water marks and your thoughts

[belliveau]

I started to think about this when I was looking through some photos on facebook and I keep seeing "photography" under their name done in a water mark and thinking what a waste of space for something that is very obvious it’s not video. Any way my question to you is who uses them and why?

I like them because most of my friends use my pics for other stuff. I don’t charge for my pics so I figure it’s a way of letting other know where to find my stuff or who did it. I know mine in the start was fairly big and now I keep making is smaller and smaller so I can see more of my work. Now I'm almost at the point of just taking it off or maybe going to a clear water mark for the pics I love the most.

[Iguanasan]

This got missed way back when but a spammer brought the thread to the foreground again. I like the idea of an unobtrusive stamp or logo that lets people know who took the photograph and I've seen a few but for the most part I hate watermarks. They distract from the image.

[casil403]

I'm kind of with Iggy on this one. A small signature at the bottom of the photo for me is fine but if it affects my viewing of the image...fuggetaboutit! I personally think of watermarks as an artist signature the same as in paintings...down bottom left corner. Again just my on the topic.

[ericmark]

This is something which caused a heated discussion in my local club. The club rules for any images submitted for competition have no identifying marks other than the competition number. Clearly a watermark is not allowed but they also want meta-data removed. I have said we should be able to trust judges not to look at the meta-data and if we can't then can we also trust them from not claiming the picture is theirs? I see no real reason why meta-data should be removed.

But having to have two version of a picture one with and one without id marks is a pain. So in general I just rely on the reduced size of web versions to stop people claiming my work.

I have been however building a web site using many images donated by the club. This has produced a further head ache as some people want their name in lights and other want to be anonymous. With 100's of pictures to sort through this becomes a problem working out who does and who doesn't want naming and also ensuring the images don't get mixed up.

Starting asking for members name in the file name if they want their name up. The 8 digit file name is something of the past and no reason why one can't have name in file name. However water mark would get around this problem and so I can see why people would be even asked to add a water mark.

Using Software like svBuilder to prepare pictures for the web can strip all meta data and change the file name so again water make would make sense.

So I would say much depends what the pictures are being used for. I would not watermark family snap shots.

[slackercruster]

Watermarks are generally good. Check out my 'Great Tog' blog. (NSFW)

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/slackercruster-gt

Some of the pix I showcase are by unknown togs. If they had a watermark I could list it.

Now, I got tons of pix I find on the web and print up to hang in my room. I don't like watermarks then.

I use watermarks for my online stuff. If I'm sending to a museum, seling a pix or making a book, then no watermarks. If on ebay, a big watermark right in the center.

...So, it all just depends.

[ericmark]

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