Recently, a friend of mine sent me this link:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/446278644299056070/

On a closer inspection as you can see here:

An example of copyright infringement

In this case a person named Deborah Radican, pulled a copy of one of my best images, “Foggy Morning View, on the Buffalo River”, from a site called indulgy.com.  There is no mention of me, or my work and the fact that this particular image is offered for sale on my website.

It seems now to be the normal process when someone sees a photograph on a website, even if the site is copyright protected, just to go ahead and screen print the shot, and post it on their site, be it Facebook, Pintrest, or God Forbid, Twitter.  The world has become a “whats in it for me now” type society and there is no longer any respect for the person or persons working.  The fact that this particular photograph was very special to me, and took a lot of time to get right, is just cast aside.  What concerns me even more, the fact that on indulgy.com, the image is shown with my name cropped out.  This means that someone actually took the time to copy the shot, and then crop out my name thus not giving me any credit.

If you want to take my work and copy it to your site, at least ask me, as all I want is credit for the work.  In this case, a photograph that has sold across Arkansas, and has been hung in both Hospitals, Business Offices and homes, now has become just totally trashed on the web.  The image is poorly shown, and the color is off.  If someone decided to take my photograph, and then work on it, well, that is beyond me.  If you want to do that, then hike up there yourself, wait for 4 hours till the sun gets just to the right spot, then shoot it.

This has forced me to so something I have not wanted to do, add a visible copyright to all my work.  This mars the shot on the web and takes away from the image, however there really is not other recourse since I have found so many of my shots just haphazardly pasted on other website.  I just it’s just a sign of the times and points to just how much damage the iPhone has done to photography overall.

New version of Foggy Morning View with Copyrighting