Sharing Your Stuff

The Arch and the Moon
Originally uploaded by compujeramey.

The idea that people don't put their best stuff online or that they don't want people to have high resolution (read: printable) copies of their work blows my mind.

I want people to use my photography. I want them to use it as desktop wallpapers. I want them to use it in brochures, course guides, and text books. I want that random surfer on Flickr to find my photo of Janesville, Wisconsin before he gets there and have a better idea of what he's getting into.

Keeping my photography to myself would be a crime. Not because I'm an amazing photographer (I'm not), but because it has value beyond ways I can imagine to the rest of the world. I tag, map, and comment about every decent picture I take and dump them to my Flickr account. Once they're in the Flickr cloud, I let everyone else do the work.


I've been contacted by Time magazine, featured in the USA Today, and had photos appear in countless catalogs not because I wanted to become published on multiple continents, but because I wanted my friends to have a way to access the high resolutions I had taken of them.

Unless you stand to make a huge pile of cash from your artwork (if you question this, this isn't you) you should put your stuff online and available for free through something like the Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow you to maintain control of your work and approve all derivatives or to set it free into the wind. It's up to you. What is important though is that you should put your artwork online.

The internet is the revolution of the citizens, not the corporations. Access to images of every place on the planet is part of this. Keeping your images on your hard drive, is not.

I would love to hear what the community thinks.