A life’s worth of work, disorganized and in chaos! I always think I am doing a great job of keeping all these files and images sorted but for some reason the approach and means to organize is always changing. A new system is introduced and suddenly we have to begin anew. Granted I do not keep on top of it all as well as I should or would like. It takes lots of time to catalog and or notate one’s images. Is it really important in the long run if it keep you from your actual process of creation. Time is of the essence here and it is such a precious commodity in an artist’s life. To do this blog and project, it feels like I am always searching for something on the hard drive. This search inevitably takes up a great portion of my day, then I feel bad because I have not been as productive as I could have been and lost most of the day. Today’s project was particularly daunting. I decided I would go though and reorganize my male portfolio by years, embed the year it was produced into the copyright of the image. It feels, with this project I am now beginning to put things out there and perhaps I should become a little more protective of my images. The copyright rules are as such that the person who creates the image, as long as they have proof of it’s originally retains the copyright on the image. Up until now I have never been too concerned with marking my images because I have been in a small area where no one was ever really interested in stealing or using my images. But the Internet is a vast and complex web of so many images and so much materials and uncertainty that some caution is in order. I often wonder if anyone is really interested in my images at all. In this modern area, we just move on to a new site and more images and it all becomes a constant stream of motion and flux. Once we have seen it we rarely go back because there is so much to look at.

I always dread seeing artists that put too much into their watermarks, where it completely goes across the image and you get no sense of what the images is about because you are too distracted by the markings. It can sometimes be a bit of overkill. I have always tried to have securities embedded into the site or use sites that have built in protection so I do not need to use a watermark. But I am told anyone can and will find a way of stealing it if they want it bad enough. My question then becomes about quality of what we are seeing. With images on the Internet are you really seeing the best someone has to offer? I do not really think so, the true test of an image is can it be printed and hung in a gallery to be seen and become archival enough to endure the test of time. We see images of the Mona Lisa on the internet and printed materials but you do not experience the Mona Lisa until you stand before it in the Louvre in Paris and gaze upon the brilliance of it’s artistry. I have always been torn between high resolution for image quality and fear of being stolen or a subliminal blurred blob of pixels that give a vague impression of your intent that cannot be used. In photography it’s hard to find the balance. My advise, find sites you can trust. I put a full resolution copy of my images on Red Bubble because it’s a site that has lots of anti-piracy guard in place and the images look fantastic. One advantage of watermarks is you can see when the images where created and it’s easier to follow the progression of a certain artist’s work. I am mixed here and not really sure if there is any real solution to this issue.