Not cool!

 

This is not cool!

On Instagram many profiles do this thing where you can get featured if you tag them when posting yourself. It’s a nice and easy way to get visibility, if they feature your image as is that is. Yesterday one such feature occured, but when doing like this profile did is actually copyright infringement. Although he/she tagged me the image had been cropped in such a way that my logo was removed and also the image went from sharp to fuzzy.

When done like this it reflects poorly on me as photographer, when my image is reposted it should be unaltered and not made a lesser image that won’t show the quality of my work. Below both versions have been included so you can see the difference. and, it is copyright infringement which makes it illegal when reposting!

Incidently, this particular image is available as print and novelty items at Printler, Spreadshirt, Redbubble and Pixels/Fine Art America. how likely are you to make a purchase if an image of poor quality is what you have seen before from my work?

Needless to say this particular Instagrammer won’t be getting any more support from me and I am actually considering filing charges. It’s sad really that people are so clueless when it comes to copyright.

This is not the first time I have been going down this road on the blogs, here at the backup mirror there are a couple of posts to read. Infringement and Credits are two of them, one with what not to do and one on how to do it.