Friday, February 20, 2015

Who Owns Jamie Dornan's Ass?

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I hope y'all all allow me a moment of self-indulgence (as if this blog is anything besides self-indulgence) - I just have a more-than-usual self-serving rant to expel with great force from my lungs this morning; a bit of a peek behind my curtain (my lacy, lacy curtain). 

Introductory Fact: I hate watermarks. They drive me nuts. I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to photo-shop them off of pictures, and usually rather shoddily I might add, in order to give We The Internet unfettered access to our beefcake photography. I'm a bit (a bit, ha, laughs everyone who knows me) OCD and a watermark will just drive me up one side and down the other. It's all I can see. 

I don't often have "original" pictures to share (by "original" I mean ones that I haven't seen on any other websites) - I'm good at aggregating, finding the best pictures buried in the nooks and crannies of the web and shining them up and giving them a group-home. Take that Adam Levine post yesterday - those were scrounged from a thousand different places, but now everybody's "Adam Levine in his underwear" needs can laser in, focus upon one location. Anyway I knew when I took those camera-phone pictures out of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly earlier this week of a very naked very young Jamie Dornan they'd probably catch on. The time was right, I felt it. And catch on...

... they have. Buzzfeed came for them first...

... and Lauren over there was super nice and gave me credit. Credit's nice, mostly because it leads to hits, and hits lead to a little bit of spare change (very very little, mind you) in my pocket, but also, you know ego

And that's where the hypocrisy settles in. Watermarks bug me not just because they're distracting but because they're usually slapped on something the person watermarking the thing has no real ownership of. I don't own those Jamie Dornan pictures. I imagine Abercrombie owns them, or the photographer Bruce Weber, or maybe Jamie Dornan's got a little bit of a right to the spectacle of his bared bottom - the list is very long before it gets to me snapping camera-phone pictures of these pictures in my old dusty copy of my A&F Quarterly.

And yet I feel that tightening in my gut looking at the pictures spreading like wildfire all the same because once they went off from Buzzfeed it was open season and, well, nobody's linked back to me ever since. It's mostly irksome when somewhere like JustJared goes and slaps their obnoxious watermark on the pictures, defeating my entire dare I say raison d'être (no I dare not; resist, me, resist!) for NOT watermarking the pictures in the first place - but mostly, yeah, I get that this is the way the internet works. It's the way it should work! I'm just feeling a little self-pitying (and poor, don't forget poor!) this morning, I guess. Don't mind me. Here look it's Jamie Dornan without any watermarks! It's magic!


2 comments:

sowhatelse said...

I feel your pain. It bugs the hell out of me when sites put heir own watermark on pics they had nothing to do with except grabbing them from another site. Anyway, really appreciate all your hard work in uncovering tons of photos we'd never see anywhere else.

shawnp said...

pajiba just posted with credit to JJ as well.