*Can’t we all just get along? Music, photography and the common ground.

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Let me start by saying this is an opinion piece, as much of what I write is.  I’m not looking to legally council nor reprimand, or cite the intricacies of international copyright law.  I’m no lawyer.  I am however a musician and photographer with mixed levels of success in either arena, and I have found some of the recent battles being waged by bands, managers, fans and photographers to be somewhat disheartening.

I like to read through various sites daily to keep up with the goings on and such.  Over the last few days, it seems there is a war brewing between a small pocket of the music industry and photographers.  I speak of course about the recent copyright battle between photographer Rohan Anderson and the band Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (you can read through the article that I read HERE on PetaPixel for all the fun, juicy details if you’re not yet aware).  Then, seemingly in response, Shawn Hamm, the tour manager for Three Days Grace went on a twitter tirade condemning photographers and their claims to compensation for any intellectual property they may think they are entitled to by way of shooting bands (you can again read the PetaPixel article on that one HERE).  Of course, I’m paraphrasing, and will leave my opinions on these individuals and bands (and their behavior) aside to focus more on my opinions at large regarding the mingling of various artistic industries.  Come on in for my thoughts, and the ability to add your own…

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*Creating an easily repeatable watermark

IMG_9435 - 2008-07-04 at 21-55-27

With so many on line communities, forums and storage based solutions for photographers, we tend to share our images with far more people than we may be aware of.  I use flickr and have for years.  I have always kept my shared images on flickr to a maximum of 640 pixels by 640 pixels to minimize any actual usefulness to anyone who may want to steal them.  Now that flickr is seemingly trying to trick us into sharing larger files by giving us more showcase room, I feel uncomfortable putting certain images out there in any sizable way.  I’ve always been very cautious what I’ve put on there, largely because I know it has become the largest illegal stock stealing site the internet has ever seen.  Okay, that may be a bit of projective assumption, but I have had a few images stolen (that I am aware of) and used illegally.  The worst offender was a Nikon and Microsoft sponsored photography contest in the UK where I was alerted that three of my images were being used on the front page a few years back, without even a sniff of permission.  Yeah, a photography contest using stolen images… Anyhoo, c’mon in and I’ll show you how to create a quick action in photoshop where you can easily replicate a watermark with one click…

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