For veteran professional photographers, shutting down imposters who claim their images as their own is, sadly, rather common — especially so in today’s era of copy-pasting things from the internet.
Wedding photographer Nasz Ismail of Glowing Iris Photography is simply the latest lensman to face such blatant thieving. According to Nasz, he found out in early 2016 that some rando photographer (faux-tographer?) was taking a number of images from his website and putting them up on the guy’s own Instagram account. At least some were credited back to Nasz, but most weren’t — although that didn’t matter, because none of ‘em were used with permission.
Admittedly, Nasz didn’t watermark the images on his website, leaving them free to be taken and used on other platforms without raising suspicion (though if someone really wanted to steal them, they’d just crop out the watermark).
Anyway, Nasz let the matter rest, as he didn’t want to kick up a big fuss.
As it turned out, maybe he should have. This morning, he received a text from one of his clients saying that the fauxtographer had put up the stolen images on Twitter, accompanied by shameless captions like “post processing another couple wedding photos, keep a lookout”. No more crediting or vague posts about the pictures’ origins — this was blatant misappropriation.
“I work my ass off day and night post processing those images. Squeezed my brain to create the content, and you are claiming it? He’s been getting (direct messages) about it and even thought of holding a workshop and sharing session.”
To Nasz’s credit, he chose not to expose the imposter in public — apparently they’ve even met and worked together before, making the blatant betrayal even more heartbreaking. He acknowledged the photo stealer as someone in his “friend list”, but decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, calling for him to remove the photos from his Twitter account and put up an apology.
“You do not have the permission to post those contents that I have created for my clients,” wrote Nasz. “It was created to show love and you have just discriminate[d] the word love.”
