Watermarks?

As a photographer you want to let as many people see your work as you can. At the same time you want to let people know its your images with the hopes you might get some work from it.

With the age of the internet really taking off, there are a lot of people that use images that they don't own for there own use's. I myself have seen other people use my images without ever asking me for my permission... 

This brings me to watermarks. At first they used to put a big ugly text through an image so people could not use them without permission from a tog. This worked for a while but soon enough things changed.

After a while people did not care about having the text through an image, you still see this all over facebook now. Go on check, I dare you! I bet that at least one of your friends have a copyrighted image up on FB.

Old Style Watermark

Photographers being the level headed people that we are, just changed with the times. Our watermarks stopped being something that made people look bad but became our calling cards. This little logo in the corner is shown to everyone that see's my images. A little advert from every person I shoot to all of their friends. 

New Style!

I have used this mark (above) for a while now but have never been super happy with it. I wanted something that would look good on both light and dark photos. I could not get it working right so I added the dark backdrop to make it stand out from the image behind. This is something that fixed the problem but I really did not like the layout. 

I want something thats is not to prominent and does not disrupt the image. The two watermarked images  below are what I have been working on and I am happy with them both! 

Full Name Clear

I like that with the first image you can see my name clearly and people will be able to just google me from just seeing the watermark. Yes I have Googled myself and I am now the complete first page!

S.E.P idea

This second one also has my name but a little smaller, with the added abbreviation of S.E.P (SkinsElliottPhotography) and I think it does look nice. Only trouble is that if you put SEP into a google search you get "Software Engineering Professionals" or SEP.com.

Let me know what you guys think as I would like to hear what you have to say on my designs