Bands | Karen Strunks Photographer

Ultravox at the Symphony Hall Birmingham & clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill

Posted at 08th April 2010 Posted in Blog, Music by Karen Strunks

Well, I’ve woken up to good new this morning! Clause 43 of the Digital Economy Bill has been removed, and it’s saved me from doing this to my photos!

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggerated image, but it’s to illustrate my point. You see clause 43 had a bit in it call ‘orphan works’ that said if owners of photographs could not be traced, then anyone could use it, for any purpose at all, including commercial usage plus the government would profit from this as they would impose a fee. Nice.

There seemed to another part of Clause 43 that said, even if the owner of the image could be found, anyone could use it as well. They would just go to a body of somesort that the government would set up, and pay them for the image. Brilliant!

If the owner of the image manages to find out that their work has been used, they could go to the government, cap in hand, and ask for payment which is rightly theirs anyway.

If I’ve got any of this wrong, I’m sure someone will correct me.

But thank goodness this clause hasn’t gone ahead. I am very relieved. Faced with clause 43 what choice would artists and photographers have over where their images went and what use they would be put to! People could just pretty much help themselves to anything they wanted. Unless you made your images so unattractive – like my example above – that it would spoil the image.

Being really busy with the 4am Project meant that the Digital Economy Bill didn’t really properly register on my radar until I started reading my twitter steam. People were using the tag #debill. It was the first time that I’ve ever tuned into the House Of Commons. I want to be an MP now!

So, anyway, I can now bring you the images of Ultravox, with just my little red watermark on the bottom right hand side. It doesn’t detract from the image very much, I’m marking it as my image and because I’ve put my website on there, people can easily find out who to contact should they wish to request use of the image. Simple!

It was my first time shooting at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. It’s quite a beautiful place. I was able to shoot from the left and right sides of the stage, but the area in front of the stages has seating in it.

Midge Ure and the band seemed in fine form and played to an appreciative audience. The support act was a South African singercalled Arno Carstens. I’m editing those photos today so will pop them on my blog soon.

As usual it was the first three songs and no flash rule. The lighting was really good – it is so hard to shoot a band in the dark! I used 1/60 – 1/80 shutter speed and ISO between 1200-600.

Hope you enjoy the photos!