Powered By Blogger

26 March 2014

The way things are.

Like millions of other people, the world over, we are very much into photography, more particularly, wildlife photography. 

We love nothing more than to get out and about in the fresh air of Britain's beautiful countryside with the principle purpose of tracking down and photographing whatever birds, mammals, insects, plants, fungi and so on as may be evident in whichever area of the country we find ourselves, including our own little urban garden.

Photography, in and of itself, can be an extremely expensive hobby, particularly when your chosen genre requires the use of long and relatively fast lenses. Indeed our equipment bill over the past decade or so runs into many thousands of pounds, add to that the costs associated with travel across the country, hotels and all manner of other expenses and it becomes., well, expensive :-)

In addition to the inherent financial  costs associated with this most enjoyable activity, there is a not inconsiderable, investment made by us personally in terms of time, effort, discomfiture and so on. Not to put too fine a point on it but we go out in all weathers from 30deg C of heat to snow blizzards, rain, hail, wind and any other weather phenomena you can reasonably imagine it is possible to shoot in.

We have sat in areas of deer pee, very smelly, for hours on end, cataloguing the activities of red and fallow deer. We've sat in freezing cold hides with a howling gale threatening to tear the roof off. We've photographed Gannet and other seabirds atop a 90 metre cliff top in wind and rain so hard i had to switch VR on on my lens to shoot a landscape whilst using a tripod - difficult, and scary.

To summarise - our photography, such as it is, is expensive in terms of time, money and effort. 

We show a small proportion of our material on flickr, 500px, and twitter as well as on our own blogs and personal website.

We are happy for people to like or dislike our material according to their own tastes. We let several organisations use our copyright material freely within reasonable and agreed limits for publicity and so on, we never ever ask for contributions, financial or otherwise.

Given what I have outlined above I do not think it is too much to ask for people to respect our copyright particularly on twitter. 

Retweet our material to your hearts content, favourite if you like it that much - we're fine with that. 

Download it, and re-upload with no credit to us as the owners of copyright, making pretence that it is either your own work or something you just found lying around is not acceptable.

To do that shows zero respect for us, or our efforts, in photographing our little part of the world.

We have a small group of twitter followers whom I find to be interesting, and informative. None of these good people have ever been so rude as to act in the above suggested fashion, and we thank you for it.

Tweets are now protected and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

The internet is not a free catalogue of materials, despite what some people believe.