by Tim Gander

Engage brain before publication

It’s fair to say that these days there are far more people handling and publishing images than ever before. I’m not talking about photographers self-publishing to flickr, Facebook and the like, but those people within businesses and corporate organisations whose tasks include searching out, selecting and using images within their own publications.

This of course isn’t a problem, except that some (many? who knows) seem not to have had any kind of training for the job they’re being asked to do, and occasionally it all goes a bit wrong.

Classic examples have included a council department getting Birmingham in England mixed up with Birmingham, Alabama, USA on a council recycling leaflet in 2008. There’s some irony in the fact that 720,000 of the leaflets were distributed with the wrong Birmingham on them, but that it would have been environmentally wasteful to have them scrapped and recycled.

Another council, Dover, got its cliffs in a twist when they wanted to use a shot of the White Cliffs of Dover on their website. In an effort to find a “copyright free” photo, whatever that might be (presumably a photo taken at least 75 years ago, so black and white then), the council’s design agency plucked a lovely photo of some white cliffs from the internet and used that. The only problem being that the photo they used was of the Seven Sisters, nearly 80 miles away in another county.

Lindahls home page photo

No Turkish Delight for Greek Man – Lindahls Website.

These errors probably aren’t that serious. Silly and embarrassing, and indicative of an amateurish approach to images, but nobody died and nobody got hurt. No, the prize for borderline negligence goes to the Swedish dairy firm Lindahls Mejeri, who bought a stock image of what they thought was a Turkish man in traditional costume to use on the packaging of their Turkish Yogurt. I’m not sure if it was low-fat yogurt, but there must have been some instant weight loss when the firm discovered that the face adorning all their yogurt pots and marketing was that of a Greek man. Those of you not aware of the political faux pas in this situation,  just imagine that the feelings a Greek will have for Turkey are enough to curdle yogurt at 150 paces.

In that instance Lindahls are said to have paid an out-of-court settlement to the tune of over £500,000, such was the depth of the plaintiff’s hurt. Personally I wonder what the photographer’s caption read when he/she uploaded the image to the online stock library that sold the image onto Lindahls. Had the caption been misleading? or was it simply ignored?

And that isn’t the most serious case to have cropped up recently. In November of this year, The Guardian newspaper reported how The Independent had managed to confuse a photo of a Croatian film actor in Nazi uniform with a suspected Nazi WWII criminal Samual Kunz (oh the irony of his name!). This would be bad enough, but running the image next to the headline “Wanted for the deaths of 400,000 Jews,” this kind of error becomes serious, defamatory and potentially very expensive to settle. Take the cost of some spilt yogurt, and multiply that a few times.

I used to help run the picture desk of a regional newspaper, and was often required to find library photos of people featured in articles we were running. I was always careful about making sure I’d found the right photo of the right person, but if the story was particularly traitorous, for example reporting on the subject’s criminal activities, I would make sure I had three reasons to know that I had the right perpetrator. If I couldn’t be certain, I didn’t offer the photo for publication.

You have to wonder though if people handling images now have become too blase about the whole thing. Will it take a very high-profile case to make people a little more professional in their handling of images?

I’m going to finish on this rather tragic case of picture research gone wrong. On December 2nd 2010, this comment appeared at the end of an article on photographer Richard Mills:

hi richard

 

would you have a photo of a grouse . We are looking for one for a brochure on a walking route in co tipperary .

 

 

The article was an obituary for… Richard Mills.

in Advice / Industry Comment 4 comments
 by Tim Gander

Captain Caption’s Last Stand

Or, Captain Caption and the WORDS OF DOOOOOOM!

Okay, so we’ve already had two thrilling episodes of Captain Caption, and in this one we see our Lycra(TM) -wearing hero save the day yet again as we delve into the murky waters of the legalities of caption writing.

Actually, if you’re sensible, it’s not all that murky, but it’s wise to be aware of some basics.

I’ll deal with this in two sections, editorial and web. This applies to captions which appear under (or adjacent to) a photo, or the embedded caption in the IPTC table, which I covered previously.

If you’re sending out captions as part of a press release, either to print or web, you need to apply editorial standards. That is to say, the caption needs to be accurate and succinct. The first of those is vital. It is possible to libel someone by using a misleading or false caption on a photo. So stick to the facts of the story, and the realities of what is in the photo.

Be careful with your choice of words in captions. If a teetotaler is photographed holding a glass of water at a charity bash, don’t just caption that Mr X “enjoys a drink at the event” as the connotations could be misconstrued. There are too many examples to list, but common sense should guide you.

deceased footballer george best at portsmouth football ground

George Best - Safe to refer to his drinking because it's true. And in the UK, you can't libel the deceased.

The really simple answer is that if you’re going to send out a photo with a press release, get a press-trained photographer to shoot and caption the images. They’ll understand the style required, and the legalities of accurate captions.

Of course where images on the web are concerned, you still need to be careful to be accurate and avoid libel – perhaps more so because of the reach of the web, but the most commonly-committed sin on web images is to omit or strip out the electronic caption stored in the IPTC table.

You may not think this is much of an issue, and although it isn’t a criminal offence to omit the caption it can still lead to legal problems. Anyone who takes a photograph has the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) to be identified as the author of their work. All professionals and image libraries will state this as a term of use of their images.

Unfortunately, it’s not too difficult to strip out the table and leave the photographer unidentified with their own work. This is an issue which all web designers will need to address increasingly as there are moves afoot to introduce an orphan works act in UK legislation. This would allow image users to find pictures on the net and use them without paying if they can’t track down the original author. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but it’s a huge threat to the viability of professional photography, and could also result in the pictures you took or bought for your business web site being lifted and used in ways you might not appreciate and without the IPTC caption identifying the author, it makes the images even harder to keep track of once they’re out there.

So remember, when composing captions; play safe, be accurate, keep it simple and make sure you keep it attached to the photo.

But now Captain Caption has flown his last mission. The skin-tight hero costume is wearing alarmingly thin at the crotch, and the cape keeps getting tangled in revolving doors, so I’m going to leave captions for a bit. Of course if this or the other articles have thrown up any questions for you, do comment them here and I’ll answer as best I can.

in Advice 0 comments