News

Raymond vanderWoning’s Photos

Matt Haughey, August 13th, 2003

This week we’re featuring the photography of Raymond A. vanderWoning. His photos feature subjects from flowers and bugs to signs and people and his about page carries a thoughtful piece on how and why he licenses all his photos. A hobbyist photographer at heart, Raymond’s closing statement gets to the heart of it all:

Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be shared.

8 Responses to “Raymond vanderWoning’s Photos”

  1. sergey prokofiev says:

    Why not use adobe – style watermarking?

  2. jeff says:

    I have never seen a pink ladybug before.

    Nice photos!

    :)

  3. discount says:

    You should compile the photos onto a cd-rom and offer free distribution.

    You could also charge a small percentage of gross profits (if sold) like project gutenberg does.

    Dead dragonfly pictures?

  4. Raymond vanderWoning says:

    Some day when I am producing higher res, marketable stuff, I may watermark. But in general I think watermarked images are unfortunate on the web. They’re ugly and serve no purpose. As I said in my usage piece, there’s nothing marketable in a 50kb jpeg. A watermark is a barrier to sharing.

    Probably the most frustrating thing to me as a blogger was knowing that using AP Photos, for example, in a blog post about a news item was violating the terms and conditions of my hosting arrangement. I felt that some of my posts lacked either humour (in which case I was forced to steal the image or not bother posting) or some dramatic punch.

    It’d be real sweet if mainstream news agencies would release low-res news photographs for use in blogs, and CC license the text of their articles. Most agencies don’t archive for long periods, likely due to overwhelming storage cost, so a CC license could expand the lifespan of a good photograph and a good story well beyong their capacity for archiving. I got tired of being thwarted, and I got tired of being a thief. CC licensing gave me an opportunity to be a part of the solution, rather than be a part of the problem.

  5. Raymond vanderWoning says:

    Whoopsie. I see I broke some links here, I apologise. ‘The eloquent words’ have been relocated to a page devoted entirely to usage.

  6. Jeff says:

    Interesting Link.

    Cant you kill these damn comment spmmers?

  7. CAL says:

    Dead Link. The domain is an Error 404 Not Found.

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