DJ shoot

Playing catch-up on old shoots again. And when I say 'old', I mean 'this summer, when life was lovely and weather was fantastic, staying inside writing blog posts seemed like endless tedium not to mention a waste of perfectly good sunshine, but now that winter is here and all I want to do is hibernate, I feel a bit silly posting photos that are over 5 months old'.

So.

Back in June, I did a photo shoot with a friend of a friend who also happens to be a DJ. He had seen the results of my RoMagazin shoot and liked that we used a big pair of headphones as a feature, so he wanted to do something similar. A couple of the results are below, and more are in the Flickr set.

Copyright

I interrupt the long silence on this blog to ask you: photographers, how jealously do you guard your copyright?

This post brought to you from Art Works 2011 and Strobist

Yesterday, I attended Art Works 2011, a fantastic conference seeking to endow artists with a little more business sense. I could go on and on about the great speakers I had a chance to hear and meet and the wealth of information I managed to capture, but for the sake of brevity (and our 3-minute attention spans), I’ll cut to the chase. One keynote address was provided by Jennifer Dickson, a highly regarded Ottawa-based photographer. In her speech, she advised all artists to guard their copyright ferociously against “thieving bastards” and copycats. In particular, she recounted an instance in which a student had presented her with a portfolio; the student had mimicked Dickson’s style and dedicated the portfolio to her. Dickson was neither touched nor impressed; on the contrary, she saw the work as copyright infringement and reprimanded the student for it.

On the other hand, David Hobby of Strobist recently published a post defending Justin Lanier’s reproduction of Dan Winters’ portrait of Bono, arguing that many artists learn and develop their own style in part by mimicking the style of their masters.

As much as I detest outright copyright infringement and the disregard of intellectual property, I’m with David on this one. There is – and rightly so – a difference between claiming someone else’s work as your own, and mimicking a style or technique for your own education and improvement. I’ve also been known to reproduce some of my favourite images; far from trying to become or upstage the artists I admire, adding those techniques to my repertoire is helping me find my own style, by picking and choosing the elements that speak to me and adding my own twist to them. And I know that if I dedicated any of my work to a mentor who discounted it and cited copyright law to me, I would change mentors in a hurry.

What do you think? Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, or should we all find our own path without crossing those of the artists we admire?