I was just checking my RSS feeds, and saw an article from CBC News.
I thought to myself, “hey! I’ve seen that photo somewhere. wait a minute… I think I took that photo…”
Some quick poking around on my gallery site1, and hey presto. Yup. I shot it back in June, 2009, not far from my house.
Looking at the article on CBC’s site, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of that fact.
I’m guessing someone at CBC did a search on Flickr for “lightning in calgary” or something (back when I had a Flickr account), and found the photo. I’d also guess that it’s used whenever there’s a “lightning” story on the site.
I’m actually fine with CBC using the photo. I don’t even care about getting credit for the photo – please go ahead and continue using the photo if it suits your needs.
This whole credit thing is messy. They (likely) found a photo that was shared under a Creative Commons license, and decided to use it. They goofed on the credit (but, so what), but they were trying to do the right thing. If a news organization struggles with providing credit for a photo, how do we expect everyone else (teachers, students, etc…) to be able to do it? And, does it really matter?
- holy crap do I need to do a better job with my photo metadata [↩]