I called up this story over at thestate.com, about how Mike Campbell is going to run for lieutenant governor (again), and Henry McMaster might, too.
Imagine my surprise to see a photo I shot of Campbell years ago — during his last run for the same office.
It was taken in the board room, and with the little Canon camera I used to use. It had a tilting viewscreen, so that I could hold it down on the table, unobstrusively, and glance down at the screen to aim and focus the shot. You can see me doing it in this photo of me with Barack Obama.
I miss that little camera, which quit working after a photo session with the twins in the surf at the beach. I haven’t been able to find another in that price range with the handy tilting window, which allowed for candids I couldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Not sure how The State had that picture, since I always kept the photos on my laptop. I must have used it in a print edition one time. (Normally, my photos only appeared on my blog, as did this one.)
Anyway, it looks like my contributions to the paper continue, despite my absence…
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While I was a little surprised that they had the photo at hand, I’m not surprised that, having it, they chose to use it.
Not to brag, but, since we had all candidates in contested races in for interviews, I usually had a more comprehensive archive of images of current, active politicians than the photo department did. If I were still there, I still would. I always shot a LOT of images in each interview. Whereas photographers only occasionally got out on the campaign trail to shoot candidates, and rarely were assigned to attend our interviews (the one of Obama and me — by Chip Oglesby, I think — is from one of those rare occasions).
I had this ritual — after every interview, I’d dump the memory card (I would fill it in just an interview or two) and replace my batteries with fresh ones from the charger. So I was always ready…
I would also periodically back them up to an external hard drive. The wisdom of which was shown when my laptop was stolen on election night 2008. Unfortunately, I hadn’t backed up the pictures to the external drive for a couple of months, so I lost a lot of fresh candidate pictures and video.
The greatest loss in that, near as I can remember, was the stuff I had recently shot of Nikki Haley. Some of the unedited video would have been handy to refer to when she stunned us all by running for governor. All I had was this one clip I had uploaded to YouTube in October. The rest of that wide-ranging interview was lost.
When Gannett sold my paper to the competition, and with it, the archives, our competition began running our photos and claiming them as theirs. It was an interesting copyright issue, because “creative” vs. “corporate” copyrights were at stake. It was settled in our favor. Basically, because you own a print doesn’t mean you own an image.
Yeah… that’s a fuzzy area.
I’m guessing that McClatchy lawyers (continuing a tradition begun by Knight Ridder lawyers, who claimed corporate ownership of anything and everything) would assert that the company owns all the images I shot while on duty for the paper — even though it was with my own personal camera, and my own SD card, batteries, etc. A very gray area, though, to me — since I was on salary and therefore always “on duty,” are the pictures I took with that same camera of my grandchildren on the weekends also newspaper property? Probably not, but in a grayer area — lot of images I posted on my blog back in those days were taken when I was engaged in non-work activities. Would those be newspaper property?
I don’t know. I DO know that I’m perfectly happy for the paper to use those images. I’m pleased and flattered when those are the best images they could find…
I’m glad you don’t mind if The State reuses your photos of local notables.
But, as you point out, the images are several years old.
Sounds like their photo staff is stretched thin.
As is everything else but maybe sports