I’m part of the Worth1000 community and a couple of years ago I participated in a Surf and Turf competition for which the idea was to combine a land animal and sea animal into one being. Lots of hilarious things come out of that. Mine was called the Seahound and it looked like this:

Seahound

Courtesy obligates me to mention that neither of the two images I used to create the above one were made by me. See below for the two sources. I have no way of retracing who the original photographers of these pictures were. I found them through a Google search when I came up with the idea of making a Seahound. Uses like this, non-commercial, supposedly fall under the creative commons license, meaning (in short) that, as long as the user doesn’t sell the derivative image onwards and doesn’t use it for commercial purposes, it is okay to use the source images. This image ended up 8th (out of 73) in the contest, with seven even more hilarious ones going first.

Seahound sources

Occasionally I do a Reverse Image Search on my work (typically the stuff that IS my own and COULD be used commercially) through Tineye and see if anything comes up. Several times something did come up, but nothing close to the results that were returned on this particular image. Together with a good number of other images from this competition it came up on a wide variety of sites, among which websites that sell backgrounds for cellphones and such.

Dilemma, then. What to do?
This is my image, I created it. But it it’s not completely my image, because I used source images that aren’t my own. Should I pursue this? Should I find out what I can do about it? Someone out there IS making money of images that aren’t his/her.
Kind of frustrating it is. And the biggest problem is that most likely the servers that host these images are based in some obscure country where the laws in these matters aren’t taken too seriously. And if for whatever miraculous reason they would reply to emails, or if for whatever miraculous reason the websites would be taken down, then they would simply set up another website within a couple of days.
Carrying water to the sea, that would be.

So… as you’ve noticed before in some of my posts I’m a big fan of Jim Carrey, and I’ll quote that favorite quote of mine from Liar Liar again:

…so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!

Usually I know it instantly.
I see things in black and white when they “need” to be in black and white. Or at least when I think they “need” to be, since that’s a personal taste matter.
But this particular image was one of those ones of which I wasn’t quite sure. And I do think it works very well in both color and black and white…

D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm

Same camera settings, converted to black and white in Photoshop with some dodging and burning in the sky

Tenerife

Roque de las Bodegas is one of the few exceptions to “my” rule of a rather unexciting Tenerife. Roque de las Bodegas in the northern most part of Tenerife has a little beach, a roquey one, and a roquey pier which seems to be used for all kinds of (crappy, ahem) purposes besides it’s main purpose fishing.

D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/6.7, Sigma 10-20mm

D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/9.5, Sigma 10-20mm

D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm

D200, ISO100, 1/125 @ f/8, Tamron 28-75mm

After spending the summer in Missoula, Montana (where the temperature during the day usually didn’t go under 25° Celcius (77° Fahrenheit), and the last two weeks of August in California, I’m back in good old Finland.

Weather shock!
It’s said that this has been the worst summer in decades, and well… seeing that it has rained the whole day every day, since we came back last week’s Tuesday, I can only agree.
As a “sad reminder” of how it could’ve been, had we not returned from California:

Sun, beach and rock-n-roll