"Out of Control" Goes Viral
Monday, April 30, 2012 at 04:27PM A few years back I set out to illustrate the concept of being "out of control". I created an image of a woman surrounded by the total chaos of her 5 children (with another on the way). We had so much fun shooting it and almost every female art director with children of her own would say "that's my life!". Having kids of my own and being completely type A, it's an image near and dear to my heart. I have always loved the conversations it incites.
As a comercial photographer, the reach of the images I create is usually limited to the media buy of specific clients and to those potential clients reviewing my work online or in private meetings with my rep, Jenna. It's not usually like the "Ultimate Dog Tease," with millions of hits on YouTube...Until last week when we got a front row seat watching this "Out of Control" image take off on a ride around the internet.
It started with a friend of Jenna's who emailed her that she saw the picture on a blog. Then, Sunday, night another woman reposted the image on her facebook page. By Tuesday it had received 40,516 likes, 7,065 comments, and been shared 27,844 times. It was, at first, really exciting for us to witness. We actually watched as, every couple of minutes, people were posting comments like these:
It was all very cool and gratifying to watch, particularly in real time, until we realized that there was no credit on the image, no reference to us whatsoever. All those people, downloading to their desktops, sending it to friends and simply loving this image that took so much time and effort to produce and no one was the wiser that we created it (Speaking of credit: many thanks to Tui Stark for the fabulous prop styling, Erin Charest for the awesome wardrobe and Cynthia Murphy for the spectacular hair and make-up!).
What ensued was an all day effort, on Jenna's part, to get credit for the image and to harness some traffic back to our website. Unbelievably, it was very difficult...We understand that not everyone has money for imagery they are using and that there are even people in the world that feel they shouldn't have to pay for any of it, regardless. But, that's a whole other conversation. Giving credit is easy, however, and with a small amount of effort you can usually find out where the image came from (try a site like Tineye.com to start).
This conversation about the internet and copyright has been going on since the begining of the world wide web and since I am sure you have heard the arguments over and over, I'm not going to get into that here. What I would like to point out, though, is how valuable that credit can be to any artist. In the end, Jenna was able to get that credit for me as well as links back to our facebook page and heathrobbins.com. As a result of this post we received 760 additional visitors to our website and our facebook "likes" were up 46%. That kind of attention and the possible leads can be just as valuable as financial compensation. So, in this case, it all worked out and we're happy so much excitement was stirred up on facebook....and that 40,000 people like the image as much as we do!
Here is the image. Feel free to re-post it... just make sure my name is on it :)
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Reader Comments (2)
I just saw this picture on FB and just had to search up your name and let you know that this is an awesome picture! I love it. :D
Hello.
I saw this wanderful picture on FB a month ago and shared it immediately. I LOVE IT! It's so pure and true... It makes me smile everytime I take a look at it. My kids act the same in the kitchen and we're planning to get a cat and a dog :)