Man Takes Free Photo for TV News Stations

I’m assuming you didn’t get paid by anyone.
No.

Did that ever cross your mind?
You know, it did. I ran into a friend who’s a photographer, and she does a lot of assignments for Getty images, shooting events, and the like. She and a few others said, early on, “Hey, you should get paid for usage.” I mean, that probably would have been nice. I just really didn’t know how to go about negotiating it. I didn’t really expect that I would be able to figure that out in such a short period of time. Also, if I started asking for money, I thought it might put the brakes on the circulation of the photo, and I thought that was fun. So I didn’t want to jeopardize that.

American Photo talked to Nick Cope about how a photo he took of his flooded Red Hook neighborhood the morning after Hurricane Sandy hit went viral, and which news agencies contacted him for permission to use the photo, and why he decided to make the photo essentially fair use, rather than get paid for it. One thing he did gain from the publicity was a lot of traffic to his website and four times the amount of Twitter followers than he had before, if that counts for anything.

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