“Love when photographers plaster their name & © all over an image. It’s like a chef peeing his initials onto your mashed potatoes. Voilà!” -Merlin Mann

Watermarking has always debated on doing. As a photographer I find it hard to paste something over my photos. By drawing the eye away from the object I was photographing I was ruining the photo. What was the point of expressing myself if every photo had this ugly stamp on it? Well, in the end I decided to go ahead and start watermarking all of my photos. Let’s run through the pro’s and con’s.

Cons:
-Asthetically displeasing
-Makes me feel like I’m expressing myself to be a professional in places I just want to have fun (ie flickr)
-Less likely to have my photo used across the internet
-Nice to have flickr as a photo-backup system but with watermarked that can’t be.

Pros:
-Always gives me credit for my work no matter who takes it and embeds it elsewhere
-Establishes me as a professional
-Limits the number of people that will “steal” my work
-With the new “Orphaned Works” Law I can be sure that my photo will not be justifiably stolen.
-If the artist or blogger forgets or just blatantly doesn’t attribute credit It’s not the end of the world.

So as you can see the pro’s out weigh the cons. I have had some photos make it BIG and later only to wish that I would have placed a watermark somewhere before hundreds of thousands of people made it their desktop wallpapers and blogged it all over the internet.

With this decision you will start seeing almost all my “serious” shots with watermarks.

What do you think?