That is nice to see...just wish the world wasn't so sneaky a place where you have to worry about someone stealing your stuff! I agree, it's nice to see higher res shots posted by others. I suppose the other way around it is to use a watermark - but those are a real quandary. Do you use a watermark so small as to be unobtrusive...but then very easily cloned over still allowing your photo to be stolen? Or do you use a huge, hard to remove watermark right across the meat of the photo, which makes your photo much more protected but terrible to look at?
I sort of settled on the smaller but still high quality postings - using 800x600, but I save them as top-quality JPEGs, with minimal compression, and try to keep them as sharp and crisp as possible. It seems to work OK, and anyone interested in paying you for the shots is usually smart enough to assume you've got higher quality and will e-mail an inquiry. It's possible that I've lost sales - that I'll never know about - because they were browsing only for high res photos...but I also know dozens of people who have gone through the nightmare of trying to recover a stolen photo, or worse get back their rights and profits after it's been distributed in another person's name!
I had it happen to me on a very small level - a cruise website I go to has a database of cabin shots, so people going on a particular ship and staying in a cabin can look at photos of that cabin from others who have stayed there. People submit their photos, and they pay you something tiny like $1.50 per shot. It's more just an information database. But when I first heard about the site, and decided to send them all of my cabin shots from my cruises (I cruise often...so I had dozens of shots)...I was quite surprised to find several of my cabin pics already posted there! Fortunately, having the originals with EXIF intact, as well as the series of shots immediately before and after, made it easy to reclaim them as my own (and get paid for them)...but it was just another reminder of the world we live in.
On a side note...I just got hit with a request last night from a small-time book publisher that inquired about purchasing some photos for their upcoming book on Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. That's two in two weeks! Crazy and cool...it isn't generating a living...but a little pocket or spendin' cash on the side doesn't hurt - and it's all helping to pay for my new camera and lenses. I keep dreaming at night that National Geographic is going to contact me with an offer for a permanent freelance contract, at $200,000 per year, all expenses paid, to travel anywhere I want and just send them the photographs. Of course, they might get a little sick of Disney pics every few months!
I sort of settled on the smaller but still high quality postings - using 800x600, but I save them as top-quality JPEGs, with minimal compression, and try to keep them as sharp and crisp as possible. It seems to work OK, and anyone interested in paying you for the shots is usually smart enough to assume you've got higher quality and will e-mail an inquiry. It's possible that I've lost sales - that I'll never know about - because they were browsing only for high res photos...but I also know dozens of people who have gone through the nightmare of trying to recover a stolen photo, or worse get back their rights and profits after it's been distributed in another person's name!
I had it happen to me on a very small level - a cruise website I go to has a database of cabin shots, so people going on a particular ship and staying in a cabin can look at photos of that cabin from others who have stayed there. People submit their photos, and they pay you something tiny like $1.50 per shot. It's more just an information database. But when I first heard about the site, and decided to send them all of my cabin shots from my cruises (I cruise often...so I had dozens of shots)...I was quite surprised to find several of my cabin pics already posted there! Fortunately, having the originals with EXIF intact, as well as the series of shots immediately before and after, made it easy to reclaim them as my own (and get paid for them)...but it was just another reminder of the world we live in.
On a side note...I just got hit with a request last night from a small-time book publisher that inquired about purchasing some photos for their upcoming book on Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. That's two in two weeks! Crazy and cool...it isn't generating a living...but a little pocket or spendin' cash on the side doesn't hurt - and it's all helping to pay for my new camera and lenses. I keep dreaming at night that National Geographic is going to contact me with an offer for a permanent freelance contract, at $200,000 per year, all expenses paid, to travel anywhere I want and just send them the photographs. Of course, they might get a little sick of Disney pics every few months!
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