03/02/2017
IMPORTANT: It didn’t take long after my daughter was first crowned, that I began being asked to take photographs of other royalty by their parents. So instead of trying to remember who had asked me I decided to take photographs of all the royalty at different events & shared them in an album at first on the Carnival page and more recently on my own page instead. Each photo would be edited (cropped & brightened – basic stuff) before uploading, so that parents could then make albums of their child’s reign as mementos. More recently I discovered that facebook resizes all images that are uploaded to make them smaller – so it saves space & memory. Unfortunately this means that any photo that is downloaded from facebook, when enlarged looks grainy & of poor quality. I therefore decided to upload the photo’s onto photobox so that parents can order directly from the company which photo’s they would like out of what ever album. Each album can be protected with a password too so that none else except people I share the album with (email addresses are required for this) can access the photo’s; therefore keeping the images secure. The cost of a 5x7 inch print varies from 12p to 30p each depending on how many prints are being done & what finishes are selected.
However in the last 12 months or so certain individuals have been using my photo’s & claiming, quite openly, that they are photo’s that they themselves have taken. Even when I have contacted them saying that a photo is actually one of mine, they have argued back; & once I have proved it is one of my own they have not apologised. Unless you have spent 30mins on every photo that you have taken in a batch of over 200 photo’s (hours upon hours of work), you can only imagine how upsetting, irateing & disrespectful this is. More upsetting is that it is a trend that appears to be spreading. Therefore I made myself a New Years Resolution, that I would have more pride in the shots that I take, the time & effort I also put into it afterwards to produce the photographic images which get put into each album. As a result every photo, in an album, that I take will run through a programme that will put a visible watermark upon each image. The only way to get a photograph without a watermark will be to order & pay for it through photobox – NO EXCEPTIONS (so please don’t ask). This is not a decision that has come easily for me, but I have to start valuing myself somewhere, and this seemed as good a place to start; but please note that I will not be making any money from this venture at all, just the same as before. I hope you can all understand, or at least respect, this decision.
