A photo of mine has been chosen as the cover shot for the 300 Star Letter, the magazine of the Gull Wing Group. The Gull Wing Group is a US-based club of 300sl owners… something I don’t qualify for, so I’m not a member. My parents are members though, and I got that photograph while co-driving their ’57 300sl roadster in the 2004 Colorado Grand. My father called me yesterday when his arrived. He saw the shot and at first thought: wow, that is JUST LIKE a classic “Chuck” photograph! Then he recognized the #47 from their car and knew it was an ACTUAL “Chuck” shot, and called me.
Funny thing is, I don’t recall granting permission for the photograph to be used in such a manner. Mind you I may have forgotten. I’ll have to dig around in my email to see.
Here is the original, untouched, uncropped image:
well done Chuck – how many mp is the camera again? I notice the power lines have been removed in the cover shot – can’t believe anything today!
Jerome
Though I’m fairly sure you may find it an honor that your shot was used, I trust you’ll take them to task for using/modifying a *copyrighted* piccy w/o yer permission?
Go git’m, chuckles!
Jerome, the cam is a 5mp Olympus C3030Z. It is a few years old now, and sort of the middle ground between the first wave of consumer digicams and the second wave of bigMP & SLRs you see now. It LOOKs like a small old-school mini SLR… think Leica. Lots of handy control features too. I like it a lot. I have a fliter ring for it and almost always shoot with a polarizer filter. The LCD tilts both down and up so I can hold the cam above my head, or down and still compose shots. This one though was just hold and click, without viewing. That classic “chuck” shot you know. 😉
Paul, I wrote them a nice note. Given that it is a club newsletter, not a huge for-profit magazine or advertisement, I’m not going to go after them with guns & lawyers blazing. But they SHOULD know that you can’t just lift photographs of the Internet and use in print without permission!
I’ve almost always said “yes” when asked.
–chuck
I knew you had an older Olympus but always assumed it was less MP and you were just a good photographer! 🙂 5MP seems plenty to me now that I have my 5MP Canon S2 (up to S5 now – they missed out 4 ha!) and the tilting viewfinder is so useful isn’t it! I wanted to use a polarising filter for ever on digital cameras and eventually got one for the S2 but the results were very disappointing to what I am used to with film camera… I probably need a real SLR digital one next camera…
Jerome
Since you’re inclined to be gentle with them, the next issue should include errata listing credit for the cover photo to you, and you will graciously accept the token compensation of US $50, net 30 days. Oh and you retain all copyright. I’m sure their magazine is copyrighted and they probably try to own anything they print. So you should assert – and they should explicitly recognize – that you are the owner of the photo. And they’ll forward to you 5 or 10 copies of the book – 1 or 2 of which you take apart to include in your hard-copy portfolio.
They are big boys and girls, as well as professional journalists. They know what they did, and they’ll be happy that you are a kind and generous and non-litigious car guy. And you’ll include them in your client list.