the importance of saying please
Last night I noticed something funny with my webpage stats. There was a new referrer, a site I hadn’t heard of before. So I loaded up the page.
It was a religious site, talking about the importance of giving thanks to God. They’d hotlinked to one of my photographs from the Evansville tornados. No polite notes asking whether they could use it, or whether they could use my bandwidth. And I’m all about the thanks to God, but sometimes you know, it’d be welcome to hear something like,
“Hey great photo! Thanks for paying for round-trip plane tickets to a disaster area, and for taking the time to tour and photograph the aftermath. In fact, thanks for taking care of ALL the details, like it’s really terrific how you picked up the cost for that Canon 20d, and the pretty piece of L glass that’s attached to it. It’s so thoughtful that you’ve traveled around the world and taken photo seminars and really learned how to use that camera, all so that I could just use your image, because it’s so perfectly appropriate for my post about GIVING THANKS.”
Now, I admit, it’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure I remember that God has some pretty specific opinions on that whole topic of taking things without asking. And I’m pretty sure that by allowing Photoshop to be created in the first place, God is basically giving tacit permission to edit your hotlinked pictures that appear without permission or THANKS on other people’s websites.
Especially the ones about giving thanks. I mean, we never even got to PLEASE, here.
I decided to write my own message of thanks. The picture used to read “THANK YOU FOR OUR LIVES” has now been changed:
I even bumped up the contrast, a little.
If you want, you can visit the site and create your own message of thanks. Be sure to tell them I said Hi.