An ever-growing collection of my favorite photos from summers in Washington State.
I’m a serious amateur photographer and thoroughly enjoy taking my camera to new places to shoot photos. I’m particularly fond of landscape and architecture photography and love finding patterns and textures in nature and man-made structures. My summers in Washington State have given me plenty of free time and new scenes to explore. I find that I make more photo excursions here than I do at home.
I’ve had at least one of my photos stolen, right from my Web site. Fortunately, the person who stole it did so innocently. Like most other people who surf the ‘Net, he thought that anything on the Internet was free to copy and use as he saw fit. He saw my photo, liked it, and displayed it on his site with a link back to mine. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, so I was gentle with him. He removed the photo when I asked him to. But if he hadn’t included the link, he could have easily passed off the photo as his own without me ever finding out.
So now I include obnoxious copyright notices on my best images and display the others in smaller sizes that make them mostly unusable.
Unlike a lot of other amateur and even professional photographers, I don’t want to put my photos of Flickr. I simply don’t like the idea behind the service: photographic social networking. At its best, it’s a good way for someone to share photos with friends and families. At its worse, its a source of images for copyright infringers, many of whom pass off the photos they steal as their own. Copyright is vital to my livelihood; although I’m not a professional photographer, I do write for a living. I have zero tolerance for copyright infringement of any kind.
But that’s only one of the reasons I don’t use Flickr. The way I see it, Flickr is a service where people upload and “share” all kinds of photographs, from the crappiest, out-of-focus cell phone shot to the most artistic professional photographs. It’s that range that I don’t like. Depending on how my photos are tagged, they could come up in a grab bag of photos of any quality. I don’t like that. I don’t want my work appearing among photos made by people who don’t feel the same way I do about photography.
Instead, I use a service called Zenfolio for my own personal photo gallery. Not only does it give me a lot of flexibility, but it makes it easy for folks who like my work to order prints and other products. It also has a great feature that makes it easy to embed that obnoxious copyright notice — and to change it any time I like with very little effort.
My Washington slide show. You can visit my entire photo gallery at FlyingMPhotos.com.
Today, however, I discovered a new Zenfolio feature: I can create a slide show from one of my galleries. So allow me to come full circle with this blog post by showing off my Washington photo gallery in slide show format. If I’m not mistaken, it will be automatically updated to include any new photos I add.
Enjoy.
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