April 6th, 2009
Greystone Endangered & Stolen Pictures
According to a write-up on Preservation New Jersey’s blog, the state’s governor, Jon Corzine, has stated that he favors demolition of the Greystone Kirkbride: Governor Corzine Apparently Favors Demolition of Greystone. While the governor doesn’t have final say on what happens to Greystone, the office does have a lot of power and I’m sure Corzine could have a strong influence on the fate of the building if he wanted to. Not being from NJ, I don’t really know much about Corzine or how much he’s involved with the future of the former hospital campus. Maybe someone from NJ could chime in about that?
I also can’t help but mention that while reading Preservation NJ’s blog’s post and another article about the hospital by the same, I was surprised by the appearance of my Greystone admin photo (without any acknowledgment of its source to boot). It’s been a continuing annoyance since I started KB.com that some people believe that if a picture is online, that means it’s somehow in the public domain and they can do whatever they want with it. In this case, the people using my picture are working to preserve a building I also want saved, so I’m not going to do anything about it (except write this whiney post;). Luckily not too long ago I decided to watermark my online photos with a copyright declaration. It’s something I strongly recommend to anybody posting photos online.
Why do I get the feeling the Greystone thing isn’t going to be solved anytime in the next several years?
I’ve had a couple of mine show up on sites that I had no idea about, including the Weston State Hospital site when they first started it & some site in the Czech Republic selling car parts.
So how does one watermark photos? I’ve seen mine pop up a lot on Flicker.com and while my photos weren’t stolen there is some guy claiming to be the official Weston photographer or something like that, who basically went around and copied a lot of my shots, angles, etc.
squad546: Yeah, it does seem likely that the Greystone question isn’t going to be answered anytime soon.
Funny that your pictures were used on a car parts site.
WSH: There are probably several ways to watermark a digital photo, but I basically do it like so:
1) open the picture in Photoshop
2) create a text layer and write my little copyright notice
3) change the opacity of the text layer to something like 25%
4) flatten the image and save