pet peeve

Art takes a lot of time and effort (blood, sweat, and tears.. literally). Juggling a photography profession as well as school is hard work. The time spent in the lab trying to process photos is exhausting. I had a taste of working with large format and I can already tell it's going to be a very long process.

Digital photography, while serving as a convenience so I won't have to spend hours in a darkroom, is still equally exhausting. Using digital, you're bound to take hundreds of photos in a few hours. Post-processing takes hours. First you have to go through a delete the bad photos. Out of about 1000 photos, there are usually about 300 good ones. Then, you go through and edit each one which can take a long while. Afterwards, I watermark each one.

Juggling school, work, and other things, getting digital photos done can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. It's so satisfying to finally see a finished batch of photos.

Now, what ticks me off is when people decide to use these photos and cut off my watermark. To them, it's just a small text in the corner of the photo. To me, that's time and effort I spent carefully trying to make everything look good, and to them, it's just a silly text that they could care less about.

All I hear from these people is, "Hey, did you finish those photos? I want to put them up to promote my band." How about promoting my photography and not just your band? Do I ever get a thanks? No.

Well, you know what? I'm a poor starving artist. I take these photos free of charge to get some kind of accreditation and you rob me of even that?

This is why I fail to ever take such people as clients. They continue to ask me for their event photos, and since my credit hasn't been given for the previous two events, I don't see why I have to continue working on their photos. They are deep within my hard drive and will stay there, untouched, until I get my proper thanks and credit.

Please, support your artists, especially if you use their art.