A Note About Copyright

I wanted to take a few minutes to clear up some confusion about copyright and how it pertains to my photography business. When the shutter is released, the photographer who pressed the button owns the copyright to the image.When you have purchased a digital image, you have print rights to that image. However,  I still own the copyright to the image. Below are some simple lists that I've put together that I hope will answer some of your questions. Please feel free to come to me if you have any concerns about copyright and your rights as a client.

It is okay to

• Tag yourself or family in photos that I post on my social media sites and/or share the post with your friends and family.
• Use photos that I post on social media sites as your profile picture without altering it or cropping my watermark out.
• Print or reproduce an image that you have purchased from me in digital format.
• Let me know that you'd like a low resolution file for social media, emailing, etc. I'm glad to send you up to 5 watermarked low resolution files for use online. If there is a file that you'd like to use on your Facebook/Twitter/Blog site, please just let me know.

It is not okay to

• Print or save a file that I post on the blog or social media site.
• Scan a print that you've purchased from me. (Again, if you want to use an image on social media sites or for e-mailing, I'm happy to provide up to 5 low resolution watermarked files)
• Edit or alter an image in any way.
• Screen print a shot from your gallery and print/copy/save/reproduce it.
• Take a picture with your camera or cell phone of an image print/copy/save/reproduce it.
• Sell an image that you have purchased to another party.

I understand the reasoning behind some of this may be confusing. However, it is important to me that all images that are placed online are directly from me. When you scan or take a cell phone picture of an image that I have created, it changes the quality of the image and is not the best representation of my work.

The same holds true when someone tries to print an image that I've put online. When I upload photos to Facebook, Twitter or my blog, they are low resolution images (72 dpi). To have a clean, crisp printed image, you need to have a high resolution file (at least 300 dpi). This is why when photos are printed from the web, they look pixelated. Again, quality is important to me and pixelated, washed-out images are not an accurate representation of my work.

I appreciate your understanding. I love you all sharing my images online and I'm so thrilled that you want to show them to friends and family. I do ask that you please come to me if you'd like to do so, so that I can control the quality of the images.