Stolen Graphics

This is a scan of the original print of my famous rose. The photo is about 20 years old by now and was taken back when I was planning to become a real artist. I took three views of this rose. This one was the best. I had already taken classes in using computers. I took a class in CorelDraw and then a class in digital art. Back then the digital camera we had in the class was a black and white camera that the students shared in the classroom. Mostly the class consisted of working with scanned photos and photo editing all done in black and white.

Then I began to take art classes, drawing, water color, design, acrylic painting...no oil allowed, etc. My classes came to a halt once I had Hailey. I put my paints away. So computer art once Hailey was asleep seemed to be a life saver. At first I worked with CorelDraw then I got my own scanner and began to scan my rose photos. The scanner came with a nice little photo editing program and then I found that after it had been bought out by Adobe I could upgrade to Photoshop.

One of my earliest at home photo edits was the rose. I took away the background and brightened and sharpened up the photo. Then I did the same for the other photos of this rose and in one of the versions I placed all three together into one picture.

Back in the mid 1990s when I first began to post my work on the web it never occurred to me that anyone would want to take my work and post it as their own. This rose was copied onto pages all over the web. By the late 1990s I was not a happy camper. I often wrote to the offenders and asked that my rose be removed from their pages. I sometimes had to contact servers. Some servers insisted on forms being filled out an sent by snail mail. I used image searches to find the photos. After awhile the old collection sites shut down and there were better photos on the web than my old rose scans. I also got a digital camera and my photos seemed to get better. I have a series of rose photos that at one time I used image protection on now they are just posted on my web pages...as a sort of history of what I did in the past.

Anyway I thought that the old collection sites had pretty much gone. Photo sharing sites like Webshots began to insist that posted photos be the property of the poster so things seemed a lot better. Now there is a web server called Pinterest that has made image stealing easy and seemingly the thing to do. Pinterest encourages people to re post anything they see so users can quickly violate copyright and make it easy for other people to do it too. Pinterest says flat out that they are not copyright violators and that anyone uploading images is the only one to blame if the image owner objects. Pinterest is pandering to people that want to take credit for the work of others. Why else would anyone want to make web albums full of other people's creations? Image thieves are just no talent pinheads looking for approval with nothing of their own to show.