Your thoughts on copyrights and permission to use photos?


Soundaholic

New Member
Jan 28, 2010
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Ha Noi, Vietnam, Vietnam
Hi people :), just wondering what CS people, especially working professionals, think about this.

I'm a student and photography is a hobby, and I don't really intend to make a living out of it in the future. Most of the time I'm ok with people using my photos, for publicity, event coverage or whatever, as long as they as me nicely and give me credits. The other day my friend dragged me along to his first soccer match of the season and asked me if I could take some photos of the match for the team. It was just meant to be pretty casual, and the photos (which I posted on facebook) were just for them to share with their friends and families. To my surprise, I saw a photo I took of the match on *cough* a blog that reports news on inter-school sports tournaments in SG. I was given credits in the photo's caption, but I thought it would have been nicer of them to ask me for the photo first.

Just wondering how you guys would react to something like this?

EDIT: I just realized the post was not by the blog's author but by a "reader". I'm guessing it's by someone from the soccer team
 

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Well, personally, I feel that most people have no qualm about taking other people's photos nowadays. I'm not talking about photographers who respects another photographer's work. It's more the individuals who owns a p&s camera and shares their photos on Facebook and on the WWW. It's normal nowadays to take friends and colleagues photos (without asking) and load them on their own personal FB.

Sometime ago, I went out on an outing with some colleagues and I took pictures here and there...to my surprise, it landed up on their FB. I'm not the sort that would go extremely possessive of my work, so it was fine...it would have been nice to be asked first, but like I said, this is normal nowadays.

After all, to most people, it is just a photo (or photos), so they wonder why we get all hyped up about it.

I do not watermark my photos, but I do resize them so that reproducing them would be out of the question.

It would be nice to be asked first by people who wants to use our pics, but it doesn't always work that way. :( My philosophy is that if you do not want people to 'steal' your pictures, leave them offline. Problem solved.
 

Hi vicyim and all,

What would be a good dimension for resize photos so that reproduction will be impossible? I usually do 900x600, is it ok?
 

600x400 at 72dpi and you are pretty safe
 

i think that putting a watermark is a good way to start. It may not 100% prevent others from using your photos, but it will make them think twice before using your photos. It will also help indentify the photos, so that even if you didn't see it being used, friend who come across it can notify you
 

Hi vicyim and all,

What would be a good dimension for resize photos so that reproduction will be impossible? I usually do 900x600, is it ok?

Its had to say about 'reproduction' because people can still print highly pixellated pics with banding and artifacts and blur and softness and still use it, ordinary people won't know unless consciously told to examine quality, and then, quality might not matter in some cases, just look at how our local tabloid papers publish blurry and highly pixellated handphone pics or low quality pics fished from social media sites.

Plus most infringement are online, so the pics still look good and normal on screen.