News, Music Copyright Issues and other random stuff.
Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned...it's been almost 4 weeks since my last post. We've been working like crazy for the past eight weeks on a marathon of Spring weddings. It's been a blast, but between emails, meetings, engagement sessions, bridal sessions, editing images, designing albums, lab and shipping runs and, oh yeah, shooting awesome weddings with amazing couples, there's just been no time to blog. We've got a two-week break until our next wedding, so I'm going to try really hard to catch up. To do that, I'm going limit my posts to a brief description of the wedding or engagement session and 3-5 (ouch!) of my favorite images. It's going to be tough, since generally speaking, I am a loud-mouth and don't really know when to shut up. But I'm going to try!
We've been working with ASCAP (the American Society of Composers and Performers) for a while now to renew the license (a fancy term for an agreement) that lets us use copyrighted music on our slide shows. Just like a photograph, a song is protected by copyright laws. Without paying a royalty and getting permission from the artist, we are not allowed to use the song in a slide show. Unfortunately, we've been unable to come up with a license that's affordable, flexible and doesn't require detailed record-keeping, like reporting how many times per month a particular slide show has been viewed and subsequently, how many times a particular song has been listened to. Since it really, really bothers me when my copyright is ignored, either when an image is screen-grabbed or scanned and reprinted on a home printer, I've decided that the only way we can continue to use music in our slide shows is to use royalty-free music. In the past, there's not been much for photographers to choose from when it comes to royalty-free music, but thankfully, that's changing, thanks to sites like Triple Scoop Music and Shawn Reeder Music. While I'd much rather be able to use a couple's favorite song or their first-dance song for the soundtrack to their slide show, it feels wrong to disregard the rights of the person who wrote and/or performs the music by using it without permission. You could argue that I'm promoting the artist and getting them additional exposure, but without a license, it's not OK to use their music. And it feels yucky to withhold from another artist the respect for copyrights that I demand for myself. So beginning today, we'll continue to create beautiful slide shows for our clients with
music that supports the story we're telling through our images, it's just going to be with music you may not have heard before. Hopefully, you'll love the images so much it won't matter!
I'm excited to announce that Sweet Life is adding two new album lines this year: Graphistudios and Leather Craftsmen. Our sample albums are in the works and hopefully will be available before the August wedding show.
Random thought for the day: Sorry, baseball, but I've decided digital photography is our new national past-time. At every reception I've shot lately, I notice that when people aren't dancing, they're taking pictures of one another. I love it! I'm going to do a post soon just of pictures of people taking pictures of other people.
Since it doesn't feel like a post without a photo, here's one of me taken by my friend Rick Ward at Ann and Peter's wedding in late March. Unlike most photographs of myself, I actually like this one. I'm rocking the standard photographer's all-black look, complete with the crazy hair. And my camera brand preference is pretty clear, isn't it?
