November 29, 2004

Upgrades and Downgrades

Daily Photography

Given my newfound employment situation, I have had some time to rearrange a few things around here. First up, Weekly Photography is gone. Don’t cry, in its place you will now find Daily Photography! Every day you will hopefully be treated to a new photograph; just like before, there will be a photo thumb in the sidebar on the homepage, but now you can also access it from the main nav or through syndication (RSS or Atom). What’s more, I have finally gotten around to adding comments and individual pages for each photograph. I did indeed love the previous Weekly Photography Flash module for its simplicity, but in the end, I needed something a bit more verbose. And now I have another reason to take too many photographs.

Reach Out and Touch Me

Also with my new professional aims, I decided it was time to straighten up and get a proper contact page going. Now you don’t have to use your boring old mail program or even leave your favorite site to contact me. 24/7/365, I am here for you, buddy.

Portfolio Hiatus

Sadly, the last bit to note is not an addition, but a retraction. Due to copyright concerns, the extreme grey area that is fair-use, and the work-for-hire agreements I signed, I have had to temporarily take down my public portfolio. After getting hit from a couple of my past employers for showing some of the work I did while I was employed with them, I was asked to remove the work from my site. So it goes with work-for-hire agreements. For those who don’t know, work-for-hire agreements basically state that any work you do while employed under them are considered under the copyright and ownership of the employer/company. This means that your employer/company (and not you) is the one who created the work. It sucks, but this is pretty standard for just about any design related full-time employment contract.

I imagine before the internet, this wasn’t as big of a deal because people could use the work in their books when they would go interviewing around town. But that is just one copy of the work, shown privately. An online portfolio of your work on your site becomes a public entity for all the world to view at their leisure.

Fear not, since there is no work-for-hire contract for any new work I get, I can attempt to be master of my own domain. So, as soon as I have amassed enough to form a comfortable body of work, the public portfolio will be back. Until then, just take my word for it that I am a designer and I can design some OK stuff. If you are interested in hiring me for work, you may contact me to obtain a password to view the private portfolio. Please, no casual inquiries.

Update

I apologize if anyone was trying to comment earlier this morning, in my mad dash to update the site I broke them. Everything is just peachy now.

Commentary (7):

1. RJ Hampden says… nov 29, 2004 | 9:40 am

So, WTF? The former employer couldn’t just allow you to display the work you did for them? You aren’t leaving on bad terms, are you? What about a URL to a site that you designed?

2. Josh says… nov 29, 2004 | 7:43 pm

Sounds more like a Non-Disclosure Agreement or something.

3. Jason Santa Maria says… nov 29, 2004 | 7:54 pm

Yes, it is similar to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but the difference here is that the work is not confidential information anymore, it has been released to the public. What is at issue here is who owns the copyright and the subsequent rights to show the work and claim it as their own. That is where the work-for-hire part comes into play.

4. Scrid says… nov 30, 2004 | 1:55 am

Same thing happened to me. I was the Photoshop Jockey / Secondary Photographer for a digital early adopter photographer. He gave the other grunt and me free prints of our work for our books giving me, I believed, portfolio rights.

He emailed me this spring, the first contact in six years, demanding I remove his work from my site. He found my site by Googling his company name. I hit higher than his site because I linked to him and fully credited the ownership and work.

If I hadn’t attributed him he would have never seen my portfolio.
He had every legal right, but he was also a jerk about it, adding the ”..if you had asked first…” line.

So I removed the images and when emailing him back reminded him to please clear his cache and that the Google cache and Internet Archive were beyond my control.

So much for mentoring.

5. niff says… nov 30, 2004 | 10:31 am

on an off the subject note…check out these beautiful paintings by caroline demooy. just beautiful!

6. niff says… nov 30, 2004 | 10:33 am

on subject:
it seems as though we all try to be nice by giving credit to the companies we did work for, when it turns out, if we didnt credit them at all they probably would never have found it in the first place.
bummer.

ps. i am the ONLY person in the office right now and its sooo creepy but awesome. IM IT!

7. Josh says… nov 30, 2004 | 7:04 pm

Yeah… was just thinking… the good old days of printed folios… How fun that was printing 15 pages and later finding out that your printer’s black cartridge is empty… :(