So, I own ettible.com. (My last name is Ett, if this URL doesn’t seem immediately like the most clever thing you’ve ever seen.) I’ve owned it for a while now but don’t quite know what to do with it.
See, my friends have been getting their pictures stolen from their blogs. And I’ve had some of mine stolen, too. And truthfully, some of the theft has been very good to my traffic numbers. But some of it has also resulted in this one particular picture of Kamran being posted in all sorts of strange contexts, ending in great shame for him and his family.
Okay, I’m kidding about that last part, but seriously, the kid is famous. So I set out to mark my photos in some way and designed this logo for myself:
And seeing that it looked crazy when I actually slapped it on a photo, I developed this little watermark, too:
But I don’t know where to go from here. It’s one thing to paste a claim of ownership onto every picture on an actual photoblog, which I guess is what ettible.com is. But it’s another thing to watermark every single thing I post on my blogs.
This looks pretty ridiculous, right?:
And now imagine a whole post on donuts4dinner.com where all of the photos have that in one corner. A watermark really takes away from the best pictures, but of course the best pictures are the most likely to be taken.
So I’m torn. I don’t want to look like some sort of egoist who thinks my pictures are worth stealing, but of course I hope to become the kind of photographer people want to steal from someday. And you have to dress for the job you want, right?
(Says the girl wearing flip-flops to work.)
