It Really Is A Shame

Here is a link to a post on the Copyright Action forum called, "The Real Cost of Being Sued By Getty [Images]."

http://copyrightaction.com/forum/the-real-cost-of-being-sued-by-getty

A small company used one unlicensed image "about the size of a postage stamp" on its website. Getty sent them a bill for unlicensed usage for £1,700 (the image could probably have been licensed for a tenth of that, or a similar image licensed royalty-free for a hundredth of it.)

They relied on advice from "experienced business people," Internet lawyerin', and all the old tired arguments we hear when such issues are discussed 'mongst the crowd.

Net result?

They paid the license fee, they paid lawyers, and they paid Getty's legal bills. They won't disclose the final amount but it is surely north of £25,000, or roughly Forty Thousand US dollars.

It was a small company, the error was inadvertent (and made by a third party web developer) and... it cost them a significant portion of their operating revenue. It could very well end up bankrupting them. Not to mention the enormous stress it placed on multiple employees of the firm as well as diverting time and resources from operation of the business.

Bottom line?

If it isn't yours, don't take it.

If you do, and somebody calls you on it, 'fess up, pay up, and move on. If you admit fault (when you're clearly caught) and offer to negotiate, they'll probably work with you. Start relying on Internet Lawyerin', and, well, you end up where these poor folks did. And that doesn't really help anybody.

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Well, Poop.

PhotoShelter Announces closing of the PhotoShelter Collection.

And after I went to all the trouble to rearrange my blog to use the PhotoShelter Widget, and everything. Damn.

Oh, well. I sold a picture to Richard Leakey. That was pretty cool. I feel sorrier for the staff - having participated, more than once, in the closing of a business, I know how much it well and truly sucks. The Archive portion of PhotoShelter will continue in business and is doing well, but they just couldn't make the stock side work.

Things fall apart: the center cannot hold. First the Patry blog, now this. Bah. Bah, I say.

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Lightroom Update

I am still a little nervous about Lightroom 2: Adobe seems to have caught Microsoft Disease. ("Ship it: people will buy it even if it's buggy and we'll gradually get it to where it's livable sooner or later.") However, they have finally posted a script that fixes the keyword bug, which was totally unacceptable. And as I said earlier, some of the features are nifty. But wait..

A photographer/programmer has created a LR plugin that allows direct export to the PSC or the PSA from Lightroom. O frabjous day! This takes a very annoying step right out of my workflow. It seems to work fine both with LR 1.4.1 and LR 2.0. Here it is

http://pka.xs4all.nl/index.php/lang-en/lightroomexportpluginphotoshelter

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Diverse, or Just Weird?

I know I've posted several times about my Search for Style. ("STYYYYYYYYLE!") One style I know is not really me is photojournalism. It's way too much work. :) However, I'm certainly adding a lot of photojournalistic, or at least editorial, images to my stock portfolio here recently.

First about two dozen pictures I took at a sprint-car race (See: Sprint Car Racing.) Then this week, about a dozen images of the aftermath of the Iowa River Floods. (See: Iowa River Floods of 2008.) Now, I'm an opportunistic so-and-so. I see something I can take pictures of, especially but not limited to pictures I might could sell, and I'm on it. If I were a commercial photographer and this were my portfolio, it wouldn't look good. Typically you have a portfolio for your main area of photography: if you have multiple areas, you have multiple portfolios. But, since buyers are probably not going to look at my PSC user portfolio that often, rather finding the images through keyword searches, I guess it's not that big a deal.

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Chicago Shoot! The Day

Well, nobody fell off the roof or got run over or anything, so it was a qualified success. We'll see how happy people are with their pictures. There sure was a lot of running around, I'll say that much.

We were at one studio all morning, then some of us went to another studio, and a makeup artist met us there, and then I took one of the models home, because she lived two blocks from the first studio, and hadn't got a car anyway.

While I hope some of the pictures turn out I think the high point of my day was either showing up at my studio and introducing everyone to my fabulous studio partner, who doesn't believe in clothes, or taking one of the models in full makeup to the drugstore on an emergency supply run. She stopped a lot of traffic. :) Here she is:



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Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Off To Work I Go

Well, actually, I'm not at my "day job" today. I telecommute sometimes. But photographically, now that I've got most of my images in my Lightroom database, I'm "mining" the older stuff for stock. Like I said in my previous post, I'm seeing a lot of images that I haven't thought about for a while.

Here's kind of a cool picture I took by the light of a neon sign at a dry-cleaner's about 8 O'Clock at night.



The nice thing about these pictures is that while I wasn't thinking "stock" when I took them, I did get full releases from all the models. If anybody does want to use them, I don't have to chase down models I haven't spoken to in years to get publicity rights.

Anyway, I'm through the first year (I got a late start that year, so it's more like four months.) Only four more years to go!

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Time to Get Serious

I decided that it was time to really get my pictures cataloged properly in Lightroom, so I've been letting it import my photo archives a year at a time. (That way I can put the right copyright notice metadata on them.) I'm having fun watching it and every so often looking to see what it's working on at the moment. I'm seeing a lot of pictures I hadn't thought about for a while!

For instance, I had completely forgotten about the trip I took to the Chicago Auto Show - or, more importantly, I had forgotten that I had a lot of released pictures that might make good stock. F'r instance:



So I foresee several days of mining ahead. Let this be a lesson to you, kids... don't get behind on your organization. You wouldn't believe how long this thing is taking to go through, import, and generate previews. And I have a reasonably fast computer, too! Then, I'll have to go through the individual sessions and keyword them. I think I'll do that on an as-available and/or as needed basis.

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Chicago Shoot! The Day Final Schedule Up!

We've got a studio lined up, a schedule for the day, and you will miss my one-of-a-kind comedy madness if you don't come! No, really. I'm hysterical.

You can visit the Chicago Shooters forum here:

http://community.shoottheday.com/group/chicagoshooters

For more information.

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Model Releases: The Subject That Will Not Die

Model releases are really pretty simple. If the law of your jurisdiction requires it, you have to obtain a release of rights (the right is usually called the "right of publicity" or the "likeness right") before you can use someone's likeness (which, depending on the jurisdiction, can include photographs, drawings, video recordings, or even audio recordings) for whatever purposes might be controlled. This is usually commercial usage, and in the US, the First Amendment protects most "editorial" or reporting usages, even without a release. If you'd like to see an example of such a law, you can click here to see Illinois' Right of Publicity Act, codified as 765 ILCS 1075.

So here's the deal:

If you offer a photograph for licensing, you have to indicate whether you have a model release. On some stock sites, such as PhotoShelter, the one I belong to, you have multiple choices - PhotoShelter's are "Have Release," "Don't Have Release," and "No Identifiable Person In Photograph." That way, the potential licensee can make decisions on whether a photograph is appropriate for their purposes - if they want an editorial illustration, they can specify that they don't care about releases, and if they want a commercial use, they can specify that they only want released images.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well, apparently not. I was browsing through photographs on PhotoShelter today and I found several images of celebrities which were not only clearly identifiable as individuals, and famous ones at that, but in which the subjects were named in the captions, and the images were marked "No identifiable person in photograph." If you want to see some, click here and look through the results. The images in question are of a dark-haired woman wearing a green t-shirt. You'll see them, unless they get removed.

The photographer in question claims to be an experienced professional photojournalist. (Their pictures are pretty good, really.) There is NO excuse for this. None. That is outright fraud. If I were in charge, I'd kick them off the site.

Those of you who are photographers, don't do this. It will eventually come back to bite you. The legal sanctions for infringing the right of publicity can be severe, and if you license an image to a client and they use it relying on your misrepresentation, they can and will sue you for any damages that may result, as well as their money back. Damages in such cases have been, literally, in the millions of dollars. It'll take a lot of shifty sales to make up for one of those if you get nailed. Just don't do it.

If you're not familiar with model releases, you should consult an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction and familiar with the relevant law for more information.

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Go Go Sprint Racer!

My father-in-law is a racer - he's been driving in competitive auto sports longer than I've been alive. Right now he races sprint cars, which are open-wheel, cage-frame cars, usually run on small dirt tracks and very popular with hobbyists because they're not too expensive and the races are usually fun sprints as opposed to multi-hundred-lap endurance tests.


I went to the track with him Saturday night, because there was nobody else to go and it's much easier if you have a helper to go get fuel, hand you stuff, drive the van home if you break your leg, that kind of thing. I took quite a few photos. I submitted several to PhotoShelter, my stock agency. You can see them here:

http://psc.photoshelter.com/user/marcwphoto/set/A0000u5ys.4_qWXA/Sprint+Car+Racing

Comments invited. Incidentally, my father-in-law is #14 in the white car.

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An Auspicious Start

One of my images was licensed from PhotoShelter last month - my first stock sale. I had planned on not saying anything about it until the sale was final (which is thirty days after the buyer pays,) but I just learned that the event it was licensed for is over, so there's no possibility that it will be "returned."

How's this for a cool licensee:

Photo #PSC000643022

License Type: Negotiated Rights, Slide show Non Profit
Buyer Information World Science Festival
Client / End-user: World Science Festival
Image Usage: video for an event

After looking at the website, my best guess is that it was used in a video for this event:

The Sixth Extinction

or this one:

Seeds, Survival, Stalin

Okay, my image may have been used for a lecture by Richard Leakey.

How freaking cool is THAT?

In any event, it was seen by a LOT of people. People who like SCIENCE! My cup, it runneth over.

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I'm Not a Hoarder, I'm Resourceful.

I am a contributor to the PhotoShelter Collection, a web-based stock photography agency (and a moderator on the forums there.) You can see my portfolio there at MarcWPhoto at PhotoShelter. They just starting issuing "Research Requests," which are calls for specific imagery requested by clients. Today I noticed that they had a request for model-released images (always get a release if you can!) of a woman painting in an art studio. Well, get this...


It so happens that I used to rent a little artist's studio on the North Side of Chicago, and the reason I rented it was that the company I worked for had gone out of business and I had no place to shoot. When it did, I also inherited a bunch of art supplies, which I put in my studio. A few times, when I was feeling artsy, I would have a model take some of the art supplies and paint or draw a picture and take pictures of her doing it. So, lo and behold, I have several pictures of women, in an art studio, painting pictures, with model releases.

It only goes to show, eventually EVERYTHING comes in handy.

I picked out ten or so and submitted them. The studio's kind of plain and they said "beautiful," so maybe it won't fly, but on the other hand, the studio had very clean white walls so they could always take the model and drop her into another picture. Both of the models I did this with were very cute and really posed well, so who knows?

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