Our Digital Policy is to not sell digital files except for commercial projects. We just don’t do it. Why…?
Chile Dog Photography Digital Policy
- We would be doing you a terrible disservice by handing you a flash drive and walking away. We are first and foremost “print artists.” This means we make all the critical decisions about our art to produce heirloom quality products that you use to decorate your home and hand down to future generations.
- We cannot and will not stand by any file that is not printed by a professional lab. Different monitors, printers and even different papers will yield different results. Many of the discount printers (you know who they are) use photographic papers that are out of date. We calibrate our monitors with our printers. We also carefully color-correct our images and use the best professional labs so that our images are printed at their very best. We simply don’t want our name associated with an image that has been printed poorly.
- Digital files can easily go astray. We once made an image for a city in Texas on a volunteer basis that later ended up on the cover of a local family magazine with photo credit to only the city. We discovered it totally by chance walking past the magazine rack at the local health club. Other photographers have had images sold for advertising purposes. So rather than invite bad karma, we just don’t release our images into the digital wild. That being said, if you would like to commission us to create images for commercial use, we would be more than happy to discuss your needs with you.
- As the modern equivalent of a negative, they are considered intellectual property. Our artwork involves considerable technical and artistic know-how. Images are subject to copyright laws just like every other piece of content, written or otherwise. Because we value our work, we register all of our images with the Library of Congress as required by law.
- Finally, a quote from Internet pioneer, Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in San Jose, California in February 2015.
We have various formats for digital photographs and movies and those formats need software to correctly render those objects.
Sometimes the standards we use to produce those objects fade away and are replaced by other alternatives and then software that is supposed to render images can’t render older formats, so the images are no longer visible.
This is starting to happen to people who are saving a lot of their digital photographs because they are just files of bits. The file system doesn’t know how to interpret them, you need software to do that. Now you’ve lost the photograph in effect.
If there are pictures that you really really care about then creating a physical instance is probably a good idea. Print them out, literally.
I’ll let Vint tell you all about “Bit Rot.” Fascinating. (TEDx, 2014)
A personal case in point, Microsoft no long allows us to open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files we created in 1998. I had a request for my thesis defense presentation a few weeks ago and couldn’t open the Powerpoint file. Fortunately, I had waited to publish much of my thesis until 2012, and upgraded the Word and Excel files to that point in time, so I could access the data. If I hadn’t, I would be SOL. The presentation was lost, but everything else is “safe.” For now. Thanks Microsoft!
We will happily GIFT you complimentary small watermarked digital files of all printed images suitable for sharing on social media. We’ll even give you an app that will let you keep your images on your phone or tablet. Should a piece you purchase from us ever be damaged or destroyed, we will happily replace it, with our compliments. We keep all printed files indefinitely and religiously back them up on both multiple hard drives and the Cloud. We are kind of digital packrats around here ;).
It is our Digital Policy to not sell digital files except for commercial projects. We truly hope you understand.