#2: Adding copyright information to your pictures

I've always thought I could only add copyright information to my pictures during post-processing. I've used Picasa & Lightroom for this purpose before. Now, thanks to the Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i/500D Companion by Ben Long I can now use Canon EOS Utility software that came with my 500D to store a custom copyright message in my pictures. This is useful for me to prove ownership of my images, especially the ones I share via my flickr, jpgmag & twitter.

I plugged James (that's what I call my 500D) into the laptop, using the USB cable, and powered on. The EOS utility window will launch. I suggest you go through these steps too:

From that first screen, click Camera Settings/Remote Shooting, & you'll see the window in picture #2.

Click on the tool button (it's about halfway down the window) - I've circled it in red.

In the Set-up Menu section, click on the Copyright notice entry.

Enter your information and click OK. I also configured the Owner's Name field, since I was there.

Mr Long advised that pressing the Menu button on the camera, navigating to the 3rd tool menu, choosing Clear Settings & pressing the Display button can confirm that we've set the copyright info correctly. I did that, and I saw my name displayed on the LCD screen.

After closing the application and unplugging James, I took a photo to check if the updated data would show in the info screen. I wasn't disappointed.

So hey - I learned something new today. Put in this info one time, and this way works for me fine. If this can be beneficial to other 500D owners, that's cool too.

Enjoy photography!

#1 Seeing the picture that I want to see

Click on the picture for a bigger view.

Sometimes, I want to see more in a black & white image. This photo gave me an opportunity to use Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) application to help me see the picture that I want within the photograph that I have.

The journey for this picture was from the top; full colour, uncropped. I wanted to focus on the decaying structure, so I cropped tighter, taking the garbage bag out. I then turned the picture monochrome, pushed up the sliders for sharpness and shadow up to the middle of their respective bars, and arrived at the darker image in the middle. Somehow this doesn't capture fully what I had felt when I saw this house/shed. I had been curious about who had lived in it before, what it was used for. What I had in mind was this thought: everything has its history. Things are not in black and white all the time. That prompted me to move the saturation and sharpness sliders all the way down and up, respectively. Then I tweaked the individual sliders in Red, Green & Blue until I saw a hint of greyish green & red. I wanted to show how the building is pushed way back, as if it has retreated into its fate of decaying quietly, even as the greenery around it continues to live and grow.

Death, is only the beginning, said Imhotep in The Mummy (1999) and I saw those words when I first looked at this structure in Taiping, early this year.

Continue experimenting - you never know what you'll see until you look. The final picture is available here on my flickr stream.

Take care.