This article in the Inquirer sparked a debate in techdirt about the future of wedding photography. Gizmodo picked it up from there and ran this little blurb on their site.

The synopsis: if you are a wedding photographer you are gonna have to change the way you conduct your business because it is much too easy for your clients to simply and quickly (and illegally) copy your work. Sad, but true.

The times they are a changin' – so look at my price packages for wedding photojournalism on my professional wedding photojournalism site: Pipal Productions. The budget packages, starting at $999, are all digital and include an archive-CD or DVD with high resolution images.

Via Srinivas Kuruganti

The powers that be in NYC have seen the light. No pun intended. But the MTA subway ban on photography has been scrapped. Can I hear a collective Amen?

I remember one very hot summer driving past the Old Woodlands drive-in restaurant [good God those masala dosas were good weren't they when that place was hummin'?] and I saw a rather curious advertisement on the road. It was an image of a Badminton shuttlecock with a condom on the cork end of it. I can't quite remember the tag line but man did that image stick in my head. Obviously it was a progressive, pro-active public service message. But unlike the ubiquitous Nirodh or family planning advertisements that one can see on many an unwelcome compound wall in Chennai, this advertisement was self-financed by Sharad Haksar, a Chennai-based commercial photographer.

A mutual friend, Keshav Prakash (an exquisite cinematographer), reintroduced me to Sharad which was how I came to know about the advertisement being his creation. I haven't been in touch with Sharad recently but I know he and his business has been booming; mostly due to his interesting and off-beat perspective on things.

Now Popular Photography has announced the Photographer of the Year award and Sharad is in the running for the top spot. In fact, out of thousands of applicants, he has made it into the top-ten. That's quite a feat.

Sharad's entries can be seen here. I wouldn't urge you to vote for him if I didn't think his work was up to snuff [to vote for him please click the link and then click the radio button next to photographer number 9]. The fact is Sharad's innovative and creative thinking on a slew of campaigns has deservedly brought him fame. It has also placed Chennai (Madras to most of us) on the map for extremely high quality commerical photography.

The deadline to vote is May 31. The winning photographer receives a plane ticket to NYC and $5000 prize to be presumably spent on a project of the photographer's choice.

Let's Go Digital's preview was terrific. The reviews are also streaming in. The Nikon D70s is another winner for Nikon.

As a Nikon shooter [with a limited budget] this is the digital SLR I want now. I was interested in the Fuji S3 Pro, but the mixed reviews and Fuji's dubious claims that it is a 12-megapixel camera have swayed me back to the company I have stuck with all this time. Is this brand loyalty? Partly.

Several of my friends have switched sides and have bought Canon cameras and lenses. No doubt Canon has stepped all over Nikon in this very competitive field and Nikon response has been slow and rather glib.

The recent controversy that Adobe stirred up over Nikon's encryption of white balance metadata in RAW image files [in essence disabling a photographer's rights to her/his own digital negative] certainly motivated many a serious photographer to move to the Canon camp. I am not sure if this affects Nikon D70 or D70s users as much as it does Nikon D2H users. Regardless, with so much invested in Nikon glass, I just can't justify the jump at this time to Canon or any other camera company.

Ideally, and I do mean that literally, I want the next generation of the Nikon D100 camera line, with better bit depth and among many other things, a vertical grip so that I can comfortably shoot portraits. The D70 and the D70s both don't have a built in vertical grip, though one is available through Harbortronics [currently backordered]. There are some unsubstantiated rumblings that a Nikon D200 is under production. We are talking about Nikon here and their production schedule is historically slow. So, don't hold your breath. The Nikon D70s it is for now until something better comes along in the future.

[If you are considering this unanimously celebrated camera please consider buying it through this link. Full disclosure – yes, I get a very small percentage from Amazon. Tiny, small, miniscule. But it will help pay for this site.]