Beyond the Blog: In a Flash Photography
To this day she still says I stole my image from her
Most of the big names have been covered. I should have probably drug them out more so I kept more people on the hook for the paid monthly stuff but I am my own worst salesman. HOWEVER, just because you may not know some of the names to come, they are memorable in their own rights. There’s a lot of wild stuff behind the scenes that many don’t know about and that was the reason to create this segment of Substack - to tell them. Whenever I meet people in person that know what I do they always want the wild stories so here they are!
To be honest, when I started this I figured it’d go like my Patreon - a few people would sign up but most wouldn’t care. This is kind of what my goal was to do over there - tell stories about what was going on behind the scenes that wasn’t just stealing photos. However the platform wasn’t right for it so I’m glad we’re all here now. I hope you’ll stay on to keep on hearing my stories (ok rants, they are mostly rants).
Onto today’s topic, which will probably be a multi-parter since this has been going on for almost 10 years. I’ve just kept most of it to myself.
In the spring of 2014 I outed a photographer who stole from me, In a Flash Photography based in Toronto, Ontario Canada. Which was hilariously comical. It never fails to make me laugh that my most popular stolen photo is of one on train tracks. What you should know before the outrage sets in is that the tracks were closed by the FBI because someone tried to blow the bridge up in the photo - which is why they were there in the first place because it was just so wild that happened that day!
Anyway!
I got a message from a photographer after someone posted to a photography group wanting advice on how to get more weddings booked. She noticed that the work on her page was vastly different in quality from one post to the next and used reverse image search and found me and the other photographers and notified us. She didn’t know that I ran Photo Stealers (it wasn’t as well known then)
I pulled up the website and was pretty shocked to see MY image as one of the welcome images.
It was very weird being on the other side of that email!!
This begins my journey with Julie. Put on your helmet if guilt trips bother you because there are SO many of them I lost track.