Quite an interesting conversation going on on MetaFilter about photographer and Greymatter author Noah Grey’s return to the web. It mostly centers around Grey’s disabling of common image-saving techniques on his web pages.
My personal opinion, guided by Philip Greenspun, is that on the web, you should put everything out there for people to see. Greenspun, for example, puts the entire text of his books online. And I bet it doesn’t hurt his sales. I know I bought the book – after getting interested in the text online. I think you gain more from that approach than jealously guarding your works. Would you become interested in a photographer after seeing just postage-stamp-size scans of his photos, because he wants you to pay for a fancy print otherwise? I don’t think so.
I’ve downloaded some very nice, if relatively tiny, Barry Windsor-Smith pictures.
I’ve also spent a few hundred dollars on his picture books (and more on prints).
I don’t feel at all guilty, and he shouldn’t feel cheated.
I’ll admit to being a bit paranoid about putting my photos online. It’s too easy to steal someone’s photo for your own use. It’s harder to make a quick impact with stolen words.
I don’t agree with the “give it away and they will buy it anyway” philosophy. Most people won’t buy it anyway. They’ve already got it, and in the case of a photo they can print it out themselves without compensating the artist.
I sympathize with Noah’s desire to put up roadblocks to downloading images, but the side effects are annoying. My browsing style is to open links in new windows; Noah’s site prevents me from doing that so it’s not as fun to click around.
Noah’s advantage is that he has a large audience already. The slightly larger audience he alienates with the right-clicking won’t make a difference. His current audience will love every photo he takes and they will buy enough prints for him to finance new cameras and printers.
As Noah himself admits, the right-click disabling only slows down savvy people intent on stealing his images. (They’re also sitting as cached copies on your hard drive, folks!) Besides, people who grab photos off Noah’s site don’t want them hanging on their walls, because the files aren’t of sufficient quality or size for decent prints. They’re like bookmarks that get collected and never used. I imagine most just sit on hard drives and never get seen again. It’s just the first impression that makes you want a copy. A different kind of impulse shopping, as it were.