Retro//Reflection - Issue #15
Giving away photos for free !? Are you mad?
Once or twice per month I send out a letter with a handful of (my) photographs and share a bit of insight on the ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. As an enthusiastic photographer, anything goes.
Maybe you learn something?
Or perhaps it will spark some inspiration?
Hear me out.
First of all, I don’t give away all of my photos. Only some, carefully selected ones, I publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
But why?
Simple: it's my way to give a little back to the communities that dedicate their time and effort to write free software, develop games, compose awesome music, write insightful articles or make creative artwork for anyone to enjoy or use.
Especially in this day and age of the AI hype train, where the big tech companies scrape all corners of the internet to generate imagery that lack any kind of (human) soul, I think it is important that people also still have the possibility to use actual photo’s for whatever they are working on.
Am I worried that my photo’s will end up in one of those AI datasets? I’m sure they will, no doubt, but I do try to limit the usefulness of all photos I publish online by keeping the resolution fairly low. It’s very straight forward: if I don’t want my photo’s to be used without my permission, I shouldn’t upload them to the internet (so no personal family photo’s end up online, period).
In case of the Creative Commons licensed photo’s, you’ll have to “buy” them at my Ko-Fi shop for zero Euro1, before you can download a full sized high quality JPEG. Sure, after that there’s no way to protect them from ending up online anyway, so I don’t kid myself thinking they are safe. That’s also not the point, the idea is to share these with everyone.
That said, the creative commons license I use is quite specific:
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes .
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
I’m not sure how well versed AI is in reading and understanding terms of use, but alas.
All photo’s in this issue of Retroreflection are CC-licensed photo’s. Currently I have published a handful of photos with this license, and occasionally I will add to that.
So if you’re reading this and you’re working on something that might benefit a nice, original, one-of-a-kind and real2 photo, have a look at my Ko-Fi page. I would love to see where the images are used, so do let me know :)
That’s it for this post. So, what are your thoughts about all this? Do you share some of your work under a creative commons license? If so, would love to have a look!
Each issue I want to end with mentioning a photographer, a photography-related website or publication, simply to show my appreciation for what they do.
Pixls.us is dedicated “to provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography and cinematography using Free/Open Source Software”. The site is created and maintained by Pat David and Rolf Steinort. They also have a quite lively community forum and because of the Creative Commons theme of this Retroreflection, I thought it would be fitting to mention Pixls.us here!
That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading until the end. Feel free to leave a short comment or message. Appreciate it!
Until next time, cheers,
Ronald
ronaldsmeets.info
ps: this article/newsletter/post is free, because I’m not doing this to make a profit. Also, I don’t like subscriptions at all (Tom Pendergast has a great article about not going paid, which I agree with). However, if you do want to show your support, a coffee always helps me writing and posting here ;-)
To support me you COULD pay whatever you want though ;-)
To be honest: (slightly) edited in common RAW photo editors
Makes sense to me that as photographers and at a certain point and level of proficiency, we tend to amass a fairly large number of photos which would be considered quite good by many standards but perhaps still not the ones we choose to represent ourselves in our portfolios, social media, or commercial catalog. In that case, licensing for free use is not so far fetched. I am interested to find out more on why you chose ko-fi to sell your images rather than a site set up for licensing like Pixabay or Unsplash. I'm also curious how you promote these images or if you are getting organic traffic from ko-fi patrons?
Really like the Light Streaks photograph!