With a new sports season quickly approaching I wanted to take a second to share with you guys a recent experience in hopes that it will help to deter the same issue in the future with one of you.

I recently received an email from the mom of a local star athlete inquiring as to why there were no photos of her kid from this past season. The background on this situation: this particular mother had a child who was a local star athlete across multiple sports. Each year for the past 4 seasons I watched this particular child play and had captured numerous images of them in action in several different sports.  Each year this same mother would approach me on multiple occasions thanking me for the photos and promising to buy each and every photo that I captured of their child. In the 3 years leading up to this past season, said mother bought ZERO photos. However, she and her child were always the first to steal each and every photo from my website to post all over social media.

While I appreciate the “free advertising”, free does not pay the bills. If you’re not familiar with the price of good photography equipment, try googling Canon or Nikon DSLR camera’s or lenses and then look on the very high end of that spectrum…… it’s not even remotely what one would call cheap. Not only is it considered stealing to take the watermarked and unpaid for images from the website, it is also copyright infringement. Under United States government law, any image taken becomes the sole property of the photographer as soon as the shutter button is released and remains as such until 25 years after the death of said photographer, or until other arrangements are made as to the purchase of said image.

In the case of this particular mother and child, I had good case history that not only was she not going to be purchasing any of the images of her child, but she was also going to steal them all. The solution to the issue for me was simple……don’t post any photos of her child from this season. That is not to say that there aren’t any to post, there are many, but why? She obviously wasn’t interested in purchasing them rightfully, so why post them?

This particular case is not an isolated incident. There are others. Odds are if you made a habit of stealing your photos and now you’re not seeing any/many photos of you to steal, your actions did not go unnoticed.

The next time you see that awesome photo of you and you go to steal it, think about the full consequences of your actions…….it may just be that your next game winning touchdown, slam dunk, or walk off homerun is the photo that you never get to see.

Lastly…..I would not be where I am today without the help and continued support of many you who continue to support this passion of mine year after year. A simple thank you is not nearly enough.