E & OE - The Escape Hatch On The Roof Of The Retail Bus

You've probably seen the letters " E & OE " at the bottom of a lot of the Camera Electronic advertisements and wondered what they mean. I asked one time and was assured that they stand for " Errors And Omissions Excepted ".

It is a sort of a quasi-legal phrase that seeks to stop arguments when the situation goes pear-shaped. We are all human...well, humanoid in my case...and troubles do creep in. Mistaken prices, goods that have run out, weird descriptions caused by typos...you can imagine the sorts of things.

Mean people might seize upon these errors and omissions to bedevil the staff - or try to compel them to supply things at incorrect prices. You can imagine the sort of trouble that a Cadillac agency would experience if a clumsy key stroke in advertising copy shifted the decimal point of a new car price a space to the left and everyone wanted to get the car for a 10th of the price. Of course the same sort of trouble would apply if the decimal shifted one space to the right...except no-one would be breaking the showroom door down to get in.

Unversed as I am in retail law, I cannot say where real decision rests in this sort of thing. Good sense would suggest that where a genuine error has been made...and one that could be seen to be a typo or transposition or mistake imposed by a publisher...everyone would stand back and agree to cool down. Bad sense would suggest other things. The E & OE puts a small barrier out to stop this.

From the cash-register-drawer side it must also be said that there can frequently be errors and omissions on the other side of the counter too. People sometimes have a different idea in their mind than that which they express. Indeed, sometimes our common language of photography leads us all to confusion. A case in point once developed; I realised that it was very wise to ask for clarification whenever someone asked for a soft box, lightbox, light cube, or soft cube.

They are all similar words, but can be used to define four entirely separate products; a studio flash light modifier, an illuminated table upon which to examine transparencies, an LED light source, and a cloth diffusing device for tabletop photography. There were some pretty fraught conversations on the phone when the customer meant one thing, said another, and I heard a third thing. In some cases it was a retail version of an Abbot and Costello routine and we never did find out who was on second.

In any event if there is controversy, be patient. The staff will endeavour to do so as well. Most things can be resolved gently. Harsh words spoken over a phone or typed on a computer screen are hardly ever necessary. You can always resort to ##,@, and %!

The Indelible Watermark

A while ago Fujifilm Australia sent out an email message to tell people how to share their images responsibly. I was frightened to read it as I was worried that they were going to ask me to be responsible for something - and I have managed to avoid it for so many aspects of modern life. I pay taxes and have stopped counterfeiting government documents and rarely run people down on the road, so what more do they want?

Well, it turns out that they are just advocating watermarking your images so that they cannot be stolen. This may be a problem for some photographers, but I have noticed that mine are rarely taken. Even when they are, they are returned in better condition than when they went and one kind soul even pinned a five-dollar note to my collar and said that he hoped my eyesight would recover.

Putting the watermark in the dead centre of the image and making it complex and intrusive seems to be the key advice. This is to make it hard to remove. It is also the key to making people looking away in disgust in the first place - if something looks ugly, it looks ugly, and unless your intention is to make tee shirts for the adolescent market, you are probably better not going down that road.

You can't watermark an idea, and you can be darned sure that there are photographers out there who would be better than you at realising your vision once you give them a hint. It's happened with innumerable television and motion picture plots - even the supposed geniuses of the Monty Python crew were not above pinching things out of books that they probably thought would never be seen. They were wrong.

I have been told that there are computer programs that make it impossible to steal an image from the internet and do so with a simple 13,000 line HTML text that anyone can learn to type. What could possibly go wrongggggg@j^ VV 2 gtkksw,mswp[-cvoe.

In the end, I would merely publish and damn the thieves. Put your name on the thing if you dare and hope that at some stage of the game someone will see it. Keep the raw file with all the data on it in your own records - never send that out. You can always refer to it when the person who steals your image gets a lawyer to write a threatening letter to you.

On a related note - isn't it interesting these days when we get a request or demand from clients for raw files in addition to other formats? Or the final working file that is used to produce a custom print? I cannot remember ever being asked for the negative, transparency, or darkroom printing notes and.or masks in the analog printing days. One sent in transparencies for block making but that was on the basis that someone paid you for the transparency and they could go make blocks and you could go buy groceries - a very good exchange.

I've had the ask a couple of times in relation to studio shoots and once after doing computer work for an image that the client submitted. The studio shoots were paid for and I judged that the use of them was such that there was never going to be any likelihood of further sale of images from them - and in spirit of friendliness relinquished some of the files. If they show up in any altered form I will show the originals and let the viewers make their own judgement. In the case of the computer work I flatly refused - it was asking for work unpaid and I stopped picking cotton for Ol' Massa when Lincoln freed the slaves.