some homeless dude put together a dog-cat-mouse combo in Union Square the other weekend: http://flickr.com/photos/cmak/3168424448/

obviously not nearly as great, but it certainly brought turtle-frog-spider to mind

your cake decor looks wonderful, your local baker is such an artist.

Note to self : Stack animals on each other and make up a heartwrenching story. Take photos. Fame, lawsuits, and then cash awaits. :)

My dad had a popular lecture he would give to amateur photo clubs about the value of the occasional great photo. During his 54 year career, he took 700,000 shots, of which he would immediately discard 90%. He was left with about 70,000 high quality shots that got picked up by stock agencies and other organizations that agreed to represent his work. Of these photos, about 80% never made a single sale. Only 5% had multiple sales. The best 2% (of the 10% he did not discard) accounted for more than half his income.

When I was a child, I heard story after story about the surprise best sellers. One morning in 1970 he walked out the front door with a camera in his hand and, seeing a butterfly on a flower in the front yard, took a picture of it. He had taken dozens of other butterfly photos, but for some reason that one went on to make $17,000 over the next 15 years (double the figure to adjust for inflation). One 4th of July in the early 1980s he took some night shots of the fireworks, which he then comped together in his darkroom using traditional photo overlay techniques (this is more than 10 years before Photoshop). Though he had dozens of other fireworks shots (which didn’t sell), this one went on to make $36,000 over the course of many years.

His biggest surprise was when he went to Morocco as part of a tour for other professional photographers. For two weeks they were taken around in a bus to famous spots. He recalls one time they all got out at a famous mosque and stood their photographing its golden dome. He looked to his left and to his right and saw 15 other professional photographers clicking away. He thought to himself, “I’ll never make any money on these shots. We are all pros and we are all taking the same shot.” But the next day they were out in the desert, photographing a ruined, abandoned fort. There were no other human beings in sight, only the bus and the bus driver and the photographers. But then my dad looked off to his right and in the distance, saw a man, dressed all in white, come over a sand dune. The scene reminded my dad of one of his favorite novels, The Martian Chronicles, a scene of infinite desert, and there in the middle, the impossibly lonely figure of a single human being walk across a vast expanse of pure sand. So my dad took that shot, which the other photographers did not think to take, and that became his best selling photo of Africa. Several encyclopedias and travel guides bought the rights to it.

In the late 90s the arrival of Photoshop and CDs full of royalty free images changed the industry, and it became harder to make a living, but my dad found that the top 1% (of the 10% he kept) of his photos continued to generate some good sales.

He worried a great deal about amateur photographers who were giving away the rights to their photos without realizing the value in the occasional photo. When Flickr emerged, he had some deep reservations about their too casual promotion of the most open Creative Commons licenses. When the story broke about Virgin Mobile using a photo of a girl which the novice photographer had marked for “commercial use” my dad wrote several long articles for local amateurs about the dangers of offering photos for commercial use with securing a release from the humans that appear in the photos. It was clear, in the Flickr case, that the photographer hadn’t really understood what the words “commercial use” meant. My dad developed a lecture on this subject and was invited to speak at over a 100 amateur camera clubs in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

All of this is to say, I hope you are aggressive in defending the photo. Every once in a long while, people take photos that are worth a great deal, and even when they are not interested in making money off those, it doesn’t seem right for others to do so without permission.