As part of planning our wedding next year, the lovely Janet and I have begun looking into photographers. It seems that at least some photographers apply the same dodgy lock-in practices as software companies do by holding onto the copyright of the pictures they take at your wedding and forcing you to go back to them for reprints.

Apart from the fact that I’m somewhat uncomfortable with anyone owning the photographic memories of our wedding, the terms and conditions from one particular photographer are just ridiculous. This particular photographer will quite happily provide you with a DVD of all the photos they take in high resolution – you just have to wait two and a half years after your wedding and pay an extra $750. I’m not sure what happens if he happens to be hit by a bus in those two years or if for some other reason he goes out of business.  As we left our meeting with this photographer I felt quite uneasy about this terms – just feeling that something was wrong, however as I thought more about it, I thought of more and more situations where it would really come back to bite us.

We plan to go live in the UK for a time, and if we happened to move over there and want another picture of our wedding to hang on the wall, we’d have to call back to Australia and have it printed over here, then shipped to us in England – not to mention paying ridiculous prices for the extra copy. If we owned the copyright and had the negatives or full resolution digitals, we could just go to any printer to get copies.

There’s no indication in the conditions of how long our photos will be stored and made available to us for reprints. If in twenty years our house burns down and our wedding album is lost, there’s no guarantee we’d be able to replace it, even if the photographer is still in business because he may have deliberately deleted the photos or just lost them because his backup strategy wasn’t good enough. If we owned the copyright and had the full resolution originals we could just have it remade – particularly so if we had all the layout/design work that went into the actual album as well as the pictures.

It sounds like the best approach will be to pay a photographer to come and take the pictures, thus making it a work for hire so that we actually own all the copyrights. It will be interesting to see what the cost difference is, both up front and over the longer term.

I just have to wonder how many people have been caught out by things like this.