a rant & some cute photos

*rant starts here* (skip to the bottom if you just want to see cute photos)
I'm a member of a professional photographer's board online and logged on a few days ago to discover that someone on Flickr was stealing images and claiming them as hers. A bunch of photogs had had their work stolen- imagine how shocked I was to find my photos among them.

I know other bloggers have had similar problems with people stealing images or material from their blogs or off of Flickr. This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me, either. In the past I've found my images on a person's 'professional portrait photography' site- she was also claiming my work as hers. When I emailed the so-called pro photog about the images, they suddenly disappeared from her website (tho she never replied to me).

But this time my images were stolen off of Flickr and someone else completely different was linking to photos here on my blog, claiming the photos as their own. I made these two discoveries within a few hours of each other, so I'm pretty pissed about the whole thing.

The Flickr problem has already been taken care of. As far as I know, the person who was linking directly to images on my blog has stopped doing it. But that won't stop anyone else from doing the same stuff.

People who link to my images or my blog while crediting me as the author of said images/material are fine with me. It's the losers who post my work and credit themselves that piss me off.

I'm still not sure what I will do in the long run about this problem. The obvious solution is to watermark all my images with my info....though that means a few seconds extra of editing before posting photos. Just not sure if the extra time spent watermarking will offset the annoyance factor of the image thieves. I know a particularly determined person can easily remove a watermark, but it does take *them* some extra time to do as well. It usually discourages the casual copyright thief though. This is something I'll have to think about over the next couple of days...just don't be surprised to see watermarked images from here on out.

*end rant*

Now, onto cute photos-

We had the neighborhood kids over for a Gingerbread House Raising....

the houses in progress (more candy was consumed than used on the houses)



the finished houses
more photos here

The kids had a ball- most of the candy ended up in either their mouths or on the floor. I think the houses turned out really cute and this may become another neighborhood tradition since it was so much fun. Even we moms had a good time gossiping and drinking hot cider.