Equine Photography- Protecting Your Images

"Wow, did she really steal my picture for her website?!"

I have no experience in photography and no training (besides skimming over the user's manual of my camera), but even I am aware of the copyright protection that your photos should have when you upload them to the internet. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing someone take one of your photos for their personal use without paying for it! I have had this happen to me; I got on a website and there was one of my images- no credit given at all- being used as marketing material...

So what can you do to protect your images?

1. Picasa: The easiest way to keep others from stealing your photos is to watermark them. Picasa is a free photo editing software that does a simplified version of a watermark for you- choose the photos you want to watermark, click file, click export, and check the watermark photos box. Enter your name here. When you export, your name will appear on the bottom right corner of your photos.

2. Photoshop: This program (depending on the version) can get pretty pricey, but it can do anything and everything you would ever need in terms of editing power and protection.

3. My way: I am as cheap as they come, and look for products that are free to use. Instead of having just my name on the photos, I decided to make myself a logo (stingray! my favorite animal) using Inkscape. It is a fairly intuitive vector design software that I use at work for graphics design- not nearly as fancy as Adobe's line of products, but it gets the job done. I also downloaded another program called TSR Watermark to add my Inkscape logo to my pictures.

Although there is always the asshole out there who will crop your watermark or photoshop it for themselves, I like to think that most people will respect your work. For more information on how to better protect your images and for information on copyrights, see here: Protect Images Online.

Below are my favorite pictures of my friend Lauren Thomas and "Evel Knievel" (Titan) and my trainer Connie Warner and Harry de Leyer's "Dutch Juliet" (Juliet). I stick my logo in the most annoying spot possible so it is more difficult to crop out.