Steve Oldham Photography

Landscape and Travel Photographer from Manchester, England

Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ category

Copyrighted Work

It’s amazing how many people think it’s OK to steal your work and then use it on their own websites. Most of my work is licensed under a Creative Commons licence to allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes, as long as I am credited.

Some of my work is licensed through Getty Images, and that can only be used by paying the relevant license fee.

I spent some time recently tracking down people who have been stealing my images, and requesting that they either (a) provide me with evidence that they have indeed licensed my work, or (b) attaching an invoice for the license fee and requesting that they pay in order to ensure that they are fully licensed going forward.

The results of those investigations – three users just removed the image from their site, one is looking into how it happened and will report back, one has been very apologetic and we have agreed that they can continue to use the image but with credits, and one has just ignored me completely. Unfortunately the one who ignored me is hosted in Mexico, so I can’t enforce the provisions of the US DMCA to take down the image.

So far, nobody has felt that the correct course of action is to pay the photographer a fee to use his copyrighted work.

I’d be interested to hear other peoples experiences in this matter!

Me bad

Hey there,

I’ve been posting lots of stuff on 500px and Flickr recently, but I’ve been neglecting my blog.

I apologise. 😦

As a small step towards correcting my tardiness, here is a rainbow I shot in north Wales recently.

Rainbow

Special Deal on Topaz Adjust

So, I’ve blagged a special deal for all my followers from those nice guys at Topaz Labs! Topaz do a great range of image editing plug-ins that I use in my work. One of my favourite is Topaz Adjust, and until the end of the month you can get 50% off! Just go to http://www.topazlabs.com/661.html and use the code septadjust.

I hope you enjoy it!

 

 

500px

I’ve just been given a free three-month trial upgrade to an “Awesome” account at 500px so I’m working through my portfolio and uploading them there to judge the response.

Feel free to check me out there as well!

Image

 

Today’s image is Boa Viagem beach in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil. It’s my girlfriend Ana‘s home city and has a gorgeous urban beach. Outside of Brazil, people think of Copacabana or Ipanema when you mention beaches there, but the north-eastern beaches are waaay prettier than the Rio beaches!

Grasmere

I’ve been revisiting some of my unloved images on Flickr recently. This is one of my favourite shots, taken back in 2007, yet it was languishing on my last page of “most interesting” images according to the mysterious Flickr algorithms.

So I revisited the post production, gave it some promotion, and it’s now up to number 3 with over 100 views and over 15 favourites!

Just goes to show, never give up on your old images. It’s sometimes worth revisiting them.

Image

Flattered

I received a really nice comment on one of my pictures on my Instagram feed today, from the British skeleton star and future Olympian athlete Lizzy Yarnold! For those of you who don’t know Lizzy, she is the British number one skeleton currently, and was the World Junior Champion in 2012. Hopefully she will follow in the footsteps of Amy Williams, Shelley Rudman and Alex Coomber and return from Sochi 2014 with an Olympic medal!

The photo she liked was this one, which I’ve shared on here previously.

Architecture

I’ve sent her a copy – hope she likes it!

If you would like a limited edition print, they are available here.

Watermarking

I’ve been following an interesting debate recently between Trey Ratcliff and Miss Aniela regarding watermarking on images. I’ve shot alongside both Trey and Natalie in the past, and respect their work hugely.

Trey never watermarks his images, licences Creative Commons and shares a full size image on his website every day. His philosophy is that his art is to be shared, and by trusting his 11m followers on Social Media not to abuse that he can still generate his revenues via licensing. When he discovers that his images have been stolen in breach of the licence, he takes action.

Natalie watermarks her images with a discreet watermark, and they are all fully copyrighted. She argues that too many people are out there just trying to steal artists works, and that with the new Orphan Works legislation in the UK this will only make things easier, so takes the steps she feels necessary to protect herself.

Over the years I’ve taken both approaches. Originally I shared everything Creative Commons, and took pleasure when I found people sharing my work, although all too rarely was I advised, and not always even credited. I then went through a phase of watermarking and copyrighting, but as I found nobody willing to pay for my work, I reverted to the Creative Commons model, with the exception of the images I have licensed with Getty.

I don’t practice photography to make a living from it, and I do enjoy people sharing my work. I think going forwards my strategy will be a compromise – I think I will use discreet watermarks to identify the work as my own, but at the same time use CC licensing so that people can continue to use my work in a non-commercial manner.

All New Flickr – update

Last week I blogged my thoughts on the redesign at Flickr.

I’d now like to update my comments. I mentioned that the “Share” and “More” options on the photo page didn’t work in Chrome or Firefox, just in IE. Well I’m pleased to report that this is partly fixed! I can now use Flickr in Chrome, just like I should be able to! As for Firefox – well this still isn’t working, so still work to be done by Flickr in that regard.

I mentioned in my last post about Pro accounts, and how if you have one you can keep it, but they aren’t available for new users. Well if you want to keep your Pro account, it’s worth checking that it is set to auto-renew as if it expires, it’s gone for good!

Now I just need to work some more shots and drive some footfall to my Flickr galleries!