to the much larger Globen area.

As a photographer going to Globen can be a bit of an irritation. For some reason they have the press entrance on the opposite side of where the actual press room is located. This really wouldn’t be to much of a problem except for the derby the stadium is locked down in order to prevent fan violence, making moving from section to section very difficult. Plus it seems that most of the people working events don’t even know where a lot of things are located.

Looking past those little inconveniences Globen really is a superior hockey stadium than Hovet. It really is a shame that they can’t play all Elitserien matches there because the atmosphere is so much better there.

The evening started with a clash between police and Djurgården supporters. I was already down by the ice at the time it started but you really couldn’t tell what triggered. To me it seemed like the fans drove the police out of their area. The police then responded by charging in with their batons out and swinging.

As a result of this the match didn’t start on time. The respective team captains came out and asked for the fans to remain calm, but in the end the delay saw fans abandoning the match and leaving.

When the match finally got under way AIK was clearly the better team of the evening. Djurgården was often sloppy and losing the puck to AIK players who were very quick to move up pitch into attack. Djurgården’s only real saving grace of the evening was that every time AIK scored they came back and quickly tied it up. It happened with every goal, AIK took the lead and then minutes later it was all squared again.

After Djurgåren tied it in the third period I thought they might go and steal it in overtime as they seemed to be growing. Unfortunately for them that wasn’t the case as Johannes Salmonsson, who earlier had scored the 3-2 goal, went and scored another goal in sudden death.

In Sweden, basketball is not a very popular sport. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty far down the pecking order. Sitting behind hockey, football (soccer), and many other sports. This current basketball season I’ve been trying to go to more home matches for 08 Stockholm and take pictures. It often seems like whenever a newspaper runs a story on basketball they have to pull up a picture that is pretty outdated. So I’m hoping my efforts are rewarded. Either an editor finds and uses my picture while it’s still relevant, or he finds and uses it a year from now when it’s become outdated.

The pictures in this post are from tonights match between 08 Stockholm and ecoÖrebro. 08 Stockholm won the match very comfortably and scored over 100 points for the first time this season, hence the title of the post.

The match quickly became extremely tense as Frölunda player Jari Tolsa hit two Djurgården players in the head from their blind side. Causing a couple of injuries and starting a couple of fights in the process. On top of the fights, injuries, and expulsions the match saw Djurgården take the lead only to see Frölunda tie it and then take the lead themselves. Djurgården eventually managed to tie it late in the 3rd period after keeping Frölunda under extreme pressure, only to lose the game to Frölunda in overtime.

Hover the most interesting bit of this story comes much later once I got home and was ready to turn in and call it quit for night. I got a call from an editor with Swedish newspaper Expressen asking me if I had anymore pictures from the fight which I might have missed and not uploaded into my agency’s picture bank. I asked him exactly what he was interested in and went and had a look to see if there was something I missed. Luckily I found a few pictures I thought might interest him so I quickly mailed them his way.

The next morning it wasn’t too much of a surprise when I saw one of my pictures accompanying a story on the game.

Venezia, or Venice as it’s called in English, holds a special place in my heart. Venice is the capital of the Veneto region of Italy, which is where I’m from, and is a city I visited a lot with my family when I was young. It’s a city that is simply breathtaking and fascinating in it’s history and construction.

The city sits inside a lagoon at the top of the Adriatic sea and is built over 117 of small islands, separated by 177 canals, and connected by 409 bridges. It’s the largest car free area in Europe. Even today, all transportation in Venice is either on foot or by boat. It’s the only functioning city in Europe that runs and operates without cars or trucks.

One of the things Venice is most known for is the gondola. In modern times the gondola has become strictly a tourist attraction, but in ancient times they were used wealthy families as modes of transportation within the city. Each family owned their own gondola, and decorated them in the colors and symbols of their house.

Another thing Venice is known for are it’s beautiful carnival masks. These breathtaking handmade masks are usually adorned during the Carnevale di Venezia, which starts 40 days before Eastern and goes on until Fat Tuesday.

I’ll leave to look at some more pictures bellow, and if you are interested head over to Flickr and look at my set of pictures from Venice.

Bellow is a 13 video playlist I compiled that runs through some of the basic custom functions of the camera, more than enough to get you started. It’s a good watch even if you’ve read the manual cover to cover, because seeing certain things put into practice might show them under a different light.

A special thanks goes out to YouTube user ChristopherKblog, who uploaded these videos and maintains a channel full with a wealth of information on Canon cameras. If you are a YouTube user and a Canon shooter you should subscribe to his channel, as well as my own channel.

Shortly I will try and compile a playlist of videos detailing some more advanced custom functions on the Mark IV. Especially in regards to AI-Servo and focusing for sports photography. I will share it here just as soon as it’s ready.

Stay tuned!

Going to a fight and being ringside was a fantastic experience. You are close as you can possibly get, ahead of all the VIPs and celebrity’s. Equal only to the judges who each sit at their own table on each side of the ring, all of them surrounded by photographers. It really gave me a better appreciation for the athleticism of these guys. Being so close you can really see and feel how winded and absolutely exhausted they become after just one or two rounds.

Photographically it was smooth sailing. I used my 24-105mm f4 lens on my Canon 1D Mark IV. I had a second camera, my trusty 40D, armed with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens but I only used that to take pictures of the fighters as they made their entrance. If I had to nitpick or complain I’d say they could add a bit more light to the ring. I shot mostly with a shutter of 1/800 but would have like to have pushed higher to maybe 1/1000 and that was impossible without pushing the ISO to far for my taste. Maybe next year I can go with a 24-70mm f2.8 or maybe the Canon 1D X (which I hope to buy) will allow me to go even higher ISO wise with less noise.

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite shots from the evening, and if you want you can see the complete set on my Flickr page.

Tomorrow night I’m going to be standing ringside photographing the Rumble of the Kings here in Stockholm, Sweden. The bill is going to feature K-1/Thaiboxing, MMA, and straight professional boxing. I’ve been looking forward to this all month. I absolutely can’t wait to see what kind of images I can grab with my trusty Canon 1D Mark IV.

Make sure you stop by late in the weekend to see a post with the results of my ringside night.

Hopefully I can change that in the coming months. I should have a bit more spare time, and then I will be able to give some attention to this website. I’m going to remove all the sports pictures and replace them with pictures from this season. Then I will start to make some more blog entries.

In the meantime, check this out … had 3 pictures in this weeks Expressen. Things are going well.