knickinoptik's photostream  

Hi, hope you enjoy my pictures.

Using the pictures:
I like the idea of helping other people and sharing what I have to make other people's life better. Therefore I'm very much in favor of Creative Commons Licenses and use it for pictures, that do not contain things that would be to personal. In fact, the only reason I created this flickr account was to put pictures (what I consider a hobby mine) in a place where they can easily be found, enjoyed and reused be other people. To allow that, I use the very liberal CC-BY (Attribution) License ... but in fact, I don't care too much about the attribution, so if you want to use a picture of mine, just ask me and I can waive any restriction that this clause may impose for your work.

I did intentionally not use any license that prohibits commercial use - it's fine with me. However, if you make or save a hell lot of money with my pictures -which I consider rather unlikely- but in cause you do, do something nice to mankind and donate some of the money to aid / relief organizations. You could call that an added "Altruism clause" to the license - but of course, I have no means of checking compliance with it and therefore the real license is just a regular CC-BY.

About the name:
In German, there exists some rather known colloquial expression "einen Knick in der Optik haben", which means literally that there is a sharp bend in the view due to some effect happening in the optical elements / lenses. This is/was used in several contexts:
- In ophthalmology to describe in simple words the effects caused by the optical defects of some kinds of astigmatism.
- More widely used for some time as a supposedly funny excuse why you didn't find something by yourself.

In my case, I chose this term because I like using cameras that allow you to take unusual viewpoints for shooting pictures. My first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 990 - which was almost perfect in that regard even when used in a Point-and-Shoot manor. More recently, I'm mostly using a Sony Alpha 350 / Alpha 580, which allows you at least to tilt the display on the back of the DSLR body.