Quote:
Originally Posted by 1980dude
First time i have posted up on here so hi to you all 
I am wondering if any of you have sold pieces of your work before?
I may have a job on with a band taking various photgraphs of them performing and also taking some portrate shots. If they are interested in my work and want to purchase the pieces how much could i charge for them? They are not a massive band but they are known. Some of the pictures will be placed onto there web site.
Also i wanted to enquire about copyright. I have placed my name and copyright stamp with the year onto the photo but is that enough to claim it to be copyrighted?
I have read through different web sites about copyright but never really understood it. Is there a way of imbedding a copyright onto the photograph? as if its just my name on there, they could just photoshop it out.
Any help/advice is much apprecaited. |
The starting point is by establishing a contract of sorts with the band. This should outline
- The scope of the photographic work (live shots, posed shots, candid etc.)
- The agreed rate per hour/half-day/day/project length (if applicable) for your time
- The agreed fee per shot per type of use e.g. print, web, commercial etc.
- The explicit details of what they cannot use the shots for e.g. CD covers, tour posters WITHOUT asking for prior permission and payment of appropriate fee*
- The method in which the photographs will be delivered to them (jpg's, prints etc.)
- The fee chargeable for replacement media if loss/damage occurs on their part
- Explicit details that all copyright and moral rights to the photographs remain with you
Now it's up to you what you want to cherry-pick from the above but I would say that items 4 and 7 are the bare minimum to lay out to them, even if you're doing the work pro bono.
Example: you agree that, in return for being credited as the photographer (your moral right) the band can use select shots that you have taken on their website. A few months down the line, you discover that the band are using the same shots on their CD cover and tour merchandise such as t-shirs, all of which they're selling for a profit. They'd be making money off your work and, if you didn't stipulate that they could only use the shots for their website, you'd have a tough time getting compensated - if at all - for their infringement of your copyright.
That dovetails nicely onto the matter of copyright and image licensing
Here in the UK, a photographer automatically has copyright on any image that they have taken. That copyright lasts for 70 years after the year of their death. Wikipedia has an excellent article on UK copyright law which can be found
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Kingdom - and will thus save me from trying to condense the article into something bite-sized for the forums
Now since you own the copyright to your photographs, you effectively control who gets to use them and how. The most common way that this is done is by licensing your images, and there is a heirarchy of criteria that you can set out which restricts the license you grant a person or company.
1. Territorial scope: terms such as UK only, EU only etc. are self-explanitory
2. Usage scope: print, web, electronic document etc.
3. Usage type: this is usually either editorial (to run with/along a news article) or commercial (to promote a product or service)*
4. Usage duration (editorial): single serial (one editon) or a specified length of time, either in terms of issues or days/weeks/months from first use
5. Third party rights: whether or not you will permit syndication of the image i.e. permitting the person/company to sell on your image on your behalf
You can tag as many clauses as you like - but you can keep it simple too. Here's an example of the clauses I would tag to a UK national newspaper
"Single serial editorial use, print only, UK only - all other rights reserved"
This somewhat leads to the matter of protecting your images and ensuring that copyright information travels with them.
If you are providing proof images in any format, I would strongly suggest using a visible watermark of some description on the image itself - an example would be as follows:
The copyright symbol and the text that sits above it are saved as an action script that I can run on a per-image basis in Photoshop. If you don't know how to create a photoshop action, just do a google search for
'photograph copyright photoshop action' and you can pick and try the freely available ones.
There's another tool that you can use within photoshop. If you have an image open, navigate to File > File Info and a dialog box will appear. You can now add in specific information to your image but, even better, you can create and save master templates that can be applied to images individually (via Photoshop) or in groups (via Adobe Bridge).
The information you add here stays embedded within the file and, although it can be stripped out of the file by a knowledgeable user, it pays to add in this info when delivering images to clients on CD or DVD-ROM, where the original file cannot be edited.
Hope that some of this helps and, if you have more specific questions, I'll do my best to address them too.