My Eclipse Image and Forbes
Posted by Ed Leckert on Mar 15th, 2019 | 4 comments
A few years ago I wrote an article I called “Where Did They Use That Image?” where I did some searching for licenses of my images sold through Getty Images to see if I could figure out where they ended up. Today I noticed that Forbes had licensed one of my images, so I decided to see if I could find it.
As I explained in my earlier article, when you sign up to sell stock photography through one of the big stock photo houses like Getty Images, you never know where your images will end up. While you can check your monthly invoices to see which companies are licencing your work, that doesn’t always help. In many cases an ad agency or other third party will purchase the license for the end user, and even if the end user buys the license, there’s no guarantee you will be able to locate the exact usage of that image. Even Google can’t search billboards on the side of highways — at least I don’t think they can!
Anyway, as I said, I noticed that Forbes had licensed one of my images, and it is a unique enough image that I thought I might be able to locate their use of it. Well, I tried a Google search for “forbes lunar eclipse aurora”, and sure enough, hit #1 took me right to it. Their article, “The Ultimate Viewing Guide To 2019’s Pan-American Supermoon Lunar Eclipse“, includes my image about four-fifths of the way down.
I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the way the image appears in the article. After I pushed the original to Getty, I decided it was rendering too dark and made some adjustments to it, but Getty doesn’t allow me to upload an improved version, so the dark version lives on. Oh well.
Here’s the image after I lightened it a bit. If you want to read about how I assembled this composite image, you can read about it in my article “Anatomy of a Lunar Eclipse“.
A lunar eclipse takes place above Prelude Lake while the Aurora Borealis puts on a show, in Prelude Lake Territorial Park, Northwest Territories, Canada. All images in this composite were taken on the night of the eclipse from the same camera position with the same lens and focal length. Only the exposure was adjusted during the night.
4 Responses to “My Eclipse Image and Forbes”
Reach out to Contributor Relations and they might be able to fix the image for you.
Thanks, Stacey.
I can see how the lightened aurora-lunar-eclipse image looks better, but the original one is more like what the human experience if one had been there would be like, is it not?
Well Eugene, that’s a tricky question, especially when a composite photograph is involved. The actual aurora was directly above me, and very bright. What you see in the image is actually clouds reflecting the light from the aurora, and they were not visible to the naked eye. Only the increased exposures taken during the blood moon (fully eclipsed) stage showed those clouds. And while I could clearly see the snow-covered hill throughout the night, the only image that shows it clearly is the one taken at twilight, before the eclipse began. But to answer your question as best as I can, it was fairly bright out there on the snow-covered lake, so I would say the brighter version was closer to reality.