Bluejacket Photo

A slight moral quandary…

Gulf Air magazine (one of those in flight magazines that try to sell you overpriced executive toys and gadgets) wants to use one of my pictures I took while in Bahrain.

The flip side is that the want to pay me with just a photo credit.

It’s not the lack of money that bothers me, per se…. I’m flattered they like the photo and thrilled to actually be in a magazine. However, if they get a photo from me for free, that means that some photographer that is actually trying to earn a living at his/her craft is going to be deprived of income. This has been a topic of discussion in many of the photography forums I frequent… I don’t want to be one of those guys who drive the prices down for everyone else. That’s almost as bad as scabbing.

On the other hand, I’ve never considered the photo to be commercially viable. It was one of the first pictures I took with my first digital camera. I don’t have it in a RAW format, and there is nothing outstanding about the shot. It’s just an average vacation photo (at best).

It would be nice to be published, and have this credit in my portfolio. It could drive traffic to my store (though I see that as very unlikely). I might be able to get some other work with the publishing company (Ink Publishing), since they have many inflight magazines for all over the world…

But do I shaft the photographic community by doing this?

In the end I decided to ask for compensation, even if it means being passed over for someone not as picky. I haven’t been rejected outright yet. While the editor is making remarks about how she has others under consideration that will allow publishing for free, I figure if she had a wide variety of choices we still wouldn’t be talking. I’ve just sent her two watermarked images for her layout person to play with, since she says the flicker images were too small to work with, and I don’t allow anyone to download different sizes (for a good reason, apparently…)

My decision hinged on three things. One, it didn’t matter what “everybody else” might do, I was responsible for my own actions, and the rightness or wrongness of them was separate from what the next person might do. Two, as others have pointed out, photocredit is pretty much worthless, especially on a plane where the viewer was unlikely to be able to act on the knowledge in any way. Three, Gulf Air magazine apparently makes 4 million a year and reaches 200,000 people a month… Why -can’t- they compensate me fairly?

I published this post in a couple of different places. One thing I found interesting was that the responses were more or less 50/50, even amoung pros and non-pros… I was expecting the people who earn a living from their photos to be a bit more hard core about “giving it away for free”, but I was wrong….

Updates provided as they happen…

Oh, and the picture in question…

The Tree of Life, Bahrain