You may have noticed those watermarks on my images. Those are the faint "© Jon Higgins" words over the images. Why in the world would I want to ruin a perfectly good (or at least ok) picture with that?
A couple of stories here. The first one is kind of funny. The second is not nice. They both involve when I had unwatermarked pictures on Flickr.
Once upon a time, there used to be a webpage devoted to inspirational quotes from Ansel Adams. They were pretty good quotes. However, The Ansel Adams Trust has very strict rules about how Ansel Adams copyrighted images can be used. They don't want to give away any of his stuff for free. That means pretty much everything needs to be explicitly licensed by the trust*. That meant there couldn't be any inspirational images from Ansel Adams on the website. What site visitors did was get one of my photos from Flickr placed at the top of the Ansel Adams quotation page with the implication that it was one of his photos. To be honest, I was a bit flattered that someone thought they could pass one of my photos off as an original Ansel Adams picture (it was a 35mm image with an aspect ratio that Ansel never used). However, I didn't get any credit so it was kind of a lie. I contacted the site owner, and they did eventually give me credit. ...But it was still weird.
The second story involves a series of sketchy websites that offered desktop wallpaper images for free download. They had scraped a few of my images from Flickr and were distributing them without crediting me. The websites also had advertising. Every time someone looked at one my images the website owners got paid by the advertisers for page views. They were freely distributing my work without giving credit and making money off of it. That's pretty much stealing in my book.
All of my images are under copyright. I had been using a Creative Commons License but it was abused. I put the watermarks in the images here to discourage stealing. If you would like to use one of them you need to provide the use case, and I need to approve a license for use. If you're a commercial entity, we need to agree on payment. If you're a not-for-profit, we still need an agreement and I have to agree with what you have to say.
If you're interested in a print, rest assured there will not be a watermark on it. Prints are licensed for private use. Public exhibition of the print must be the original print and not a copy. The print may not be scanned or photographed for physical or digital distribution without the explicit consent of the creator or his representatives.
* There are some photos he shot on a commission from the US Department of the Interior that are in the public domain.