boydski

Hi Donna,

We do quite a bit of shore diving in Cold Water (drysuits, double steel tanks) with my 25 lbs. Camera.

I enter the water along with my buddy, carrying my fins and camera. I hand the camera to my buddy to hold while I put on my fins, then I put thier fins on for them (since they are being nice and holding my beast) , then get my camera back. This works very well for me as long as the waves aren't huge.

I often reverse this process when getting back up into my dive boat. Hand the camera to a buddy, take my fins off, climb the ladder, drop my gear, pick up the camera, then pull my ever so helpful buddie's fins off for them.

How do you search for your images? Do you search using the file names, or EXIF information (is this possible?)

I have not found a way to search EXIF information yet (wouldn't that be cool), but by searching for the image names (which in my case match the common names of the species), I have so far found 7 web sites using my images.

For example if you go to Google Images and search for "Spiny Dogfish", the image in the middle hosted by Gulfofme was the most recent site I found.  The name of the image was "spinydogfish.jpg".  

It takes almost 6 months from when content is posted before it will show up prominently in Google Images, so you will typically only find images that have been on your web site for at least a year.

NSS-CDS   Full Cave
TDI               Trimix
First PADI Certification in 1989

Keep in mind that it is $45 per work, not $45 per image. If you send them a CD or DVD crammed full of low resolution 200 pixel wide jpegs and call it "Personal and Stock Photography, dates xxxx-yyyy", then the CD or DVD represents the work. Each image within the work is then protected as a component of the original work registered. So you can register literally thousands of images for the $45 fee.

Thanks Craig,

I had no idea that it was "per work".  I was thinking $45 per image and that just seemed to darn expensive to me.  Sending a DVD is an awesome idea!

If your images is registered w/ the copyright office, you can usually get a "summary judgement" where you don't even have to go to court to get 3-4x the normal usage fee.  The filing fee is all you have to pay.

Anyhow, don't you think that if someone WILLFULLY removes your copyright notice and puts their own, they deserve a little more than a slap on the wrist?

Cheers
James

Hi James,

I thought about registering the images with the copyright office previously but was too cheap to fork over the $45 fee.  Maybe I should have reconsidered?   Is that something you do with your images?

As for the other photographer's watermark, I do not believe in this case that the photographer had anything to do with it.  I think a "grad student" was being creative and in truth there was no watermark on the original image (my bad, and I have fixed that now).  The web site in question belonged to a University in California and I suspect it would not be worth the effort to seek money through a civil suit in this case, although I did offer to sell them a right to use the image for a reasonable amount.  

Their claim is that the image came from a royalty free web site with the watermark already on it, but of course they can't tell me where that site is.