You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
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Credit Where Credit is Due

I recently posted the existence of this blog to another forum of serious researchers at www.unmannedspaceflight.com and since have had a few terse comments posted here (which I have now edited as of July 2007). My intention in posting there was to have these people take a look and see if maybe I was getting anything wrong or taking too broad a liberty with extending some images to fill the proportions of a wallpaper image. What I have had instead is a few people angry with me that I didn’t credit certian people enough for some of the fine work they have done. The one example that I would really agree with was the Venus Projection image i colorized. Don P. Mitchell really did some extraordinary work on re-translating the old Venera data into those images used and I removed his credit from the color version which was water-marked. I left it in the original B&W image on the post, and linked to him in the text… but the wallpaper was void of any credit back to him and I have repaired that.

Some other comments have been made about other usage and I guess I am feeling like it starts to get silly. The flash thing at the top picks from about 30 random images and apparently one of them was an image that someone had worked on. Now, I can remember staring at these places when I was in Junior High School and the image I used up top was nearly identical to this image I have been told was produced by a freelancer more recently. You see, NASA image are famously copyright free as the missions are paid through government funds… or taxes. So the trick here is to know when it is NASA free and not NASA free. When I made many of these wallpaper images I was not sharing them on a blog and didn’t know I would one day. So I wasn’t taking notation on where I found the original and I wasn’t looking to see if anyone was claiming credit.

So, if you are one of these people whose materials I may have unintetionally lifted… please keep in mind this is non-profit, I do this in the interest of public interest of space exploration and that I admire the work you do very much. Just drop me a line and I will brand most anything with your credit and update the files. As a matter of fact, many of these freelancers maintain their own websites containing awesome galleries of images rarely seen by mainstream media so I am thinking adding some of these sites to a nice links page could be a great resource as well. One great example I recently found is this one for Mars Rover images: MER Imagery run by James Canvin.

From now on I will try to take note of where I am getting these things and run a credit and provide a link. The more the merrier.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 1:27 am and is filed under Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Credit Where Credit is Due”

  1. James Canvin Says:
    December 5th, 2006 at 6:48 pm

    Hey thanks for the link. Sorry to here you’ve been having ‘issues’ with credits, etc. As I’ve discovered making the MER images, there is an awful lot of work involved and you do end up becoming quite protective over them. I hope the experience doesn’t put you off at all and we here from you over at UMSF again. There are some beautiful images you have put together, thanks.

  2. thomas Says:
    December 6th, 2006 at 8:25 am

    that really is awfully cool of you to say. i think some of the confusion has come from people thinking that i was claiming to do this kind of work when actually i am just trying to be a filter of this material for the “everyman”… which i am when it comes to this material. all i am doing is crawling the web for stories and images that would appeal to the average person on the street. Oh, and occasionally i get to take advantage of my professional skills in design and photoshop work which is always even more fun than usual if you also particularly enjoy the subject matter.

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