Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

One of the first key decisions I discussed with David was how big should we present images to the user. The influencing factors on this decision are as follows

• Portraying the highest quality images to the user
• Ensuring that the images cannot be missapropriated

The balancing act between these two factors will give us a size at which we are happy to use. In order to assess these two factors I will go into some details about each one.

Portraying the highest quality images to the user

We all wish to capture a level of detail in our images that goes well beyond the resolution of a computer screen. When we come to represent those images to a user we shrink the images to a point where we don’t think they are of any use to ‘pirates’. This typically means shrinking them to where they are also of little use to most users.

The typical size of a web gallery image appears to be about 300px x 450px , a size that is poor even by cheap mobile phone standards. I’ve yet to meet a photographer that would happy to show there hard graft to a potential customer or browser on a cheap mobile phone and yet most will proudly talk about their new website and how well it shows there work.

Most professional cameras/scanners these days will produce files of approx 4000px x 3000px and if you are working with large format files, 6000px x 8000px and more is not unheard off. This means that the average size web image is showing 1.1% of the image that was taken or, if you are of the large format persuasion, 0.3% of the image is shown. In my personal opinion as someone who likes to browse other peoples work, this is a real shame.

A typical photo oriented monitor these days (i.e. one of about £250-£300) is approx 1680px x 1050px which means the little picture at 300px x 450px is only taking up 13% of the screen!

Let’s think about what resolution image we would have if we were to try to make the most of this common screen size. For a portrait image on an SLR, this would be 666px x 1000px . If this were to be printed up at 300dpi, we would have a 2.2″ x 3.3″ picture. Even if we were to print this at a just about acceptable 150 dpi, we would still only have a 4.5″ x 6.6″ picture which would make a lowish resolution postcard printed using sRGB colour which has a low colour range.

So, if we are happy to risk the possiblity that someone will print out a picture postcard sized print at low quality of one of our shots then we can provide screen filling goodness for our customers and browsers!

Portraying the highest quality images to the user

OK, so now the down side of putting images on the web. People can pinch them and use them for personal use or possibly to make money for themselves. This is obviously a serious matter. The general ethos at the moment in photography is to try to make sure that there can be no piracy at all by making the picture too small to be useful. We should also consider that this will inevitably mean a reduction in possible sales as people cannot see the product at it’s best.

What we have is a classic cost/benefit problem for which there is a ‘best’ point at which the additional sales gained by having higher quality images is overtaken by the actual losses caused by picture piracy.

Wait a moment though, we need to work out a way to calculate the actual losses due to piracy. I’ve spent quite a while browsing around the web and asking colleagues about who has actually lost revenue from this problem and I could not find anybody who said they were personally worse off because of piracy. There were a few people who had found there images being sold elsewhere but those sales did not reduce the photographers actual sales (in fact, when the pirates customers found out in one case, they licensed the photographs from the original photographer!).

Lets take a look at this from the eyes of a potential pirate. We can probably classify them as ‘personal users’, ‘small time opportunists’, ‘career fraudsters’ and ‘organised crime’.

I think we can discount organised crime here because they seem to have other ways of making lots of money. I also think we can discount career fraudsters as if photographers have problems making money out of their own pictures, it’s not really an attractive fraud opportunity. So we’re left with personal users and small time opportunists. The personal users aren’t costing any money but I can understand that some people object to unauthourised use. The opportunists are the real problem but generally they only cost the photographer money once the photographer has discovered what is going on. At that point, it’s up to the photographer to take action and prove the opportunist has broken the law.

The people I have spoken to who have said this has happened have mostly said it’s been for use on websites or for little pictures in articles, in which case, the 300px x 450px is more than usable for this.

If an opportunist really wanted to pirate material to make some serious money and costs the photographer revenue, they could order original prints or buy rights managed or royalty free pictures and pass them off as their own. No amount of web asset size restriction will prevent this.

Now my ‘boat’ is landscape photography so some of the discussion I’m having is probably not relevant to the photographer who makes money out of selling stock images for web use; but for most art ‘style’ commercal photographers, I find it difficult to beleive that the availability of a postcard size images will create serious revenue loss.

However, as I’ve said, I can see revenue loss from a lack of good product representation.

So this conversation was had with David and the conclusion was to go for screen filling goodness. There was one precaution I wanted to take though.

Final Precautions

The Internet is being ‘crawled’ by search engines all of the time and you can use google or other tools to find lots of images without having to browse through lots of websites. Hence it is more than likeley that images will appear somewhere on the web without the associated copyright footer.

This presents a ‘plausibly deniable’ opportunity to a fraudster. They can say that they found the image on some search engine and didn’t know it was copyright restricted.

In order to get around this, all of the larger images on David’s website have a footer attached in the same background colour as the site (so that it doesn’t appear to get in the way of the picture). If the image gets indexed by some search engine and then gets picked up by someone wanting to use it, the image still has a footer which includes copyright statement and contact details. The fraudster would have to manually remove the footer and this gives any prosecution the evidence to prove active ‘intent’ to remove copyright notices.

Some Last Points

People always ask about watermarks to prevent theft but I generally think that making an image unusable also renders it almost unusable as a promotional tool.

The postcard comparison came about when I saw the Fuji promotional material that includes high quality postcard size images of some of David Ward, Joe Cornish and Charlie Waite’s best work. If this isn’t seen as a piracy opportunity, good size images for web use shouldn’t either.

I’d love to hear about other opinions on this matter though so please let rip..