Reply To: Lesson 12 Portfolios

#24333
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

If there is one thing I would recommend sort of at a higher level, it’s don’t be afraid to share your works with the internet at high resolution with no watermarks or anything.

You can take two stances with the internet and photography. One is to lock everything down, put watermarks on everything and hope people won’t steal your work. The other is to be open post high resolution images and be grateful that people think your work is good enough to steal.

The people who are going to steal your photos will steal them no matter what you do, it’s the people who need images and are willing to pay to license them that are the ones who benefit from sharing your works.

I get several emails every week from people wanting to license my images because they saw them on flickr or wherever.

I even go so far as to use creative commons non commercial licenses on my images.

This is a personal decision but I can tell you from experience that the internet likes openness and transparency!

Also, the internet is infinite so you can backfill your website with photographs that may or may never been seen by a human. Meaning add galleries deep in your website that aren’t totally up front and obvious in the main navigation but will get crawled by the googlebot.

Take a look at this to see what I mean, these are some of my photographs being indexed by google.

Anyway just a thought.