3309 - Between Churches

Today’s images have all been taken on my way from Convento do Carmo to Igreja de São Roque, basically following the eastern border of Bairro Alto.

And while we look at these images, here’s something I’d want to discuss: Licensing.

Like so many photographers, for a long time I was deluded into believing I could - some time - make money from my images. Well, maybe I even could. I’d have to compromise, take images of what’s sought after, instead of picturing what interests me. You know the drill. It can be done, but sooner or later it transforms your hobby into a job. Which is probably not in your best interest if you already have a job.

A few years ago I decided to relax licensing. I went with “Creative Commons BY-NC-ND”, a license that requires attribution, allows for non-commercial use and disallows derivatives.

To make it short: I have relaxed it further, down to “Creative Commons BY-SA”. To paraphrase from the Creative Commons site: This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon my work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit me and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on mine will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

The idea is, to get my images used. One thing that I may do myself is, to upload images (for instance from the current Lisbon series) to Wikipedia. The other thing is, that I absolutely wouldn’t mind to see my images getting used in a travel guide or any other kind of book. Once you relax about monetary opportunities, it is easy to step back.

Any toughts about it?