I am always rather flattered when somebody asks to use my photos in their publication or on their social media etc… I had a request from Mark McG, one of the organisers of Strawberry Fair, to use some of my photos from the famous one-day festival in the Cambridge Edition magazine, very happy for him to do that, with credit. All for a good cause.
The flipside is when you see a photo you took at another event appear on an organisation’s Facebook page where they didn’t ask permission, they didn’t give credit, and worse still they cropped off the logo. Frustrating, irritating, annoying. Doesn’t really matter, you might think, but hey…credit where credit’s due right?
Aside from it being a simple courtesy to credit the photographer, the online or print use without permission may have scuppered the photographer’s chances of selling the photo to another outlet or even just entering it into a photography competition.
So, here are the rules, they apply to all creative output really, words, pictures, music etc:
- All of my photos are my copyright, per se. Nobody needs to assert that, it is a given in law, unless otherwise stated.
- If you wish to use any of my photos, regardless of where I have already posted them myself, I expect a permission request – email me.
- Wherever you use any of my images, I expect a credit – Photo by Dave Bradley, https://sciencebase.com/photos (you can request not to include the web address, but I’d prefer you to use it and to make the whole credit a dofollow link)
- If you wish to crop the photo, please ask, especially if you plan to crop the logo from the image
- If your site/social media is a commercial concern, I expect payment. An invoice will be forthcoming based on prominence and value, if you asked permission, we can discuss the actual fee. However, if there was no permission, the standard fee will be £250 per photo for any site/social media with fewer than 250k readers/subscribers. Above that, we need to talk.
- A bonus tip for editors and social media managers: If you are supplied with a photo of unknown provenance, make sure you find the source and have clearance from the copyright holder before using it.
This post was actually written on 8th May 2019, but I’ve put it back at the beginning of the blog in 1996…