Welcome to the first in an irregular sequence of tips / viewpoints for my new Blog.
First, the formal introduction: Hi, I'm Rick Harrison, i'm a semi-pro freelance photographer ( nice to meet you, you're looking well ).
I come from a background in Landscape photography, and while it's still my love, I also do the odd bit of tourism / event / corportate / wedding photography.
You can find out more about me and what I do on my website.
So, for this first little Tips posting, i'm going to discuss a bit about one of the less glamorous aspects of photography - trying to lessen the chance of having your photography miss-used/protecting your work.
I'm not going to profess that this is the complete answer - I get licencing requests fairly regularly (usually through people finding my work on Flickr), and these are just some of the things i've added into my workflow to deal with some of the issues I've come across along the way. Hopefully someone will get something out of this!
Most of these steps I apply to any photo I process, before uploading to Flickr etc, with the occasional alteration when passing a photo onto a client.
To start off with, and to save repeating myself in the various steps, I'll point out that much of this advice relates to adding information to the invisible "EXIF" data that is stored within a photo file.
EXIF contains information about camera settings (apperture, speed, time, date etc) that show up within your image editing software, or when you click on "more info" against a photo on the likes of Flickr.
You'll need a program that can edit this data (my examples are going to be within Photoshop as that's what I use; Theres more technial details on what EXIF "is", and programs you could try to edit it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format
EXIF Editing - How to
To view and edit the EXIF data in Photoshop, with the photo open, pick "File Info" under the file menu.
You can aso edit the information from within Adobe Bridge by right clicking on the thumbnail and choosing File Info.
Lightroom also lets you edit the EXIF data directly in the program within the Library module.
With that out of the way, on to the tips:
Make sure your photo is properly flagged as copyright.
If your camera is relatively new, there may be an option in your camera settings to set a default Copyright message in the photo's EXIF data. Unfortunately (at least with my nikon D700) this lulls you into a false sense of security - while it does write the copyright message into the EXIF data, it doesnt appear to actually set the magical "Copyrighted" flag in the photo, rendering it somewhat flawed, so this piece of advice may apply whether you have a copyright setting in-camera or not!
So, Edit the EXIF data (see the box-out above), and find the Copyright setting - there'll be a drop down list and a text field for the message. Change the drop down list to "Copyrighted" and enter your copyright message of choice, for example:
It's the drop down list "Copyrighted" that is the most important - this has the handy side effect of displaying a little copyright image on the title-bar of the photo when you open it in Photoshop:
You may wonder why this little copyright symbol is important? It acts as a visual re-inforcement to a designer that there may be usage restrictions on the image that they should check - here's a couple of example scenarios:
- Someone at a company has downloaded various photos from the internet, and sent them on a CD to a website design agency for the new website they want building. To a certain extent, a designer will have to work on good faith that the photo's they've been presented with that their client has permission to use them. At least with the copyright details embedded within the photo they have an opportunity to check if they're suspicious.
- You've licenced a photo to a client who manages a large collection of photography, A fair bit of that photography they may own the copyright to (e.g. they have on-staff photographers or have hired freelance photographers), unless they're careful it could be possible that they pass on your photography to a 3rd party without realising that they don't own the copyright (this has happened to me!)
I've been told by another photographer who's partner works in publishing that their designers will often just use an image without thinking if this symbol isn't there.
Provide your contact details in the EXIF data.
It's all well and good putting a copyright message in your photo, but what happens if you licence the image to a client, the client stores the photo on their computer, and then later forgets who took the photo or how to contact them? Or if someone's downloaded your photo from Flickr and later want's to contact you, but can't remember where they got it from?
You'll also find fields within the EXIF data to enter your contact details. I choose not to enter my full postal address in these, simply because a lot of my photography is publically viewable on Flickr.com and I don't want anyone turning up at my house while i'm out and helping themselves to my gear! I do provide a mobile phone number, email address and website though.
Make your images more searchable.
So you've licenced your image to a client. Maybe the client had a lot of photography they manage, keeping track of it can be a real bind, as it's not possible to search on what a photo looks like...
... but it is possible to add a description and keywords stored in your photo's EXIF data!
The way I see it is, if I enter all this keyword data, if a client does a search of their computer / photo collection then I stand more chance of appearing in their search results, and more chance of being used / re-licenced.
As a handy bonus, if you upload your photos to Flickr, the Flickr Uploader tool automatically pulls out the description and keywords you've entered in the EXIF data, so you don't have to write them all out again :-)
Be specific with your licencing.
It's very easy in your early licencing days in all the excitement of selling a photo to effectively let a client have an image to do with what they will, for as long as they like. Great for a client, but that also means you'll only get paid the once for the cost of the original usage - you'll struggle to break even let alone scrape a living out of photography by being so generous!
If someone wants to licence an image from me, i'll ask for more detail on what it's for, for how long, how big etc - mainly to work out a price, but you should also state these as part of the licence agreement with the client - if they want to use the image again for something other than what was agreed then they'll need to re-negotiate price and terms.
To facilitate this, I state clearly within my Invoice (which i usually send as a PDF) which images are licenced (including a thumbnail and a link to a bigger version of the image for reference), and also fairly specific terms of the licence. I'll also edit the EXIF data before sending them the image to include who that photo is licenced to, and for what use.
Here's an example segment from one of my invoices by way of an example:
Name your files well
I generally leave the number part of a photo within the filename, so that I can more easily work out which photo a client is referring to by treating it as a unique identifier ("the photo I licenced from you a year ago, I now want to do X with it" - "What was the filename again?"). I'll also add into the filename a very brief description of what the photo is, and that it's copyrighted - to make it easier for them to work out what the photo is from a filename, and that they need to contact me for licencing, eg:
IMG1234_frosty_ladybower_jetty_peak_district_copyright_rick_at_fortybelowzero.com.jpg
Watermark your images when uploading to the likes of Flickr
If you're providing the image for a client then obviously skip this step, but if you're making your photo publicly viewable (e.g. through Flickr) then I usually add a small watermark of my signature to the image.
It's up to you how obtrusive you make this - I just go for a small semi-transparent "(c) Tricky" in the bottom-right hand corner of the photo, just enough to make it obvious the image is Copyrighted, but not enough to distract from the image (sure, someone could crop or clone it out, but at least that's a tiny bit more effort on their part, and the way I see it is if someone's physically removing my copyright from an image there's no way they can claim naivety and that they didnt know the image was copyrighted should things go to court.
Monitor for unauthorized usage
Once you put your photography on the internet for the public to see, if it's good then it's likely the odd person may use it without permission.
But how do you find out about this? There's 3 things I occasionally monitor:
- The referral stats on my Flickr pages - my older photography I've left licenced as creative-commons-non-commercial (I dont post under creative commons any more, i'll save why for a later post), some people have very strange ideas of what constitutes "non-commercial", and will use a photo in commercial ways while still linking back to my Flickr stream - there are a couple of occasions where i've noticed this in my referral stats on Flickr, and after a short discussion came to an arrangement for usage.
- Google - either by searching for my name / Flickr url to find people linking to my pages (where someone hasn't clicked through a link that would show up in the referral steps in the point above), or by searching via google image search for events/locations i've been to.
- TinEye.com - this is an amazing website - you can upload a photo, or give it the url of an image already online (there's also a handy plugin for Firefox), and using very clever pattern matching technology it will display any matching images that it's found when crawling the Internet (even if the image has been cropped or altered). Unfortunately TinEye has only crawled a relatively small part of the internet so far, but it's still quite scary how often you can find your photos cropping up in places they aren't supposed to be.
None of these are unfortunately going to find all miss-use of your photos, the main thing is to keep an eye out...
I think that'll do for now, I'd be interested in hearing any comments or what else other people do?
- Rick.
