HockeyPhotography.com

If you are a non-commercial blog* and would like to be able to use hockey photos at no charge, you have come to the right place.

If you look around my blog, you’ll see a number of embedded galleries or slideshows related either to particular players, games or hockey-related events. These are available to you immediately simply by clicking on the upward arrow in the lower right corner of the gallery and copying/pasting the embed information into your blog.

Here’s a sample with images of Mikael Backlund who will hopefully make the Calgary Flames roster this year.

Don’t see the player/event, you are writing about? Simply visit my website (taking you directly to my PhotoShelter front page to save you time) and search for the player or event/game in question. (Games and Other Events have been categorized between “College Hockey” and “International Hockey” and the year and/or tournament on the right of the page.) If you’d simply like to be able to embed a single image of a particular player – email me from that photo’s page with the request and I’ll email you the embed info. Or if you’d like an entire game/event gallery – email the name of the gallery to me.

Want free personalized content? – simply sign up for Photoshelter (they don’t spam), create a lightbox** with the images you’d like included and share the lightbox with me. I’ll come back to you with the embed code. In general, if I believe images have been grouped to make fun of a player or generally push a negative image of said player, I may come back to you with a refusal instead of the embed code. I do not consider a group of images showing a single event qualifies, but if you pulled only shots of a particular player being on the receiving end of a hit from 10 different games, that would (unless it is the rare player I dislike and you catch me in just the right mood :-)).

If you don’t see a particular player, but believe I may have shot him or her in the past, email me the name of the player, his/her team and his/her sweater number. I have a large number of games that have not yet been edited and uploaded to my online archives and if I am able, I’m happy to take a quick look and upload a few images for your purpose. I plan on adding markers online for the games that have not yet been uploaded to make this guesswork a bit more accurate.

Why am I doing this?

I’m tired of seeing my content stolen and used all over the place – sometime with the photo credit, sometimes without, but regardless of the credit, if you copy/paste one of my images either from my galleries or from someplace like USCHO.com, it is stealing. (I have never seen one of my images used where “fair use” would apply.) In the past, I’ve gotten angry, but haven’t done much unless it was a news organization or team doing the stealing, because in some cases, they’ve been blogs that I would have allowed the use if asked. From this point forward, however, if you steal one of my images rather than following the above steps, expect an invoice.

In addition to the above “I’m getting old and should probably watch my blood pressure this way since I’m not going to stop adding salt to everything” reason, the embedded links make it easy for your readers to visit my website (clicking on an image will open a separate window and not take them away from your blog) and possibly purchase a print if that option is available for the image, thus making it possible for me to continue to shoot and therefore have images available for you to use :-).

* If you have advertising of any sort on your blog or website, you are attempting to earn money from that blog or website’s content and therefore should pay a usage fee for any content that you do not personally create. If you are interested in photo usage, feel free to contact me re: usage licensing options.

** Creating a lightbox:
1. Log into Photoshelter
2. While viewing images from a search or gallery, click the lightbox icon to add the image to your lightbox (it will take you to a list of your current lightboxes, if any, and give you the option of creating a new one).
3. Once you have finished adding images to your lightbox, place them in your preferred order (there is a custom option).
4. Once you are finished, you need to “Share” the lightbox with me – just click “Share” and then select photographer/image owner where my name will appear. If you haven’t communicated with me in the past, please leave your blog URL in the “message” box.

That’s it – I’ll receive your lightbox invitation, create a gallery from it and provide you with the embed code.