“I was furious that my reputation, and that of the three other photographers, was apparently being used to sucker in amateur photographers to spend the summer filling the hard drives of a new National Trust picture library – all of which the Trust would be able to reuse and resell to generate profits.”
– Simon Norfolk
via EPUK
by A Photo Editor on May 20, 2009 · 5 comments
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A Photo Editor (APE) is edited by Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men's Journal and Outside Magazine. Contributors include fine art photographer Jonathan Blaustein (@jblauphoto) and Creative Director Heidi Volpe.
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I totally get how Simon feels, but come to Africa, specifically South Africa, they do this all the time.
http://www.photoattorney.com/ is a pretty good resource for all the competition rights-grabs. Just subscribe to the feed and you can keep and eye out.
In general, photographers should just assume that by submitting photos to any sort of contest they are giving up the rights, and then work to find the small print that (hopefully) says otherwise.
Those contests are all guilty until proven innocent.
This is doubly outrageous because of the greed that the National Trust is exhibiting regarding access to the land and buildings they control. It really is quite egregious behaviour which must eventually rebound on their good name. The NT controls many miles of the English coastline, yet they are attempting to prevent any photographer from exploiting this, even to the extent of non-commercial postings such as Flickr.
Another photographer I know was recently quoted a location fee of £1000 for shooting a non-identifiable little bit of wilderness. But as a rider the NT added that his images would ‘of course’ be added to their image library!
Its time for a letter writing campaign I think. The old fashioned paper variety, if their bags fill up with enough of them they may start to take notice. I’m guessing that whoever runs this side of their business is fogeyish enough to be more impressed by a heavy postbag than a full inbox.
Just when it seemed that micro-stock is the lowest point of for the business…
Fact is, most people own a camera nowadays. Even if it in their phone. The likelihood of someone having a memorable moment captured privately is fairly high now.
Props to Simon for a principled stand.