My post about Montreal’s stealth police cars prompted an article in the National Post in Wednesday’s paper (an article written by a former colleague of mine at the hippie university paper).
I mention this in its separate post not just because of the fact that the article quotes me and the Post used one of my photos on Page 3, but … uhh … [insert better reason here later].
They used this photo (though heavily cropped on the sides – I’d be outraged, but I’ve done it enough times as an editor):
Of course, I took this photo not thinking that a national newspaper would want to use it. I spent little effort composing the shot, took it at a low resolution (the lowest my camera goes is 1728 x 1152, fortunately that was enough to make it printable) and didn’t bother getting names or other information.
On the flip side, it’s something that happened randomly as I was out shopping. If it wasn’t for the fact that I almost always have my camera with me, I’d have never gotten the shot. Instead, I stopped, pulled the camera out of my backpack, and took a few shots before continuing on my way.
Let that be a lesson to you freelance photographers and bloggers out there: always have your camera ready, and don’t assume you know how a photo might be used later.
Being a camera man I’m accustomed to having my image butchered and re-framed, flipped & cropped by editors. They also fixed my images if I’ve made a boo boo.
But that’s how it goes.
Spacing montreal took my photo and used it with credit, but no asking permission beforehand or anything decent or civil or anything like that. Welcome to the modern world, where property theft is normal behaviour.
DUDE! Why, why would you have you camera to the lowest resolution possible at any time? The camera is your hunting weapon. Carry your optimized weapon at all time. You can fillet your game all you want later at home.
Congrats on getting published Mr. Faguy.
A lot of the pictures I take are blurry or grainy enough that taking high resolution is just a waste of hard drive space. It’s very rare that I’ll take a picture for later printing, and in those cases I switch to higher resolution. “Low” resolution is still more than enough for the blog, and even small 4×6 prints.
Carry your dSLR with you at all times, and hopefully reap enough profits to pay the chiropractor down the road…
But: congrats!
hey congrats on the nod in the national post! that is very cool :)
will you be mentioning anything about the upcoming copyright roundtable meeting in montreal? (http://copyright.econsultation.ca/) a previous poster calling your credited work “stolen property” made me think of it. a montreal filmmaker even had a great influence on popular opinion with his recently released doc “RiP: a Remix Manifesto” (nfb.ca/rip – available online, free, to subvert the notion of intellectual ‘property’)
ahhh sorry for the tirade. congrats again. also, i like your blog a lot.
My son the celebrity. Now he’s in two papers.