User:Ram-Man
From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository
  NOTE: Most of my pictures are available for almost any usage at standard stock photography prices or other specific special arrangements in addition to the licencing specified on the image pages themselves. Please don't hesitate to email me or contact me with any questions. [edit] About MeWelcome to Derek Ramsey's Wikimedia Commons userpage! I'm a prolific Wikipedian here and on the English Wikipedia. I'm passionate about photography having taken many tens of thousands of pictures, many taken purposefully to fill in picture gaps in articles. I'm in the continuous process of uploading more to Wikipedia. My ultimate goal is to help Wikipedia articles contain high quality, professional-looking pictures. You can see the complete list of my work: Please see those pages for information on licensing the work for other uses. [edit] PhotographyI'm often very pragmatic rather than artistic about taking pictures for Wikipedia, resulting in sometimes "boring" but useful images. My exciting, artistic photography isn't always appropriate for encyclopedia articles (e.g. Black & White vs. Color). While I strive to add only high-quality images, sometimes the only images I have are bad or mediocre images. I'd rather Wikipedia had a bad image than no image at all. The reason is because someone will eventually take a photo that is substantially identical in content to one that I have taken but has much higher quality. My bad image should then be deleted as it is no longer useful. I upload most images at maximum resolution and license them under the GFDL v1.2. Occasionally I'll do High Dynamic Range composites of identical images taken at different exposures. The kinds of post-processing that I might do (in order of frequency) are cropping, sharpening/unsharp mask, curves/levels, and occasionally some color balance adjustments and background blurring. In general I do not heavily optimize my images for the web, since there is no reason that these images couldn't be printed in physical media. I don't mind most digital manipulations that don't substantially change the content. Those that do are ok, but they should have proper labels. I tend to frown upon images that have artificial elements such as cloned content or fake skies or backgrounds, however, when done discretely it can be ok. I should mention something here about freedom. Many photographers will not release high resolution images because they are concerned with losing money from the sale of their images due to the free license. I think this misses the point about how important freedom is. Still, one can always sell the images under other terms for money. For example, almost all of my images are available for standard stock photography rates. It is true that they are also available for free copying under the terms of the licenses that I use, but many people may want to use the images for proprietary purposes too. The two are not incompatible for the professional photographer: you can make money from the images while simultaneously promoting freedom. Freedom is more important than absolutely preventing someone else from making money off of my images and I encourage others to do the same with their images. [edit] Image EvaluationsI have one hundred sixty-one Quality Images and thirty-three Featured Pictures. I used to be uninvolved in the process, but have since discovered that it is a fun way to highlight photography skills and to build a collection of great images. All photography is art and as a result its quality can often be quite subjective. This is especially true in FP and QI voting, where good pictures are sometimes rejected and bad ones promoted. I don't think you should take it too seriously. Here are my criteria for evaluating images. Note that I don't always evaulate images at 100% crops because a crop is a different image. 100% is different from user to user based on the dots per inch of the display (usually from 72dpi to 100dpi) anyway!
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[edit] CamerasFor those technical-minded individuals, I typically shoot pictures from a number of cameras with a variety of lenses and filters. The images that I upload come mostly from the following cameras:
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