Thanks to Facebook’s “On this day” feature, I was reminded that it was seven years ago today that I started my first Project 365. Yes, you read that right: SEVEN YEARS ago. Wow. Among other things, it serves as an awesome cautionary tale: you never know where your capricious whims might lead you. In my case, it led to a second career in photography to compliment my day job. Did not see THAT one coming seven years ago!
That serves as an excellent segue to what I wanted to share with you today: some of the fun and funny ways I’ve found my photos being used all around the world in the last few months. All of these have been licensed through Getty Images, where I now have nearly 800 images available for license.
There’s a couple of different ways I find these. Every now and then I just do a Google search on my credit line, and that turns up some. When I get my monthly sales statement from Getty, I do a reverse image search. That’s how I found most of these.
Country Time Lemonade used my photo of skaters on the Rideau Canal on their website:
Beloved and the boys ended up in the Wall Street Journal. (This was our Christmas tree quest from a snowier Christmas than the one that just passed.)
The UK Telegraph used this iPhone shot of Parliament Hill on a travel supplement called “Discover Canada”:
Bella visted a website in Norway, with an article about pets and the holidays:
Tristan and our former treehouse made it to Germany:
Did you know Woman’s Day magazine publishes a version in Russia? Me neither, but they liked Lucas feeding the chickadees!
And Willie (and my stripey socks!) made it all the way to Taiwan on HSBC’s site!
Fun, right? Since I’ve started licensing my photos through Getty, they’ve been licensed more than 500 times, bringing me more than $15K – in $USD, no less! And that’s not even counting the other side of my little photography business, with all the charming people and wonderful adventures I’ve had doing portraits of families, and the occasional wedding, baptism and other special events. I laugh trying imagine what me in 2009, picking up the camera to take that first photo in that first Project 365, might have thought of all this.
So the moral of today’s story is this: follow your heart. You will never be able to guess where it might take you, but wherever that might be, it will be awesome!
