Category Archives: Work

Editorial Content — Editorial Photography

Ah yes — disgruntled readers and/or people with their own ‘agenda’ or perspective that they expect everyone else to bow down to.

I shall not name the woman who sent me the simply vile letter today regarding my printing of photographs that I took at the Autrefois parade, but I would like to make something completely clear for those who do not have any understanding of EDITORIAL content.

I do not publish pictures of people on this website for financial gain UNLESS THEY HAVE MODEL RELEASES. This site is primarily a platform for my commercial work such as travel photography which I do indeed sell through several agencies.

If I was trying to sell photography of families and children for something like limited edition prints — then that would, of course, require a Model Release for every person pictured. I have been a working journalist for several decades, so I am well aware of what is and is not legal.

Editorial Content includes pictures taken at public events such as the Autrefois Le Courserons and the Tour de France coverage a few months ago. Any journalist or photojournalist is allowed to take pictures AT PUBLIC EVENTS as long as they are used for journalistic content including online news coverage, blogs, newspapers, print media, and stock photography that is plainly marked EDITORIAL USE.

Since the letter writer opened the door to this post, I have removed the earlier article so this white-hot-angry woman can calm the hell down — but to whoever is reading this rebuttal and explanation, I shall continue to post articles that include pictures of recognisable faces of people of ALL ages at public events.

This is quite different to ordinary street photography and France happens to have some bizarrely strict rules about shooting photos on the street without written permission. But even here the law is quite plain that if there is a public event and the camera is not singling one person out, informal street photography is acceptable. So yes, I am quite within my rights to publish event photography.

Let me make this very, VERY clear — my website will not be dictated to by the opinions of anyone else! But I certainly will follow the prevailing law of whatever country I live in.

When people attend an event such as the Autrefois Le Couserons, there are dozens of photographs taken each year that end up on websites all over the world. The people who were actually in the parade certainly expected their photos to be taken. The parents who dressed their children in costume and paraded them through the streets of St. Girons did know that photos would be taken by people from all over the region and overseas. I saw at least a half a dozen other journalists on site that day.

Were all of us photographers standing on the street corner, holding up the parade, handing out Model Release forms for everyone to sign and be witnessed? Of course not! It was a public event.

I have no way of knowing who the people in my photos are — adults of all ages, teenagers, elderly folks, parents, and children included — and I have no contact details for them since they were part of a crowd of hundreds of people in a public place. I am not handing out clues to who any of these people are or where they live. And no, photos of children and parents who are in a group setting at a public event are NOT a no-no. If your mind tends to go straight to deviant possibilities, well heaven help you for being in the mindset that regards every adult as a potential threat.

Whoever you are, Ms. K — if you have issues with my website, why are you even bothering to read it? Lighten up!

When In France, Patience Pays

Deciding to stop travelling, pick one country out of several options, and settle in the south of France has been an interesting proposition on a variety of levels — so I thought I would share a bit of that with you. The Midi-Pyrenees is a stunning part of this beautiful country and after much consideration, we believe that we have made a good choice. So we’re taking that leap of faith and staying!

St. Girons from the Avenue Francois Camel bridge

If you read the previous post, you will know that I have some additional freedom again now that I have my own little Peugeot to zip around in. However, it took TWO DAYS of hanging on the phone, leaving the car firmly parked because it was uninsured, and then wading through my kinda-sorta ok-ish French to get a new insurance policy. But as of Saturday afternoon, that’s all sorted and I’ve been out and about already doing essential errands and tracking down the correct government offices for each task.

A bit of freedom courtesy of a new-old Peugeot for Deborah

Yes, the updates on the site have been a bit thin for the last couple of weeks, but we’re fine and still doing the settling-in thing. That means lots and lots of paperwork from government departments that never seems to end. Mark’s life is a bit more straightforward than mine is right now — he gets up in the morning and goes off to work at various astonishingly scenic places as he renovates French houses. I am here in my home office, making endless copies, sourcing more government information, sending flurries of emails, and then waiting, waiting, waiting for things to get done by whatever French government department I am currently dealing with.

Getting registered in the health care system is still ongoing and that has, I must admit, been ridiculously time consuming. But I feel confident that my own paperwork will be completed this week. And I’ll be very happy once I see two copies of the laminated Carte Vitale, the essential item that gives us full access to all of the French healthcare system.

Things came to a grinding halt recently when I had to get an official French form to then obtain an official French translation of our birth certificates from English into French — and then the official French translation form had to be stamped and signed by an official French Civil Authority in a government office. That finally happened yesterday, but not easily!

After getting the translation completed last week, I took all of the correct paperwork to the Marie (the mayor’s office) in St. Girons yesterday and was directed to the office for Civil Registry. There I found a woman behind a desk with rather a lot of stamps and pens on her desk. Good — I must be at the correct place — right? Perhaps not since she looked rather alarmed when she realised that I wanted her to put her stamp on the official translation of (shock-gasp!) a British birth certificate and an American birth certificate. Seriously, she looked at me like the sky was falling!

Shaking her head and repeating, “Non, non, non!” several times, she pulled out an instruction sheet for what she could sign off on and waved one finger at it saying that her office was for people from France, not “etrangers” — strangers (which is what they actually do call anyone who isn’t French). I just stood there and waited with a calm expression. She went off in a huff to talk to the woman in the office next door, her supervisor, and came back with a very thin smile on her face. She had just been corrected by the supervisor (lovely woman!) who told her that since we were registered to live and work in France, she was required to copy and stamp all of our documents.

Kachink-kachink went the stamps, 2 on each form plus a date and signature, and finally I was handed 8 “official French” forms. I kept a pleasant look on my face, thanked her very sincerely, and suppressed the urge to dance down the hall outside her office and whoop out loud once I reached the parking lot!

I have no idea why, but for some reason I have rather a lot of patience with this unfolding process. Maybe it’s because this place feels so right. And for a change, Mark isn’t neutral, he really LOVES it (in all capital letters!) here in this part of France! That’s an important change because he’s always liked the places where we lived in the past two decades in Australia, England, and even those brief few years in the USA — but he hasn’t LOVED them. Nice, eh?

Getting new passwords for our online account required a trip to the bank to meet with our account manager — and as I was walking through St. Girons yesterday, I was smiling. It was interesting to see how many people turned and smiled back because I was walking around feeling like a lightbulb was on inside my face. St. Girons is just lovely in that picturesque faded-French-beauty way that makes my heart happy. The photo below is of Rue Gambetta and my bank is underneath those arches at the end of the curve, just before the parking lot in the square beyond. Now seriously, if you looked at your local business district each day and saw this kind of charming view, wouldn’t it make your own heart sing?

In the larger view, we are both quite happy that we waited, that we had patience about making a decision about where to stop and where to settle down again. We enjoyed our time over the last 18 months immensely as we travelled and worked in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. And we met lovely people in each and every place that would have introduced us to the right people, helped us with our language issues in the non-English countries, and generally assisted us in negotiating through the ever-present paperwork in the EU.

The place that we have finally chosen, France, seems to be particularly attached to ‘les papiers’ and, in direct contrast to the way things are done in the UK or Australia, online processing of forms is practically non-existent. So everything moves at a snail’s pace. If you do choose France, you must know that ahead of time and accommodate yourself to their pace

Time to stop for today and get back to work. My next challenge is getting quotes to have our household goods delivered to us here in France. We had the very happy news from our shipping company in Australia that they had mistakenly quoted us for a larger amount than we actually had in storage. Once they picked it up last Friday from our storage unit, compacted it, and measured it on Monday, they sent us the actual figure which was approximately one third less than what the quote was based on. So we are saving a little bit of money off the sticker-shock prices that we were dealing with up until yesterday. Our boxes will arrive in the UK in a few months and then be trucked down here to France, a process that is (rather oddly!) cheaper than having them sent directly to France or even to Spain which is only one hour south of us.

Ah well — c’est la vie!

Temporarily Tangled and Tied Up

Temporarily Tangled — by power cords and computer cables — and Tied Up (and then some!) with migrating files, photos, and software from one computer to another.

It became apparent in the last few months that since I was now doing so much stock photography and freelance writing, my MacBook Pro was groaning under the weight of the files. Doing back-ups to passport drives and online storage sites had become scarily essential as a measure of protection against losing all of that work.

Apple MacBook Pro on my coffee table 'desk'

I’ve been looking for another MacBook Pro so that I had redundancy, and one night (when I should have been asleep!), I was online on Ebay and I saw a brand-new listing from a small company in the UK that was an authorised Applecare agency. They had an identical MacBook Pro to the one I already had, but this one that was listed had a terrabyte of memory instead of 500GB — and the RAM was also double at 8GB instead of my current 4GB. It had a brand new hard drive so I wasn’t buying someone else’s computer full of ‘fluff’ and old hidden files. They had also placed the latest version of Apple’s OS system Lion on there and it was loaded with almost every single piece of editing and office software I used on a daily basis.

I hit BUY NOW as fast as my little fingers could fly and the lovely little computer arrived yesterday. Hooray! And it was half price compared to a brand-new-from-the-Apple-store one that only had 4 GB of RAM and 500GB of memory. Can you hear me saying a huge WOO-HOO!

The only thing that I had to download new copies of were my iWatermark program for placing my copyright on my photos, another copy of Adobe Lightroom (and since I had purchased mine in Australia and registered, I just migrated the passwords & serials over), and the MacKeeper program to keep everything clean and running smoothly. I also added Skype and I thought I was ready to send my photo and document files over. Nope!

My older Macbook Pro is running on the OS Snow Leopard and the new one is on Lion. Add to that, the software for some of my other programs were all previous versions. Soooooooo — the Migration Assistance program that was running in both computers, which actually did recognise both computers this morning, would not play nice and let me transfer files. I wasn’t asking it to send Applications, Downloads, Users — just documents and media files. Nope — not cooperating.

So it looks like a huge portion of my weekend is going to be spent transferring files via my passport drives and fingers crossed that I’ll be back at the beginning of the week to put NEW PHOTOS and posts online for you. Then I have a bit of a learning curve since my new operating system is different and has new features — and so do the new versions of Lightroom and Photoshop.

Wish me luck!

How’s That For A Drive To Work In France?

Seriously, if you have to drive from one village to another to go to work, isn’t that a pretty splendid view? This is what Mark sees as he toodles on down the road out of our village of Engomer and on toward Castillon.

Driving to work in the Midi-Pyrenees of France

And once he gets up into the remote high spots where some of the clients live, this is the kind of thing he sees as he works on house renovations.

Horse coming over the hill in the snow-topped Midi-Pyrenees in France

These photos were all taken by Mark at various job sites and yes, I am certainly glad that I bought him a decent Nikon camera before we left Australia. Not only is his photography getting better and better, I am spared the knuckle-gripping drive up to these places on one lane mountain roads which are apparently not much better than a dirt track in some places. Remind me to tell you the ‘stuck in the mud — I’ll be late for dinner’ story sometime soon!

If you look closely, you can see that each of these three white cows has a new baby up in that springtime meadow. Is it any wonder that Mark really loves going to work each day since we moved here a few weeks ago?

Spring calves with their mothers in a mountain meadow. Midi-Pyrenees in France.

Finally, in a dramatic example of size and scale from another job site that Mark is working on, those tiny little buildings that you see about 3/4 of the way down the picture in the center are actually 2 or 3 story houses.

A lesson in size and scale in the Midi-Pyrenees of France

Need A Parking Space?

So — you live in a quaint French town full of gorgeous old stone houses on a one lane cobblestone street and you know that the painters and plasterers are coming to work in your home. How do you suppose that they will make certain that there is available parking right in front of the house which is on an uphill slope?

How tradesmen secure a parking space on a narrow, uphill, cobblestone street in France

That’s how! They simply take several large paint buckets and lay planks across them until they secure an area that is large enough to park the work van.

Voila! A very practical solution!

Censorship Is Alive And Well In PayPal’s Misguided Little Minds

Deviating from my normal posts about travel, history, or the issues involved in living as an expat, today I am addressing a situation that has just been brought to my attention by one of the publishers of my books.

I publish both of my books about spiritual growth, social and historical issues, and future visions in paper versions — The Dreamkeeper and the most recent book, Darkness Folding Inward, Light Emerging — at Lulu.

But I also publish both books in electronic versions at Smashwords — and I am quite concerned because Smashwords is under attack by PayPal right now.

I found it breathtaking that PayPal has decided that it was appropriate to be ‘content police’ on what is published at Smashwords. They have informed the head of Smashwords, Mark Coker, that unless all books are removed that contain what they consider to be objectionable material, they will cancel the PayPal account that enables authors like me who live in countries other than the USA to be paid our royalties.

This is simply insane on at least three fronts. (1) It would immediately bring the wonderful flow of artistic output from non-USA-writers to a halt since we would not be able to be paid for our book sales. (2) It penalises all Smashwords authors, even if we are not producing what the ‘thought police’ over at PayPal consider objectionable. (3) It sets up PayPal as the judge and jury of what the readers of the world are allowed to read. And what gives them that right???

I will begin to immediately participate in the online protests against this impending action by PayPal against Smashwords. I encourage all of my readers to read this article at Electronic Frontier Foundation and do the same.

Giving France A Chance

We did it! Mark’s paperwork is complete and he is now registered to work in France. And today I finally got the last of my own paperwork done and as of 3 PM this afternoon, I am legally a resident of France!

Carte Du Sejour application for French residency approved and number assigned!

I’ve intentionally kept the photo of my official paperwork small and unreadable for security’s sake. Within a week or so I’ll have a little laminated photo ID card to carry in my wallet instead of this larger piece of paper. But the happy news is that it’s done and we can move forward.

We’ve decided to give France a chance. So I’ll be posting some articles in the future that vary a bit from the travel writing because they will describe our efforts to settle in for awhile.

I think we’re about to be on a large learning curve!

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey