Another of my photos has been Published! and like most, this one has a story behind it.

So, we’re getting ready to leave for vacation; I grab a bowl of cereal and sit down at the dining room table cluttered with several days stuff’ including mail. An advertisement for Stout’s Shoes catches my eye. Normally (and thankfully) most ads that arrive by mail get pitched immediately but somehow this one hadn’t made it to the trash yet. It proclaimed a 125 year anniversary shoe sale with a mix of historical and new images of the Mass Avenue storefront. That was interesting; I always like to look at old images of familiar storefronts. There was a ‘Deja Vu’ click, something seemed familiar about one of the photos, but no, it couldn’t be…, it must just be a similar photo to one I’d taken and posted to flickr over a year ago… Surely not my photo…

I checked. Yep, it’s my photo, exactly, not cropped or shopped, nothing but straight off of flickr. Then the roller coaster of “That’s so cool, of all the photos out there someone liked mine best!” then, “The scoundrels, they didn’t even ask, or give any credit, how lame!, they used my photo then mailed it to my house!” up and down, up and down.

The chance was SO slim that I would even notice. Nobody (really NOBODY) but me would ever have recognized that the Stout’s ad photo was mine.

So here’s my photo on flickr:

and here’s the Stout’s Shoe ad:

So, what would you do, be honored or offended? Personally I lean toward being honored. I don’t think Stout’s is involved in a deep conspiracy to steal and profit from my photos.

Yes, I did check with Stout’s. They passed along the contact info for the ad and they in turn apologized for unwittingly using my photo. They had gotten it from another website where it had been lifted by someone else, which I am finding happens a lot…

So I’ll look on the up-side, I enjoyed catching an image of Stout’s in nice early morning light, at least a few other folks out there thought it was good enough to represent Stout’s Shoes 125th Anniversary Sale, and I got published again!