Usage rights and licensing

Photography licensing is one of the more confusing parts of commissioning a shoot, mostly because the conventions are different for personal sittings versus brand work, and the differences aren't well-explained on most photographers' websites. Here's how I structure it.

Personal portrait sittings include lifetime personal use. You can post the images to your own social media, use them as your LinkedIn or website headshot, send them to friends and family, get prints for your wall, and treat them like any other personal photographs. You don't need to come back to me for permission to use a portrait you commissioned for yourself.

What personal sittings don't include: commercial use. If a brand wants to use your portrait in advertising — even for the company you work at — that's a separate license. The usual fee structure is a percentage of the original sitting fee, scaled to the scope of use. A small in-house newsletter is different from a billboard campaign, and pricing reflects that.

Brand campaign work is licensed by scope. The default license is twelve months of use across the channels we agreed on at the start: brand website, brand social media, paid social ads. Print campaigns, billboards, packaging, and broadcast are typically negotiated separately because the value of those uses is different. The license is renewable; if a campaign performs well and the brand wants to extend, we extend.

What about your own usage as the talent in a brand shoot? You can repost the images to your personal social media (@kylieblue on the photographer credit), use them in your own portfolio, and reference the campaign in your work history. What you can't do is license the images to another party — they're owned by the brand under the campaign agreement, not by the talent.

I retain my photographer's right to use any image I take in my own portfolio, on my website, in my journal, and in printed promotional materials. This is the standard convention; if there's a reason an image needs to be exclusive to you (a particularly private context, a non-disclosure agreement around a brand launch), we can negotiate that, but it's the exception not the default.

If any of this sounds complicated, that's because it is — the law around image rights is fragmented across jurisdictions, and conventions vary by industry. The practical version is: ask the question. Most usage questions have a simple answer when we talk through them, and almost every reasonable use is included or extendable for a small fee.