Commons vs. microstock

While looking at my Flickr statistics, I saw that another one of my photos was used by the Wikimedia Foundation (there are some already which I uploaded myself). It’s this one here:

That’s ok with me. All of my photos which I upload are under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can do with them more or less how they wish. See the image and the description of the license and rights on its Wikimedia page if you wish to.

It was picked up and its license was checked and confirmed by a bot, and then the image was actually used (by a user named “OttawaAC”) on the page about sewing machines in the English Wikipedia, which makes me a bit proud.

What was my original purpose to take that photo of Mitchie’s sewing machine anyway? I did it for an article (in German) about microstock photography from March 2011.

No, I don’t really like microstock, as I also wrote in that article. I listed – as only a few of the reasons against those – that:

- first, with very few exceptions (like Yuri Arcurs), that business model is good for the agencies only. It certainly won’t make many others rich
- second, and this is even more important in my opinion, it’s the death stroke for professional photographers, who have to earn a living with good and professional photography
- third, and that was more of a personal note, I didn’t want to develop a “business view” onto any object I look at. Definitely would hate that “Ka-ching!” sound in my ears and those dollar symbols in my eyes when looking at stuff

There are more reasons of course, but instead of taking away business from professionals, I decided to more or less donate my “work” (it’s more like the average quality output from a hobbyist, or an amateur) to the public domain. And if any of my photo is used in that sense, I’m happy and proud.

Not everything we do has to generate money. I’ll be glad to leave that to the professionals.

Thanks for reading.