Paul_K Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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bjhurley wrote:
I don't work as a photographer, but when friends invite me to parties they sometimes ask me to bring my camera and take photos. I typically shoot a lot of photos, go home and cull through them, do post-processing on the ones I like, and post my selections in a private album on Flickr for the partygoers to view and download.
But sometimes I get questions from people: "I saw you taking lots of photos but you only posted 20 or 30 pictures. What happened to the rest? I want to see them all!" I explain that I only posted the ones I thought were good enough to share, omitting the ones that were out of focus (I only use manual lenses), embarrassing (people with mouthfuls of food, people looking dejected, people with weird expressions on their faces), badly framed, poorly lit, or simply boring. One guy was so insistent that I posted a second album with my rejects. Even that wasn't all the photos I shot, since I had already deleted the worst ones.
It happened again this weekend. We had a party at our house and I took photos, posted the best, and one person who came asked to see all the photos I had taken of her, since she knew I had shot more than a few but I had only posted the two I liked.
How do professional photographers handle this? Do you post all your photos, no matter how bad, and let clients pick and choose what they want? Or do you do an album of your selections and a second album with every photo you shot? ...Show more →
To begin with, a pro photographer gets paid for the job, and conssequently has some kind of obligation to the person / organisation who hired them
That said, as part of the job, some kind of agreement / contract will have been made up beforehand what to shoot, who to shoot, how to show the proofs, and what those proofs will consist of (all images, or a selection of what the phottographer are the best shots, or the ones he is willing to show)
If you're invited by friends to shoot at their party for free, IMO you only have some kind of, at best sdomewhat ehical, obligation towards them
After all, being a good friend, you, after they asked, promisd to shoot pictures, and as a consequense, again being a good friend, have to show some of the pictures
You however can / could make part of the, even just verbal, agreement, that you will only show a selected - by you, based on the criteria you mention - number of pictures
If someone whose pictures you shot at the party also wants to see the pictures you IMO should refer them to the people whose party it was, and asked you to take pictures, and point out they agreed with you to only show a selection made by you
If they nevertheless insist, it's up to your discretion and resilience if and how many images you are willing to let them see
You after all still are in a position to refuse to show other then the ones selected by you
If they don't agree, they, based on the experiences I had in similar situations, most likely will start to say they didn't give you permission to take pictures of them, and make demands or threats, even legal, based on that
Where I live it's legal to take pictures of people at events open to the public, even if you don't have an official model release. It's however not allowed to use those images commercislly, or publish them with some kind of specific caption like eg 'drunk partygoer' as that would falsely label the perseon depicted
So that, at least where Ive, takes care of any socalled legat threats
If that's not the case where you live, or the person involved simply doesn't want to let go, just go the easy was, and delete the images of the persson involved from your online seletion and perhaps even from your harddisk
After all, why hold on to pictures of someone who behaves so unreasonably?
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