This has come speeding to the forefront recently as we have been building out our website and getting ready to upload images into our store fronts. When I was first asking around and beginning to understand the back end of being a cut flower grower, it had been implied to me that it was common practice to use internet images to advertise your items, especially for those who were “just starting out”. This was to save yourself the lengthy time to photograph your own items and get up and running on a faster pace, and as time went on, slowly replacing the “borrowed” photographs with ones of your own. But in reality, it really doesn’t work that way.
Photographs are considered implicitly copyright, to the photographer who had taken them/famer who had commissioned them depending on agreements to use of photographs. This was a big point of contention for me about my own wedding photographs. I very much disliked the thought of someone else owning essentially my image, along with my family members, and could use the photograph in a way they saw fit to advertise their business, and did so, with impunity, much to my chagrin. But they owned the photographs, they took them, they did the work and produced them for me, and made it clear that they owned the rights to that photo, even though I, and my family, were the subject matters.
How this intertwined with my flower farming journey came up when a mentor of mine was finding out that more prominent farms, smaller than theirs but much larger than ours, were using their photographs without permission. The sheer audacity was mind boggling, and yet not surprising at all. When speaking with Kev about it, he remembered a story where a very large well-known electronics company would issue blanket copyright infringement statements to smaller businesses, essentially bankrupting them out of business because something could be considered minimally related to copyrights they owned. Websites used to do the same thing back in the day and have google take down websites all together who were in possession of the stolen photographs and using them without permission from the photograph owner. A practice, I’m told, can still be put into place today.
All of this to say, take and use your own photos. It is infinitely easier and keeps your own exposure risk low. Of course, we aren’t all professional photographers, but our subject matters are so beautiful and forgiving, we really just have to remember to keep our subject in focus. By then I think we will be just fine.
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