Mar 18 2012
Stolen Photos, Oh MY!
There is a woman in Facebook under the business name Capturing Essence, who has taken various chainmaille artists’ photographs and is passing them off as her own.
Here is a screenshot of the photograph of mine that she stole:
And here, I’ve overlaid my own photograph, the one that I took back in 2009, and have posted all over the net in my various accounts (flickr, etsy, rainestudios.net, probably here on my blog somewhere) at 50% opacity, so it’s kind of see through — easier to see the fact that it’s the exact same photo with a different crop:
And finally, I’ve made a little animated gif (click it to see the animation) that shows exactly what a thief she is:
I’m blocked from her page and can’t post anymore.. but I’ve reported the stolen photo to Facebook, we’ll see what happens. Sadly, many other chainmaille artists have also been targeted.
6 Responses to “Stolen Photos, Oh MY!”
I’m not blocked so I can see her page. Your photo is gone, at least from the Profile Pics album and some others I checked. She’s also received a lot of negative posts from the looks of her wall so she’s now marking her own photos (which aren’t as high quality as your photo, no wonder she stole).
She also grossly misunderstands coyright if she thinks that she owns all photos of anything she designs, but we’ll let her deal with that headache later, shall we?
I reported your photo and about 20 others last night and they were removed. Most of them anyway. The ones she didn’t remove, she watermarked and claimed as her own even my piece. FB removed one of my pieces 4 times and she just put it back up again. The other piece of ours on there was removed twice, but she hasn’t put them back up yet. Anyway, she will not talk to me, and several others that have been blocked from her page. She is honestly insane I think. Anyway thanks for sharing this, I hope she understands that what little reputation she may have had is dwindling quickly.
Andrew
[…] are not cropped alike, a close examination reveals them to be the same image, and a blog post about stolen photos from the artist shows this to be so as […]
Wow, I can’t believe she’s so blatantly ripping off other people’s photos. I’m totally inspired by you work, and have created some of my own pieces, but I would never use someone else’s photos and claim them, or the work as my own.
Here’s her latest explanation to her fans on Facebook as of yesterday:
“replacing MY OLD PHOTOS with my newer STONE photos. will take a while because im also going through and watermarking and tagging all my photos that are also already up. so i have 100+ photos to go through and get done. will probably take a few days :D”
Ouch.
Sad, but this happens a lot. Artists are ripped off even though imitating and copying is supposed to be the best flattery. Keep exposing the little thieves, they will pay in the end when they can’t produce that item.
I told her she was a thief not a jewelry artist. I appreciate people like you showing newbies like me how to do new things, that would really irritate me knowing sometimes how hard it is to push something creative out of your mind.