I’ve been thinking a lot about the business end of photography these days. I’m in the midst of reading John Harrington’s Best Business Practices for Photographers, a book intended for professional photographers with well-established businesses, but still a good read for those just getting started. It goes into almost painful detail about licensing and rights for all different types of photography, and what and why you should charge. It’s filled with all kinds of real-world scenarios from Harrington’s own business and I’ve gotten so engrossed with it that I’ve found myself still reading it at 2am. But, perhaps I’m just weird that way.

Photo by Thomas Barwick

As luck would have it, I also got to spend a bit of time this morning with one of the local Seattle photographers whose work I’ve been drooling over for the last six months or so. Thomas Barwick’s work really struck me in the November issue of Seattle Magazine. All of his photos in the issue (as well as subsequent issues…) have been beautiful, but the one that really grabbed me was a photo of well worn hands all covered in dark soil holding out a selection of cranberry and string beans… brilliant pinky purple speckled pods hiding a few dappled beans. Simply gorgeous. So, being the goof that I am, I googled to see if he had a portfolio, and popped off a piece of mail asking if he’d indulge me in a little chat over coffee. It took a few months for him to find some time in what sounds like a very nutty schedule, but everything finally fell into place this week, and we chatted for a bit at El Diablo Coffee, in the Queen Anne area of Seattle.
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Most professional photographers out there put some sort of transparent-ish watermark on their images when posting them to the web. It’s one of the few, albeit not necessarily fool-proof, ways to keep your photos from being used without your authorization. For pros, this is important not only to protect the value of the work, but often because the photos are under exclusive use license… it’s bad for both the photographer and their clients if those photos are misused.

With services like Flickr making it so simple to “borrow” images from, unauthorized use is becoming more of a problem. I can name quite a few cases where Flickr photos with All Rights Reserved clearly indicated on the web page were taken and used in magazines or websites without permission. In fact, I just stumbled upon this post with an old image of mine that was used without my permission. As a result of this kind of issue, more and more people are tagging their images with a copyright notice, and sometimes even quite a big one.
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