Why You Shouldn’t Steal Images

For starters, it’s 2014 (Happy New Year!) and the internet is not the hole you think it is. Every image uploaded is sorted, categorized, and saved somewhere. It is searchable. It can be found. You will get busted. You will be publicly humiliated.

This article is to photographers, mainly. I was recently browsing the world wide web and I came across another photographer’s site in Maine. She had a boudoir ad very similar to mine. Almost exact. I decided to take a look and I was aghast at what I found.

I am not appalled by the photographer copying my ad. Far from it. I am appalled, however, by the photographer’s blatant theft. On the ad for her “boudoir marathon”, she had two photographs. Two photographs which stuck out in my mind. I had seen them before. I just knew I had!

I copied her ad to my computer and cropped the two images in questions. Sure enough, BOTH images were stolen. One from the ever talented Kailyn Mae Photography and one from Sippin Photography. Both images were beautiful and powerful shots. Great job to the original authors!
Now, to the point. You can’t steal and get away with it. Period. Stop trying. It’s embarrassing. It’s appalling. You are defrauding your clients in the worst way possible. You’re promising them image quality you cannot reproduce, or you wouldn’t have stolen the image in the first place. Take that effort and apply it toward photography classes, exhibits, books, CDs, whatever.