New Decisions Regarding Stock

Hi everybody,

I know that I have been fairly inactive recently as far as posting stock.  This is primarily due to time constraints I have faced with work and my free time.  Rather than spending time cleaning up images for posting, I find myself rather wanting to spend my time outside taking new photos.  I have accumulated far too many memory cards of images that I have not had the time to sort through.  Looking through my more recent work from the past year, I have decided that my photography has improved enough that I feel comfortable posting most of the images as stock in their 100% original form.  Previously, I used to spend a bit of time on each image 'cleaning it up' as practice for my main gallery images.  I feel as though I don't need this practice anymore.  As a result of this change, I do ask one thing of my stock users:  Please DO NOT simply clean up the stock image and repost it to your account.  I want to provide quality stock images to my watchers/stock users.  Some of these images I believe would be fairly nice stand-alone photography pieces but I also want to make them available as stock.  

To define what I consider 'cleaning up': Sharpening, adding contrast, adjusting color hues/saturation, removing noise, etc.

I sometimes find it upsetting when people post a cleaned up version of my stock and other people comment that it "looks so much better than the original."  Things like this sometimes make me regret offering that image as stock since I was perfectly capable of doing the same touch-up work to the image.  So please, if you use these images, create new and unique pieces of art with them.  Thank you for understanding!

Also, just as a note, I have added a new rule stating that " NONE OF MY STOCK MAY BE USED IN ANY PIECE WITH AN ANTI-CONSERVATION TYPE THEME OR MESSAGE." It has not happened often, but I have seen some of my stock used in things such as anti-red wolf pieces (claiming they are just coyote-wolf hybrids and not a real species).  I find this very frustrating as I believe all animals deserve a fair chance at co-existing with us humans.  I spend part of my free time trying to promote wolf conservation and it is very discouraging when my own photography work is used to undermine conservation efforts.  I thank all of you in advance for understanding this new rule.

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Sincerely,