Photography Tip: Shoot a Sketch and Five Reasons Why

Here's a Photography Tip I discovered by accident and it has saved they day for me on more than one occassion. So, I'll give you five reasons why I shoot sketches and hope one of them saves your day sometime, too. Shoot a Sketch. Once you shoot a sketch, it becomes a photo. You and the sketch artist own the copyright and you treat it just the same as any other photo you've taken.

Here are three of my munchkin Grand kids doing pencil sketches of an important event for me.
They are using photos I took of someone else's photos as models for their sketches. I have no right to use those photos because I am not the original artist. Not a problem. Grand kids, hah, I have plenty of them. They need stuff to keep their little hands out of the cookie jar. Sketch!

Here's an old US ARMY photo taken during the Battle of Okinawa. I needed it for a magazine article. The ARMY keeps this stuff on file somewhere in the Library of Congress,  in the USA.

I've been trying to get permission to use this photo for over a year. Congress has more important stuff to do, like raising taxes and spending more money so, they don't have time to help me do what I think is important. I don't vote for those suckers. I just work and pay their silly little taxes.

There was a deadline for this magazine back in January 2010. Well, the Grandkids got drafted for sketching, again. But, I wasn't getting the desired effect from their sketches, this time. So, I let them put the pencils down and go eat cookies. I had a better plan. Go pay a real sketch artist.

Look real close at the lower right corner. There's his copyright. He got ten bucks and I got the sketch to do with as I pleased. Now, we're both published artists at APOGEE PHOTO 2010.

One of my Grandsons got this sketch published at GO NOMAD in November of 2009.

And another Grandson hit print at MATADOR TRIPS September of 2009 with this sketch.

Five Reasons to Shoot a Sketch:
1. It gives little munchkins something to do on a rainy day besides eating all your cookies.
2. It gives sketch artists a place to get their work recognized.
3. It is a way to get around copyright violations.
4. It eliminates the need for a Model Release.
5. It can help make up for a really, really bad CAMERA DAY.

Have you ever thought of using sketches in your photography?

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