Yakshagana by Diji (www.dijisworld.com)

As you have seen in this article on copyright infringement, I decided to implement watermarking of all my images which are larger than 500 pixels. I felt the watermarking is justified to solve similar copyright infringement in future. Friend of mine Dijiraj has experienced a bizarre twist on this scenario. A few days ago he was visiting the Chitra Santhe at Bangalore and came across a stand of paintings, being sold as original work of art. The only problem was that the painter had made “faithful” (but unattributed) reproduction in paint of Diji’s photographic image which is shown above. If you have a facebook account you can check the photo of the painting taken at Chitrasanthe by Smrithi Kangovi here. Now image resolution or a watermark wouldn’t make much difference here, a painter could nick a photo at screen resolution. The painter had “stolen” friend’s intellectual property and made it his own by interpreting it in paint. The law apparently sees no problem with this.

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.
- Patrick Leahy

By definition a written quote is attributed and hence a context. If it’s not attributed then it’s just theft. Whereas a copied photograph from the net rarely, if ever, attributed properly. We obviously haven’t the time, or the capability, to study all the works of art in the world to check whether this is in fact true so a percentage of people will get away with making rip-offs without being caught.

Philosophically, originality is linked to free will. If we are all beavering away in our own corners, minding our own business, creating for ourselves, then anything we haven’t done personally before, is original. And then there is no reason not to do something that someone else has already done. If however, we are all in it together, then originality is defined with respect to the community. And then, it is up to the individual to be fully aware of what everyone else has ever done.

I fully accept that the theft of images from the net does take place. However there is always the risk that whenever you put your images out there that they might be stolen. Does this mean that we should never show our images on the net or in print? No, of course it doesn’t! What’s the point in making images if we don’t share them? Life is full of risks and this is just one of them. One just needs to take the precautions one sees fit – as long as they fall short of paranoia!

For me, My photograph’s purpose should be (amongst other things!) to uplift, inspire, evoke and enlighten – not simply to make money. Though I do need to pay that bill… So I prefer to have my images without watermarks. So what do you think? Should I keep them or remove them? I want your opinion in this regards before I take a decision regarding watermark.

Watermark

I was shocked to see that one of my photograph was displayed as a hoarding at the entrance of an exhibition, without my permission. As this was copyrighted image and the person(s) who were exhibiting this did not take any permission whatsoever from me and have displayed it without even informing me. The photo was obviously taken from my web page as I had not distributed the original elsewhere. They had cleverly cropped out my copyright info at the bottom left corner. Blown it up using software and then printed on a 15×20 feet sized large format print.

I was able to find out the copyright violators and asked them to comply to my term of copyright or face legal actions. They realized their mistake and readily agreed to my terms. So the whole matter was settled amicably. But the question that remains at large is that my pictures are source of attraction for others to steal. What should I do to safeguard them? I was thinking of several solutions which are possible.

Let us examine different methods to prevent such copyright infringement of photographs which are published on the website like this one.

• Reduce size of images I can show only preview of my images which are 500 pixel in size which can be easily copied but since it is so small it will be useless for anything but a preview.
• Reduce quality of images This will result in ugly preview of my images. Reducing quality of images is not a good idea. Why put ugly photos on photography site which will show me in a bad light.
• Use javascript to disable right click and save Not fool proof. It will not stop web page saving and making screen shots. Does not work on the Mac OS. But it is a smart way of telling people the images are copyrighted.
• Adding a transparent gif over the top of your image in a web page. This is what Flickr does. You can show original images. Gives the wrong image when saving by right mouse click. But does not stop screen capture programs and saving web page.
• Adding visible watermarks to images Big non transparent watermarks do not allow restore original images. But small watermark can be easily cropped out . Transparent watermark can be repainted or cloned out (but the work is very difficult). Often people do not care who owns the image. This is the most popular way to protect images. Use several big transparent watermarks for improving protection quality. The image will look uglier than the pristine original.
• Digital watermarking adding invisible watermarks Hidden, so thief will not know it is there. You can prove your copyright. But since it is hidden, how do people know it is copyrighted? Finding stolen pictures is dependent on the thief actually posting the image online AND getting that page indexed at the search engines. Newer services like TinEye help to find such stolen pictures without having to resort to digital watermarking
• Making images into Flash or Shockwave objects No right click, no drag and drop, no web-page saving. But it does not protect against screen capture. Flash is not universally accepted format and is a time consuming way.
• Making pictures Java Applets
  You can show original image or part of your image as you want. No right click, no drag and drop, no print, no web-page saving. But does not stop screen capture programs. Mobile devices may not show image. Java is not as good as it could be. It also slows the web page rendering somewhat.
• Last but the best one is not to show your images at all Nothing lost or gained

I usually downsize my image to maximum of 1200 pixel at 100 dpi. I found that even using simple image viewing software like irfanview or FastStoneViewer this JPEG file can be blown up easily to 5 times its original size without drastic change in quality. Modern algorithms of resizing make this easy. If you use dedicated softwares which can enlarge photos like onOne Genuine fractals 6 or Alien Skin Blowup 2 you can get very large format picture with fantastic quality.

Till now I was publishing such photos without watermark. I felt that my pictures need to be enjoyed without the blemish of ugly watermark in the background. From now on I’ll be putting watermark at the center of the picture so as to prevent people from stealing my work without crediting me. I know this will look ugly, but leaves me with no choice. If you notice all my photos in the blog have gained watermark by now. I will be using watermark only in the larger version and smaller version will still be watermark free.

Happy New Year 2010

2009 was especially a great year for me and for my blog Krishna Mohan Photography. Blog visitors for this website went up by so many folds during the year that I had to change the server midway through the year to cope up with the traffic. All thanks goes to you who are my readers, friends and guides. It is you, who have encouraged me to blog and post almost twice a week. I have clocked century as this is the100th blog post of 2009 which itself is a record of sort for a lazy person like me. This year marks another milestone as my blog was featured in Alltop Photography page.

On the photography front I got my first full frame DSLR camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II at the beginning of 2009. I also acquired some of best lens I was dreaming of buying. Both these made a vast difference to the quality of pictures. The results speaks for themselves. Even though the gears themselves do not produce good photos, they help creating better photos . Encouragement I received through your comments and mail is the one which kept me getting these photos and writing these blogs. Let us hope 2010 brings more such fun and joy for all of us.

I thank all of you for the great support given to me till now. Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2010.

Good news friends. My photo blog Krishna Mohan Photography has been added to the Alltop photography collection! That’s pretty cool.

It is so great to be recognized as one of the top photography blogs! Traffic to my site has been increasing very rapidly. I have moved recently to bigger server to accommodate the increased loads. Thanks to everyone for supporting and for passing the word along to your photography friends.

If, like me, you’re a junkie for news on what’s going on in the world of photography, I highly recommend you check out Alltop.com and specifically their Photography section.

Alltop aggregates the latest feed updates from a wide variety of photography blogs all onto one central site. This allows you to quickly browse through and investigate the blog entry headlines that catch your interest.

For those of you who don’t know anything about Alltop, here’s a quote from their about page:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.

Thanks Alltop!

As you might have noticed I changed my Logo. Here is the old Logo which I had used a script font Zapfino Forte LT Pro.

Old Logo

I some how felt it did not flow well with rest of the web site. So I used the new design using Gabriola which is a new font used in RC version of Windows 7. It is a beautiful font designed by John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks. For the word photography I used Report font.

How do you find the new Logo?