Hello Steemit! For those of you who don't follow me or haven't been following me, I am a professional photographer based in Japan. Or, lost in Japan, as I usually put it.
What Does Professional Photographer Mean?
Well, it means that I make a large part of my income from photography. Specifically, a large part of it comes from client work, most of which I unfortunately can't share here. A helpful portion comes from stock photos. Stock photography pays as little as you may have heard, but as my photography mentor always said, it takes a lot of peanuts to feed an elephant, and stock photography is a small but helpful peanut. I also make some money from directly licensing my photos for commercial projects, and a small amount from prints.
That's a quick intro for you.
What I Share on Steemit
I share one of my photos or more everyday (when time allows) in a post here on Steemit. I usually file it in my Beautiful Japan series†, but occasional others.
I also love haiku and do translations for another of those peanuts. A small but growing peanut. I share a haiku I enjoy here everyday also‡. But this post isn't about those, so that is that last we shall speak of haiku (in this post anyway).
Anyway, all this is leading to an offer I have for everyone on Steemit, though specifically for members of the Writers Block. It involves free stuff. Interested? Read on!
My Offer: Free Photos! (within limits)
To get straight to the point, if you want to use one of my photos for a post here on Steemit, feel free. Also, if you like my photography but none of the photos I've posted yet work for your post, feel free to email me§ or message me on Steemit chat or Discord chat and tell me what you need. I can look through my massive archive of photos and see if I have something that fits the bill. No promises I will, but I will be happy to check.
On Discord I hang out in the Writers Block. Well, at least I try to check in there every day or two.
And that's basically it. Free photos to use in your posts, most of them of Japan or Japanese things.
A small sample I quickly whipped up in Photoshop:
What's the Catch?
No catch, really. There is an actual legal license behind this, if you are worried. Here is that:
All my photos are licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Whew—that's a mouthful. You can read the details of that here.
Basically what that means is that you are free to use my photos for all noncommercial uses. All you are obligated to do is give me credit (a name and a link would be super) and if you alter the photo in any way, you have to also release it under the same license.
The license does restrict commercial usage, but, y'know, I am even open to letting folks use my photos commercially for no fee if they have a good reason. I just don't license them that way by default because I want to discuss it first. But feel free to ask if you do have an idea. I might say yes. I'm happy to help out Steemit in any way I can.
So that's that. No fine print, no Faustian deals. Basically free for non-commercial usage and maybe free but email me for commercial usage.
Where Can I See Your Photos?
I used to have a website with a large sorted gallery. Unfortunately it's gone now. So it goes. I'll get around to putting it back up one of these days.
In the meantime, check my Steemit blog. Again I post at least one photo everyday when possible. And if you don't see something you like there but like my style, track me down on Discord or email me and I'll see what I can do for you.
Footnotes:
†: Like, for example, this one, the most recent collection post collecting photos 31–40 in the series.
‡: Here is the most recent haiku collection post, collecting haiku 31–40.
§: david.laspina@gmail.com
If you enjoyed this post, please like and resteem. Also be sure to follow me to see more from Japan everyday.
I post one photo everyday, as well as a haiku and as time allows, videos, more Japanese history, and so on. Let me know if there is anything about Japan you would like to know more about or would like to see.
 | David LaSpina is an American photographer lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time. |