I have to admit, I’ve been giggling to myself at some of the comments that are popping up on the sites that have covered the Vampire Weekend image controversy. There seems to be confusion in monumental proportions regarding who owns the rights to a picture, to people’s images in a picture, and what you can—or can’t—do with a picture that you own. Confused much? We’ve put together the Small Aperture Quick and Dirty Guide to Photographs, People’s Images, and Rights. Just remember that we’re not lawyers.

Copyright

This one's mine!

If you shoot a picture, you own the copyright to it*. No one can reproduce it or otherwise make use of it without your permission.

*) The only exception is if you have explicitly signed away your rights. This might be part of your job contract at work – for example if you are taking photos for work, during work hours. In the UK at least, you can only sign away your copyright in writing, and you have to sign the document where you do so. Ticking a box on a website wouldn’t be sufficient.

Moral rights

You also own the moral rights to pictures that you take. In short, that means that your pictures should be attributed to you, and you can ‘protect their integrity’, or stop people from manipulating and distorting them.

Images of people: commercial, editorial, and personal use

If the picture features a person or people who are easily identifiable, you will require a model release, which is essentially that person’s or people’s consent, to use the picture for commercial purposes. If the picture of a yak farmer leading his herd down the mountain is just going to sit on your Flickr stream as part of your holiday snaps from Outer Mongolia, you don’t have to worry. Sell the picture to the publishers of the Encyclopaedic Guide to Mountain Yak Rearing, you’ll need a model release.

But, there are some exceptions to this. Inevitably.

Caveat number 1: Crowd scenes and itty-bitty people on the horizon whom you can’t make out properly (or similar)

You’re standing amongst the crowd at the London Marathon and you manage to snap the perfect shot of hundreds of spectators standing at Canary Wharf, cheering on the runners. It’s so perfect that Nike wants to use it in a commercial campaign. Do you need model releases from everyone in it? Not if they aren’t recognisable individually (even if someone says ‘But I knew I stood right next to that lamp-post all day’), in this instance it wouldn’t be reasonable.

These guys manning a laminating stand (in the middle of the street in Fez, at about 10pm) are probably obscure enough for me to get away with this shot. Probably.

Caveat number 2: Famous people doing famous-people things

It’s pretty much a given that famous people’s pictures taken when they are doing famous-people things, such as tripping the light fantastic up the red carpet at film premieres, opening yet another megalithic shopping centre with a false smile affixed to their faces, or taking an amazing catch at a cricket match, are fair game. But that’s only for personal (i.e. Flickr or your portfolio site) or editorial (i.e. news reporting or reviewing related to the picture) use.

You couldn’t use a photo of Tom Cruise attending a movie premiere to advertise toothpaste—no matter how shiny his teeth are—without a specific model release. And as far as Tom Cruise is concerned – good luck getting one of those.

Caveat number 3: Famous people doing stupid-people things

You’re out having a quiet meal with your best friend when you spot Cruella Manningly-Kneesup, Secretary of State for Juggling, Air Guitar, and Space Cadets locked in a passionate embrace with someone definitely not her husband. In fact, it’s Marco Poloco, whose company was recently awarded the government contract to supply rocket launchers and hover cars to the Space Cadet programme. Hmm. Is something fishy going on? Maybe! Obviously neither of these two is going to give you a model release for the picture that you snap with your ever-handy compact camera, but publishing it would be in the national interest – so you wouldn’t have to worry about privacy or libel too much.

Still the same applies as above: you couldn’t use the same picture of Manningly-Kneesup and Poloco in an advert for birth control. As much as you would like to.

Ownership of rights vs ownership of an artefact

I've turned this one into a card. Pretty, no?

Selling a copy of a picture is different to selling the rights to a picture. I use some of the photos that I take to make greetings cards. Mostly, I make them to send to my friends and family, but every now and then a misguided soul will ask me if they can buy one to send to their great aunt Marjory. I might’ve sold this person a copy of one of my pictures, but that’s it. All they own is the physical artefact, nothing else. They can’t reproduce it or make derivative works from it. Come to think of it, the same goes for the people to whom I give these cards.

Selling rights

Selling the rights to a picture means selling the rights to use a picture. There are different ways of selling the rights to use your pictures, because the number of times it can be used, and how, and where, will be dependent on the contract you agree, and that’s not really for this post. But the simple explanation is that if anyone wants to use a picture that you took, they have to at the very least ask your permission first. Then you can ask them for some money to do so. Okay?

And finally

Remember that you’re allowed to take pictures in UK public places without let or hindrance, and that we’re not solicitors, so all of this is for general guidance only, mkay?

I get a lot of people sending me images with ‘mysterious’ problems, and I figured it was only fair if I run a series of articles about how you can alleviate these problems. The most frequent problem is actually a lens-flare related problem, and there seems to be some confusion as to what lens flare actually is.

I suppose the first thing we should discuss is just what lens flare actually is. Most commonly seen in photographs, lens flare can appear as bright circles, smears of light or glimmering lines.

On some occasions, it can even appear as a thin film over the entire picture that makes the image itself lighter.

Why does this phenomenon occur? Lens flare is normally seen because the photographer took the picture into the general direction of the sun. The basic idea is this – some sunlight gets into the camera lens at just the right angle that it bounces around the interior of the camera until some of it ends up on the film.

If that’s the case, then how can you test your camera to see how it deals with the lens flare issue? First and foremost, there is the obvious way of aiming it right at the sun and taking a picture. This is the most common way to get your lens to produce lens flare, but not the only way. In fact, some lenses have no problem taking photos towards the sun, but fail miserably in other tests.

A second way to test for lens flare is what is known as the ‘window test’. Aim the camera someplace indoors, but have a bright window just out of the view of the lens. If your image, upon developing ended up with the tell tale signs of lens flare, you know your camera can’t handle that sort of situation so well.

Another way that you can test your lens is the ‘bird in a tree’ approach. For this, aim your camera at a bird (or something of similar size and detail) against a bright sunny sky, but without aiming directly at the sun. Check for contrast loss at the edges of the bird or object. Generally, what you will see is the light ‘swallows’ up the outer edges of the bird. The more of the bird that is ‘swallowed’ up, the more lens flare is occurring in this case.

These aren’t the only ways to come up with lens flare. In fact, you don’t even need to have lens flare show up in your original photo to have it appear later. But why is this? Well, Photoshop has come up with its own ‘lens flare effect’ that you can apply to your images long after you’ve originally taken them. It offers a wide range of options to choose between to get you the look you are after.

Okay, so I thought we were trying to avoid lens flare. Why would Photoshop come up with something people try to avoid? For the simple fact that lens flare shouldn’t always be avoided. In fact, it can a little something extra to your images when used in the right circumstances.

Thing is, well, there are very rarely ‘right circumstances’ for lens flare: There’s an excellent reason for why photographers have been trying to avoid them for dozens of years, and it’s a bit daft to try and use software to put ‘em back in…

Is there an easy way to avoid lens flare?

Why yes, there’s a very easy way: Keep your lens-cap on your camera when you’re taking photos!

Okay, so maybe that’s not the most convenient piece of advice. It does have a kernel of truth, though: If you can stop direct light (from flashes, reflections, or sunlight) hitting the front element of your lens, the lens flare effect will be reduced significantly, or even eliminated altogether!

To keep the light out of your lens, you can block it out with your hand (not particularly convenient, as you’ll need both hands to operate your camera most of the time), you can get a friend to block out the light with a reflector, or just by standing in the sun so the front of your camera is in the shade.

Alternatively, you can use a lens hood (it’s one of those attachments that go onto the front of your lens – on the picture above, it is the flowery-shaped attachment), which will go a long way to blocking out stray light. You can also get straight lens hoods (without the flower-shape), or you can even make your own.

Guest article by Amanda Stachowski (thank you, Amanda!). Photos are all CC photos from Flickr, by Ian BC North, Yuan2003, ratkinson and K Sawyer.

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Your pictures; your rights