(yes… the New York book party on Monday night for “A World in HDR” is invite-only. See the event page and contact the event organizer for more details)

Huffingtonpost uses my son’s photo without permission, no credit is given, my comments deleted

Can you believe it? Surely you are as shocked as me. And because it was a photo of our son, my wife was especially outraged.

So here is what happened. The Huffington Post ran a story entitled, “Girlfriends’ Guide To Divorced Parents: ‘Hey Kids, Wanna Have a Sleepover with Daddy’s New Friend?”. They used a photo of my son from my website and did not link back or give credit.

Now, all of my work is Creative Commons, which means people are allowed to use it for non-commercial purposes as long as they link back and give credit. Simple. They did not do this.

But even worse, to me, is the context of the photo and the article. Who would want their son’s photo associated with such a topic? It was just crass and an all-around bad idea.  Maybe the article itself is acceptable and interesting subject matter, but the article title is quite evocative and that photo makes it even more shocking.

I received the photo below from one of my fans that recognized the picture. I then went into the article itself and left a few comments (I have screenshots) — telling them my issue. They then deleted my comments and never acknowledged them.

I never received an email of apology or anything despite repeated attempts.  I’ve given them plenty of time.  Anyway, I think it’s a pretty lousy thing they did, and I hope photographers think twice before they associate themselves with the Huffington Post.

Creative Commons is Great for Artists

The whole purpose of Creative Commons is to allow people to openly share photos and art with the world. I use the Creative Commons license that says people are not allowed to use my photos for Commercial Purposes. If people want to use the images here from the website, they need to contact [email protected].

99% of the time I have no problem with this, and people share and give credit.

A fantastic example of Creative Commons is from this recent Twitter contest we ran. People would send me a Tweet about a great photo they found online like:

“Hey @TreyRatcliff, I found a beautiful photo on the net for the #hdrbook contest! (Link to Photo)”

You can see the results over at John P.’s One Man’s Blog. All of these artists got their work promoted and seen by tens of thousands of people because of the greatness of Creative Commons.

So, as you can see, John P does it right. Ariana Huffington (by proxy via her website) does it wrong. For this reason, John P gets an invitation to the party and Ariana does not.

Here is a happy picture of Ethan, free and joyous in Glacier National Park. It’s a one-shot HDR from a RAW file. See the HDR Tutorial for more info — the one-shot bit is just after step 6.