Guess who turned 30 today? You will be so surprised!

​I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my favorite file format – the GIF turned 30 today! Yes, you read that right! GIF has been around us for 30 years and is a millennial – woohoo!

If you were born in the '80s, you are probably trying to recollect the first GIF you ever saw! For me, it was the dancing baby!

The GIF was traditionally released as an 8-bit color image format in 1987 as a result of a problem Developer Steve Wilhite and his team looked to solve - how to make a computer display an image while also saving memory. The solution? A Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).

GIF inventor Steve Wilhite

In 2012, GIF was named word of the year and in 2013 Steve Wilhite received the lifetime achievement award at The Webby Award. While most people associate GIFs with annoying memes, GIF has contributed a lot more! Few examples include:

• Enhancing product illustrations
• Depicting visual Instructions
• Demonstrating UX for apps
• Displaying pictures as cinemagraphs
• Adding pop to social media pages 

They say, GIFs didn't just shape the internet — it grew up with it. Today, GIF has a personality of its own and has made communication simple. Like all digital media creations, GIF serves its consumers needs well and has thus thrived with the growth of the internet. 

If you want a deep dive into GIFs, check out Historyofthefgif.com 

P.S - Facebook celebrated the birthday of this mighty format by announcing the global rollout of a feature which enables GIFs in Facebook comments. Yaas!

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/gif-turns-30-ancient-format-changed-internet/

Created in His Image

An artist has sued the Associated Press in order to preempt being sued. Shephard Fairey allegedly found this photograph by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia on the Internet and used it as the basis for his now famous "Hope" poster featuring President Barack Obama.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/arts/design/10fair.html

I thought this article was relevant, given the discussion we had in class on Monday regarding whether it is legal to replicate photographs of the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, etc., by taking new shots from the same angle, distance, and during the same conditions as famous photos. 

The A.P. had wanted Fairey to settle out of court and donate some of the earnings he received from his "Hope" poster to the A.P. Emergency Relief Fund, which supports A.P. journalists around the world who suffer personal losses due to natural disasters or conflicts. Shephard Fairey's lawyer contends that the photo was used merely as inspiration and that it falls under the "fair use" exceptions to copyright law.

If Anthony T. Falzone, Fairey's lawyer, were worth his salt, he would continue to scour the Internet for photographs of Obama, a political and public figure, that mirror Garcia's in terms of the angle, facial expression, and position of the head. The truth is, people who had earlier combed the Internet trying to find the photograph that inspired Fairey's piece of art came up with many such photos in the process. They had debated which one it was for a long time. That in and of itself could prove that Fairey used not just one, but many images as "inspiration." Alternatively, it could show in a court of law that the A.P. cannot prove with any real certainty which photo was the basis for the image on the poster. If they cannot do that, they cannot win their case.

Having worked in a medium in which artists used photographs as references daily and transformed the pictures into something more magical and inspiring than the original, I clearly (at the moment) fall on their the side in the debate. In addition, the fees that photographers expect other artists to pay simply to base new works on their images almost amounts to extortion. (I get that photographers need to protect their craft and make a living, but they need to be more reasonable in their expectations for compensation.) In the future, artists out there, always base your new piece of art on at least two different photographs. You will get in far less trouble with photo agencies.