Three Palms Photography Blog

As I said earlier, I thought the photographs I took Christmas day 2004 might be significant. When I ventured out to start photographing around town that Christmas morning, I had realized the historical significance of the snow. I had two websites where I had already been posting my images, oldbaldandgrumpy.com and PBase.com. When I returned home that morning, I immediately downloaded the images onto my computer and started the editing process. Not until several days later did I start having regrets about my shoot. My first regret was that I did not take more photographs of more places around town. My second regret was that, about halfway through the shoot, I switched from shooting in RAW mode to JPEG mode because I was worried about running out of space on my compact flash card. The last decision would eventually come back to haunt me in a big way.

After I culled through the images and made some edits, I picked out the ones I thought came out the best. After I was satisfied with the edits I had made, I posted the images to my website and to my PBase account. A few days later, I did some searching on the Internet to see if I could find any other images depicting the “miracle” snow along the Texas coast. Not surprisingly, I found many snow images. What was surprising is I started noticing some of my snow images had made it to other websites! What was that all about? I could not believe that my snow images were being pilfered and posted on other websites. In most cases, the persons who posted them did not give me credit for the images. Not until much later did I learn that, most of the time, my images had been distributed by e-mail. Not that it is a valid excuse, but many e-mail recipients could not have given me credit for the images because they really did not know who took them. This event would introduce me to the wonderful world of copyright infringement, a subject I had only associated with music, video and software pirating, not photography.