Just saw a twitter (ahem, a tweet..) from Jim Goldstein asking what folks are shooting on this spring weekend. My immediate plan is to get out and photograph some of the “impossibly green” California grassland and some spring wildflowers this weekend – but also to prepare for an upcoming visit to Death Valley.
What are you shooting this weekend and beyond?
Today’s photograph (the earlier one of Alcatraz in lovely morning light) was made at the tremendously popular parking lot, I mean viewpoint at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. On fairly normal days, especially in the afternoon, it can be so crowded there that you simply cannot find a parking space.
On this morning, with this astonishing light, there was only one other person there when I arrived. A couple more showed up as I hung around and made photographs. That was it.
The Photo Attorney web site has a post on the subject of “rights grabs” associated with photography contests. (See “Photo Contests Here and Abroad Grab Rights“) This is a subject that has concerned me for some time, and about which I and many others have written from time to time.
The basic problem is this. In many of these contests (in most of them from what I’ve seen) the photographer who submits a photograph to the contest surrenders considerable rights to his/her work . Note that the loss of rights typically occurs whether or not the photographer’s work ‘wins’ the contest! In quite a few cases the language in the contest agreement gives full, unlimited rights for any imaginable use of the photographers submitted work without any compensation, control, or (in quite a few cases) credit to the company sponsoring the contest, the marketing firm(s) supervising the contest, and even to other businesses that they cooperate with.
This applies to every photograph submitted by every participating photographer – not just the winners. (Even if these onerous terms only applied to “winners,” one would wonder who actually “wins” in a situation where a whole team of corporate interests acquire free rights to the “winning” photographer’s work.)
No, I’m not making this up.
It is not without reason that many refer to these things as “intellectual property rights grabs” rather than as photography contests.
This is not to say that there are no legitimate photography contests. It seems reasonable that the work of contest winners would be displayed in some limited (as to time, medium, and so forth) manner directly associated with the contest itself – that would be mutually beneficial to the winning contestants and to those putting on the contest. But photographers who believe that their work has value should be very cautious about such contests, and they should read contest terms very carefully before submitting their work.
Tomorrow morning I plan to be at Muir Woods very early to follow up on some of the photography I did there last weekend. After that I may make a brief visit to San Francisco to see my son, or I may shoot some coastal stuff near Muir Woods. Sometime in the mid-afternoon I’ll head over to Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo for a round of night photography with the folks from The Nocturnes.
All in all, a great opportunity to explore the capabilities of the new camera body.