Musings on Photo Etiquette

One of the wild things about being a photographer, a commercial photographer in particular, is when you just randomly see your work being used in random places when you're not really expecting it. Sometimes it is used well. Sometimes it is not. I went to a friends page earlier and was surprised to see shots I had done of her used in her timeline -- and used well. Ladies and Gentlemen, my friend Emily:

...to clarify on this. It is one thing for a art director or designer to crop or alter the work I have done for them to fit the purposes of the job at hand. But I can not stand it when people just randomly crop into my photos without any thought as to why I may have given them the photos cropped a certain way to begin with. Emily actually cropped into these photos, but manged to do it in a way that didn't make we wanna cringe when I saw it. Cropping into some photographers work when you don't know what you are doing or have no clue of composition is about like taking an artists' painting and cutting half of it off. It's just bad manners.