PhotoLife – Mat Smith Photography

“Can we get the copyright to the photos?”

Let’s say you hire a photographer to capture your wedding.

You are keen to know exactly what you are getting, and you want to ensure that you will get the copyright to the photos at the end. Perhaps you have heard that not all photographers will allow this.

Firstly you must understand that no professional wedding photographer will ever hand over the copyright to your photographs.

Instead, most photographers will provide you with a licence that allows specific things to be done with the photographs; for example they may allow you to keep low resolution copies on a DVD and print them for personal use.

Some photographers still prefer not to release digital versions of images – or to release versions with large watermarks that prevent printing by obscuring a large portion of the image – for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the photographer has a more old fashioned revenue model whereby the majority of profit comes from selling prints, alternatively the photographer may have exacting standards for photographic printing that most consumer print services do not allow for.

It is arguable that this practice is changing, and photographers are charging more and more for the photography time rather than prints of the images that are received at the end. In this sense, wedding photography has become more similar to corporate and commercial photography.

However it is also arguable that a photographer operating nearer the higher end of the market wants to maintain full artistic control and will therefore not allow for a situation where couples can make their own prints.

“So we’re not Victoria and David Beckham”

Either way, a professional photographer will always retain the copyright – except in extremely rare circumstances.

Of course, it is technically possible for a photographer to hand over the copyright, however this would allow you to sell the photographs for a large sum of money to an agency. Or worse still, put those photographs on Facebook; did you realise that a third party could legally sell those photos onto an agency without your knowledge?

You may be thinking “we aren’t exactly Angelina and Brad”, but if you think photos of your wedding might not be worth that much, think again. What if the photographer even so much as happens to snap an object quickly from the perfect angle with the perfect light, and there is a company out there who require that exact image for marketing purposes? A professional photographer is defined as someone who makes his/her money from taking photographs, and it therefore denies them the ability to continue making a living when other people get revenue from their works. That’s why pros don’t do it.

“But wait, these are photos of me!”

Secondly it helps to understand the word copyright and how this differs from intellectual property, licence, and goods.

Copyright doesn’t just mean the right to copy a photograph. The word copyright covers a whole host of things by inference: the right to email, publish online, upload to Facebook, sell, print the photograph out, even the right to crop a photograph!

The goods are the photographs themselves, in whatever form they happen to be; this could be on disc, as a download on the photographer’s website, in print, in a book.

Intellectual property (IP) is a term that describes the original idea of the work, and because it is unusual for a wedding photography idea to be capitalised on, this is something that is rarely discussed; IP is rarely transferred from one person to another in wedding photography. However it is still worth talking about, because it ties-in with copyright: the IP of a photograph is always owned by the photographer. This means that even if a photograph doesn’t have a copyright notice on it, even if it has already been posted online, even if the IP is not protected in any other way (e.g. trademark), the IP by default belongs to the photographer. Even if the photograph is of someone famous, even it was taken by a freelance photographer and sold on to a newspaper, the IP belongs to the person who produced that image, the photographer. As long as there is no explicit transfer of copyright, the copyright will also remain with the photographer, even if a copyright notice is not written anywhere.

“So what does this mean?”

1. If your wedding is shot by a professional photographer, intellectual property and copyright almost always remain with the photographer.
2. When choosing a wedding photographer, ask what licence to the images they offer. Please respect those photographers who offer no licence at all, as this will be built into their revenue model and they will most likely charge a lot less for your wedding photography.
3. Many photographers will assign a licence to the wedding couple that allows them to keep photo files on DVD and print for personal use. A licence needn’t be worded in legalese. A licence can be implicit upon an action: this means that if the photographer gives you a DVD with full size images, then you arguably have the licence to keep this DVD.
4. A licence is usually specific. Assume that you are not allowed to do anything other than what is written or communicated to you in this licence. Therefore if you are given a licence to store images on DVD, disc, and print for personal use, this means you may not edit, crop, or change those photographs in any way. This would count as transforming or adapting the work. Furthermore you may not email photos or upload photos to Facebook, as this would count as publishing or distribution.
5. Some photographers may provide a mechanism to allow for common modern usage. For example, they may provide a heavily watermarked version of the photographs for sharing with guests by email, and uploading to Facebook. Ask your photographer.

Mat Smith is a commercial, portrait, and wedding photographer based in London, UK. The above does not constitute legal advice. Always consult a member of the legal profession. Visit Mat’s portfolio here: www.matsmithphotography.com

Within the last week Adobe has released a second beta of their photographer’s digital darkroom tool Lightroom.

Here’s one of my favourite new features of this release:

Tethered Shooting

Tethered shooting is the instantaneous, automatic transfer of image files from the camera to the computer when a photograph is taken. This happens either via a direct (e.g. USB) connection from camera to computer, or using a wireless file transfer function provided by the camera.

The process allows the studio photographer to immediately assess an image on their computer using advanced controls in digital darkroom software, and is commonplace in a big budget studio shoot because it allows an art director or client to see exactly what they are getting at the time. Tethered shooting also speeds up the photographer’s workflow, removing the need to replace full memory cards during a shoot and having to transfer images in bulk after the shoot.

Tethered shooting to Lightroom has been possible for a while, however the new native support within Lightroom will simplify the workflow for studio photographers, and provide a number of benefits:

• No need to install or run camera’s own software in the background (e.g. Canon EOS Utility)
• No need to match import settings in camera software and Lightroom: reduces points of failure
• Control the tethered shoot from one piece of software rather than two
• View camera settings and operate shutter release within Lightroom
• No need for a watch folder. Automatically import images according to your existing folder and file naming convention
• Automatically add photographs to a Lightroom collection
• Automatically apply develop settings: very useful if you have 15 minutes spare before the client turns up to create a custom develop setting for the specific lighting setup. Note: you can swap develop settings mid-session on the tethered shoot control bar
• Apply any metadata to the image files on a per-session basis

How to set up. Previously, the method for tethered shooting depended on your combination of camera and camera software. Thanks to the native support in the upcoming release of Lightroom 3, tethered shooting will work with pretty much any camera straight off the bat. And it needs no instruction other than to say: Ctrl-Shift-T (Win) or Cmd-Shift-T (Mac) > enter your session name > start shooting.

The above keyboard shortcut is equivalent to selecting the menu File > Tethered Capture.

I have tested tethered shooting in the recently released Lightroom 3 beta 2, and it works like a dream. It’s super fast with my Canon 5D Mark II shooting RAW images on full resolution (average file size = 22MB), even on a relatively slow laptop.

Each time you start a tethered shoot, you can set the name of the session and select automatic metadata settings from the metadata preset library.

Here’s what tethered capture doesn’t do right now:

• Doesn’t support all cameras yet: only newer digital cameras
• There are reports that the 64bit version of Windows XP is not supported, however these have not been confirmed
• Tethered shooting will not support any live view function your camera may have

So the wedding plans for Tom and Emily’s wedding are taking shape and I can’t wait for the big day in a couple of weeks. Guests will be asked to have their portraits taken (classic low depth of field 85mm on white), carrying on the theme of Tom and Em’s engagement shots so far. Kind of like photo booth meets studio portraits. Naturally, it will be towards the end of the evening, when guests are at their most animated! There may even be the option for guests to actuate the shutter themselves. Fun!

This blog post features a selection of photographs from last week’s shoot with the founders and select staff at Melcrum publishing.

The term corporate headshots leaves me a little cold; I prefer to think of them as a series of mini quick-fire interviews and I like to make them last for up to 15 minutes each, depending on how quickly we get the shots. In most cases it only takes 5-10 minutes.

As always, the kit used for a photo shoot often determines the style of the photographs that come out, and in some cases where I want the diaglogue to be snappy, I prefer to go as natural as possible and use a single off-camera flash with a shoot-through umbrella.

During such photo shoots, I sometimes like to engage the sitter in a fast-paced conversation about the exact details of the work they do on a day-to-day basis. I love getting little slices of people’s lives.

In smaller business commissions, it’s often the case that there is not enough room – or time – to use your own backdrop or set up studio lighting.

As soon as I arrive, I look around for a space where the reflected light will be as white as possible, and assess the usability of a wall for a backdrop. Sometimes the backdrop may be too reflective, but in the case of most white walls it’s possible to manage the reflections.

The plus side of this limitation is that you are without the constraints of seating, free to allow the subject to stand and make conversation whilst snapping.

I like to inform the subject that the best photos come just when you are about to laugh or when you are about to sound-off about a colleague I have never met, and so I keep chatting from behind the lens. If this makes the subject a little self-conscious, that’s great, because I can then poke fun where appropriate, which in turn gets a laugh.

Without posing the subject too much, I will experiment with a variety of facial expressions. It’s usually towards the end of the 10 minute slot that the subject feels relaxed enough to look good for the perfect headshot.

The photographer must keep moving the light stand around, however. And this makes post-production that little bit more difficult, as the light varies so much between shots, and people’s skin reflects light differently.