The main purpose for optical storage for me, is that we love to take pictures. The beauty of todays tech, the digital camera, is that you can take as many as you wish and only print out the ones you want to keep. However, the downside is you can take as many as you want and you don't want to get rid of any of them it seems at my house. So, with our 4mp camera, the hard drive gets full fast! Not only that, but you can't safely leave these on the HDD only and we burn ours to CD (and now DVD) for archiving in a cool dry dark safe place. My Logitech tower.
We are lucky too in that we invested in a couple nice photo printers and a copy of Photoshop Elelments. After readiong a few tomes, we can take some shots that were good and really make them look great. This is a wonderful thing and even if you are just ametures like us, you can occasionally crank out some damn good shots and herin lies the problem for those that still use a photolab.
| Charlie Morgan says that if it weren't for digital photography, he wouldn't have a bustling business that specializes in publicity shots for musicians. That's because Morgan - perhaps being a bit modest - says he's not a very good photographer. He relies on Photoshop editing software to make his work look sharp. But digital sometimes presents a puzzling problem. When Morgan's mother and a client recently took CDs with some of his shots to a printing lab, the photo technicians spurned them. They said that since the shots seemed to have been taken by a professional, printing the pictures might be a copyright violation.
The situation is not unusual, and it's Copyright law requires photo labs to be on the lookout for portraits and other professional work that should not be duplicated without a photographer's permission. In the old days, questions about an image's provenance could be settled with a negative. If you had it, you probably had the right to reproduce it. |
The gentleman mentioned in this article said quite modestly, that he isn't that great a photographer, but with Photoshop he can really make them look sharp. Nowdays, with all the images coming in on some sort of digital media, it's up to the tech to make a gut decision if the work is pilfered or not. In the old days, the negative was used to make the determination. If it looks too good, forget it, they wont help you. To top it off, the rules are not set in stone and the labs have been sued, so they tell their employees to err on the side of safety for them.
Make sure to drop by the My Way site and read this story in it's entirety, it's a most interesting problem that maybe some of us weren't aware of, or worse, maybe you have been affected by such a situation.
Source: My Way AP News
