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Who Is Gage Skidmore?
Meet the man who disrupted the photography world before graduating high school.
I write a lot of articles about celebrities, and I always like to illustrate them with a picture of the person I’m talking about.
I could just grab the first picture I find on Google and claim that I’m using it under the fair-use doctrine, but I’m not so convinced that would hold up in court, and as a lawyer, I’m a bit of a stickler for following the law to the letter.
So, instead, I typically follow a two-step process:
Step 1: I search for a picture of the celebrity which is available for free under a Creative Commons license.
Step 2: If I can’t find a free picture, I buy the rights from a stock photography website. (This is surprisingly cheap by the way — I’m not sure if most writers realize this, but you can often buy non-exclusive rights to an image for just a buck or two.)
These days, I rarely ever get to step 2 because there are just so many free pictures available. (Which also probably explains why the paid photos have gotten so cheap.)
But here comes the really strange part of all this. The vast majority of the time that I find a Creative Commons picture of a celebrity, it’s attributed to the same photographer: Gage…
