Learning To Share

I’m going through a phase.

This phase can best be described as “Create Art, Share It”.

While I still have capitalistic intents, they aren’t as strong as they used to be. I fell in love with a beautiful woman in the last two years (truth be known, I fell in love with her from the start, but courting takes a while) and we were recently married. During the last year it didn’t make sense for me to keep working full tilt to make money from photography. It took away precious family time and her income is ample, so I have transitioned into making less money and more time taking care of family matters (“Househusband” sounds odd. “Housedude”? “Houseguy”? Still working on it).

With this switch in priorities comes a rethinking of this 200,000+ image library I have. I still want to make money from my images because at this point, with so many photos still to be released, it’s more passive than active and I can work on it from 9-5, keeping family life more sane. I will still sell my images to commercial outfits, including stock and client work.

But I’d also like to see more people enjoy the beauty of the world around them.

And that’s why you may now use any of my images freely for your own intents, with a few rules. All images I have created are now available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License.  I know that’s a mouthful, so here are the simple rules.

1. When you use one of my images on your site/Facebook/Twitter/anywhere, you must attribute it to me (something like “Copyright Peter West Carey Photography”). A link back to http://peterwestcarey.com would be nice, but is not required.
2. You may only use the image for personal use. You may not use the image for commercial uses, which includes using it in your advertising campaign. No making it into mugs or selling prints or putting it on your commercial website to bring in traffic.
3. You have to allow any work you create with my image to also be shared under this agreement. Meaning, you can’t restrict someone from sharing the image from your site or, if you use an image in an original work of art, you have have to allow that work to be shared freely as well.

To this end you will notice a new watermark on my images (click on image below for a larger version). It lists the relevant license and YOU ARE WELCOME TO REMOVE MY WATERMARK WHEN REUSING MY IMAGE AS LONG AS YOU FOLLOW THE ITEMS ABOVE WHEN SHARING. This means attributing the image, somehow, near it.

I am also tending to make my images now available in a size at least 2048 pixels on the long edge for better quality. When you click the image above, it should get BIG.

I’m not doing this for financial gain or for ego boosts. I’m doing it because sharing is usually a good idea and I don’t want to spend my life guarding all my photos so closely that they never see the light of day, nor inspire someone to explore the world around them.

Thank you for reading and have a great day!

pwc

PS, I am revamping my schedule as I still want to teach photography. I love helping people learn. Likely I will start classes again in the new year but they will be typically during week days when my family is at work/school. I do also want to keep writing here and at other sites about photography and I will still work with strategic corporate clients, such as Un-Cruise Adventures, as those partnerships make sense.