Copyright differs for photo, text, video and varies from one country to another. Check on your area and consider the following idea.
Copyright and Photos
Most photographers want to keep copyright of their photos. To get the rights to the photo without having to constantly pay a fee, you would have to reach an agreement.
Some photographers specialise in actors and others who need or want to be able to keep using a photo without paying further sums. You might find their advertisements in publications featuring actors. Or just do a search.
If a photographer prints off pictures and you want to pay for this, the time and trouble, and the paper, that's a different matter. The question is whether you could continue using the photos printed or distributed by somebody else, or by yourself, during that photographer's lifetime and if they died or sold their business to somebody else.
A photographer might, not unreasonably, want to publish a book of all the photos they had ever taken. You might want to have an arrangement allowing the photographer to continue to have rights over the photo, so long as you had rights to use it. So one of you owns the right but shares it with the other, or both have equal rights.
I presume if you go to a stage school photo shoots are arranged for you.
What are you paying for?
First, you are paying for the photographer's time.
Secondly, their studio and equipment.
Thirdly, it's a business - they may be paying tax, secretary, website etc.
Fourthly, it can take hours to go through many photos to choose the best one. Many more hours to edit it. Get rid of red eye. Remove blemishes. Adjust colour balance. Crop the picture. Increase contrast.
Storage and filing.
Captions - each photo must be stored and retrieved, by name of person, date, location, subject. Each photo must be distinguished from the next by number of subject.
If you are storing your own photos, you will find the more captions you write at the time the easier it is to find a photo later.
CV
You also need an up to date cv of all your experience. If you are a retired or older actress or model, you may have lost track of the dates when you did work. So you want to update your CV and/or include pictures and clips.
Once your photos are on the internet, some websites take away your copyright. You know longer have exclusive rights, and cannot charge others to use the photo.
Don't take my word for anything. I am merely telling you what to watch out for and what you need to check.
Stories
How to identify a photo? I once saw a photo of a monument in India printed in a magazine. I thought - hey - that's my photo.
However, when I went back to my photos I saw that it wasn't. The people in the background were different. If you can put your own family or friends or dog, or car in a photo, you can prove it's your photo.
The opposite happened to me with a photo in Brides magazine. I sent the text and a choice of photos. When the article was published and they sent me a copy, I saw that they had a full page spread of a photo labelled Spanish Tourist Board. I keep looking at the photo and wondering why they had chosen it.
I conceded that it was colourful, all in focus, attractively framed. A good photo.
Later I received a message from an unhappy sounding girl asking me to phone the magazine about my text and photos. I worried for hours. What had I done wrong? What could they have done wrong? Had they lost all my photos and had to use one by the tourist board?
It turned out that they had used one of my photos but mistakenly attributed it to the tourist board. I asked them to print a notice in the next edition acknowledging that it was my photo.
Nowadays, you can print your own photographer's name small as part of the photo. Unless the user crop it out, your photo remains captioned.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer
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