If you give away your photos for free, then someone who does take photos for a living is missing out. Should you care about that? I’m not sure.

Is that something that open source programmers should care about when they write software that directly competes with commercial vendors?

Professional photographers will always have work in the service industry. When people want photographic record or want assured high quality and no doubt about licensing they’ll hire the professionals.

Now stock-footage companies are going to find the future more challenging, but that’s ok. I’m sure they’ll find a way to add more value.

When I searched I searched for allowing commercial, with attribution CC license. Although my show isn’t commercial, I didn’t want to risk the image authors accusing me of using it commercially when I wasn’t.

Most people think all TV shows are commercial. They’re not. Although in hindsight, I’ve been considering selling DVDs of the show so that decision gave me more future options.

They are fully credited in the end credits.

It never occurred to me to contact the author directly to let them know I’ve used it in much the same way as it doesn’t occur to me to EMail the author of a software package when I choose to deploy that.

Should I?

But there is another other issue to think about with commercial sites/publications.

If you give away your photos for free, then someone who does take photos for a living is missing out. Should you care about that? I’m not sure.

And I’d argue that producing and packaging code is far more of an onerous task than taking a photo (not to denigrate photographers but each individual photo is usually takes significantly less time and effort to produce than a library or application).

So since you’re you’re not bothered by the code, why are you bothered by the photo?

I’m the archaeologist that used your Cahal Pech photos (and very nice they are). And, yep, you’re right; mine is a commercial site and when I look for images I limit my search to those allowing commercial licenses. And it would be great if I could afford to buy photographs–just as it would be great if I could actually make enough money from my writing to support myself and my family.

By making our content available for free (i.e., publishing on the Internet), in one respect, we’ve short-changed ourselves–after all, we could keep our work to ourselves and market to print outlets on a per-pay basis. On the other hand, the Internet has provided us an outlet for getting our work to people to see and read, without requiring us to market to a print medium. A lot more people read us/view our images because we are on the Internet, and, to a large degree, I gotta say that’s worth the trade off. And that does make our portfolios visible.

I can’t make a living simply writing stuff for the Internet, as you can’t make a living by simply posting your pictures on the Internet–there are far too many crap sites that do the same thing for free for even great quality information/photos to be able to charge a fee.

What I do is balance the two–publish on the internet AND market to print publications. I can’t say it’s perfect–frankly there aren’t enough hours in the day–but it does mean I have multiple sources of income.

Best wishes,

Kris

Well, that’s fine. My work is my work, and if someone wants to use it, I’ve let them just go ahead and use it in all my Flickr photos. I don’t take photographs for money, I take them for fun.

So far, my photographs have been used in Time magazine, on the front cover of a Ministry of Sound CD, on countless websites including The Australian newspaper, in a few books, and Schmap stuff, yes, too. They’re simply licenced for “/by/” and that’s it. I find that many people have still contacted me to let me know they’re using my photo, and is that all okay with me?

If you’re a professional photographer, of course the world is different. But as a hobby snapper, I’m delighted when people want to use my images. Perhaps, then, the plan is to learn what you want to do for fun, and what you want to do to get paid-for.