Difference between revisions of "Photography"

CC’s legal and technical tools are playing an increasing role in digital cultural heritage and the growth of the digital economy. Photographers and other creators are using CC licenses to share their images online, gaining new audiences for their work on photo-sharing platforms like Flickr and communities like Wikipedia.

For instance,

• Wikipedia is a heavily-trafficked website with over 400 million unique visitors a month. Wikipedia contains 19 million CC-licensed articles in 270 languages (over 3.7 million in English alone), as the default license for Wikipedia is CC Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA).^[1].
• Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia storehouse for Wikipedia, is one of the premier repositories of free cultural works on the web, currently hosting approximately 7.5 million media files licensed CC BY-SA or equivalent open content license.^[2]
• Flickr contains over 200 million CC-licensed photos, establishing it as the Web’s single largest source of CC-licensed content.^[3]
• Google’s Picasa, Fotopedia, Vimeo, Blip.tv, SoundCloud, Jamendo, the Free Music Archive, and other services host tens of millions of CC-licensed photos, videos, and musical works.
• Major museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum and Powerhouse Museum, have adopted CC to increase public participation in the preservation of works, including images. ^[4][5]
• News sites across the globe frequently use CC-licensed images in their reporting. – Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of Online, Al Jazeera English^[6] writes:

“A large part of embracing free culture is accepting the fact that you are forsaking control in exchange for something greater – the empowerment of the creative community. This means that you never quite know where things will lead. When launching our repository, we had thought that it would be a key resource for anyone producing content on the war and that it would primarily be used by other news organisations and documentary filmmakers. What we saw was both surprising and delightful. Soon after posting our first video, Wikipedia editors had extracted images to enhance the encyclopedia entries on the War on Gaza. Soon thereafter educators, filmmakers, video game developers, aid agencies and music video producers all used and built upon our footage.”

In 2008, DigitalPhotoPro published an article on the use of Creative Commons licenses by professional photographers with advice for those thinking of using CC themselves. In addition, the "Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible flickr Images" written by Skellie outlines the use of images licensed under CC licenses effectively.

Photographers using CC licenses

Jonathan Worth

“Creative Commons enables me to use existing architecture really smoothly and to address the digital natives’ social media habits. The mode of information is the same, but the mode of distribution has changed. We don’t have all the answers, but CC lets me choose my flavor and helps me take advantage of the things working against me.”

British photographer Jonathan Worth’s work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He teaches photography at Coventry University in the U.K. He has photographed actors Colin Firth, Rachel Hunter, Jude Law and Heath Ledger. He is also one of an emerging group of photographers experimenting with sustainable working practices for professional image makers in the digital age.

Jonathan Worth in:

• The Telegraph - How the Power of Open can benefit photographers
• BBC News - "Photographer Jonathan Worth explained that Creative Commons allowed him to sell his work for commercial use while still giving it free to individuals who wanted it for other reasons."
• The Power of Open - Stories of creators sharing knowledge, art, & data using Creative Commons

Lan Bui

Monkeyc.net

Photo-sharing sites that have enabled CC licenses

Flickr

DeviantART

Fotopedia

Fotopedia is a breathtaking application for the iPhone and iPad. The app builds on the concept of a coffee table book, updating and enhancing the browsing experience for the web. This project is possible thanks to Creative Commons, as over 18,000 of the pictures in Fotopedia Heritage book are under one of the CC licenses. The pictures come from all around the world; as individual photographers and organizations license their high quality photos under Creative Commons, the book will only grow as a community contributed and shareable resource.

National Library of Australia: 'Click and Flick'

Newsbank Image

Culture.si

How To Publish photos in an online community

One way to increase visibility and access to your photos is to share it with an existing community that has enabled CC licensing, making it easy for you to indicate the license along with other information, such as who to attribute. In addition, search engines like Google and Yahoo! will index your work as CC licensed if the metadata is properly attached. See Publish/Images for more info.

Finding CC-licensed photos

Thanks to the machine-readability of CC licenses, CC-licensed images can be found via:

• Google Advanced Image Search by specifying options under "Usage Rights"
• Yahoo! Advanced Image Search by specifying options under "Creative Commons License"
• Google Docs, where Google Image Search has been integrated
• CC Search Portal, which is not a search engine, but a tool that offers convenient access to search services provided by independent organizations, such as Flickr, Google, and Wikimedia Commons (media repository for articles featured on Wikipedia).

Related resources

• CC in Journalism
• CC Factsheet