Looking at one’s own navel is a bad thing a lot of the time. One ends up missing other things that may pass him by. Google is great for wasting this kind of time. I didn’t intend to find this, but here it is.
I found this and because it’s written in Cyrillic, I have no idea what it means. I traced it back from here.
I was attempting to illustrate for a buddy that once images get homes on the web, they’re pretty much up for the taking. Heck, I knew a guy who would openly copy material from people’s websites and save the images just so he could have a personal archive of pretty pictures. I suppose it’s not a big deal on such a small scale. For me, this was a grab shot (the little girl in it was mad that her brother had gotten a chance to wear the mask but she hadn’t) on a roll of cheap 400 iso film for which the processing was then an experiment and is now forgotten. I did it for fun and didn’t get paid, nor do I expect anyone ever will pay for that image. For me, this isn’t a big deal, as long as someone else is only looking at it.
But what if I’d come across it in an advert for who-knows-what? (Maybe these, if they were real.) I think I’d be as peevish as the people who regularly complain that their music or images have been pinched unbeknownst to them. In that regard, I have to say, I saw the photograph, processed the film, printed the image and scanned the print to serve a final need that wasn’t the one at which I’m currently looking. If the fact that I “pushed the button” doesn’t hold water, surely the other reasons do.
It’s for this reason that many people, including Suzanne Sease, advise against web communities like flickr, where this image lives today.
photographic ramblings of thomas scott 