The Sea Level Photo Rises Again

An email came in bearing the simple subject line “photo permission”. This often ends up here as a blog post, and this one take me full circle back to 2006. Marty, start up the DeLorean, we are riding the blog machine back in time!

The writer of the email states that they are putting out an album of songs that were written and recorded while out of work last year. Citing a southwestern sound and a genre labeled “space cowboy” (pretty accurate from the sample link sent), the ask was to use on of my photos for the cover.

It’s a photo that has played this round before and became one my stock Amazing Stories of Openness. Maybe 16 years ago, an email came from a rep from a band in Germany that has the same name as the sign in a photo I had hanging on an ancient web site posted maybe in the mid 1990s. Eventually I got in the mail a CD-ROM of German beach rock music bearing a cover of my photo!

This same photo is of interest again by a musician:

I took this photo maybe in 1987? 1988 during the trips to Bishop, CA for my Masters field work (Geology). I bet this was my first excursion across Death Valley, how could I not stop and take a photo of my 1973 Ford Maverick driving at sea level. This would have been a print photo taken with my Nikon Nikkormat, scanned to digital, and was published to my web site Random Walks in the Southwest long before Creative Commons was even a thing (later I added a CC BY license to tis page).

The funny thing is how exactly this file is even found. It’s buried way down in a folder of photos I had scanned and posted to my own web pages in those early web years.

I let the person writing recently that it had been used before (alas thesealevel.de is a dead domain, I guess the band is done). Here’s where it even goes another notch up on the Amazing Stories scale.

Hi Alan, I found the photo on Myspace about 18 years ago and have held onto through different computers and phones but no idea of who took it. When I thought about using it for the cover It took a while to find the photo again on google so I could trace it back to its owner. I ended up finding it attached to a blog about the German band using it.

It comes back around. Look for another celebration here soon, heck, maybe I will go back and record a new story (although the old site was cleanly converted to a SPLOTbox theme, no new stories have showed up).

But more to my other point made earlier. That few people really get the concept of public domain, giving attribution credit, than independent musicians. Again, again, and again.

The sea level rises again!

Featured Image: Rising Tide flickr photo by Tony Armstrong-Sly shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license edited by me superimposing the original sea-level image I posted online long ago later licensed CC BY, Call it all CC BY NC to keep in line with original. Call it whatever license you like, just share and attribute like an independent musician.