Need to have this answered

[anotherziom]

Hi everyone. My questions deals with the rights I, as a photographer have. I am a high school student and thinking of ways I can make money out of photography. My idea is to go to my school's basketball, soccer, football, etc games, take pictures of players, post them on a website and then sell them to the parents or whoever would be interested in purchasing them. My questions is would that be legal? Do I have the right to take a picture of someone in a public place (school), put it on a website and then sell?
Thank you.

 

[usayit]

First place to start..
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

Your school's events are most likely still considered private events which naturally mean you need permission to sell the pictures.... thats just my guess.

 

[morydd]

I'm not sure on this either, but in order to sell the pics, you'd have to have model releases for the people in them, as I understand it.

 

[DeepSpring]

I was thinking of doing this too, then I found out once a year a professional photographer team comes and shoots a game of every sport and then sells the pictures to the students. No way can I possibly obtain the same results they can so it would be pointless. You might want to check on that.

 

[fmw]

I used to shoot horse shows for a horse owners association. I not only shot the animals and riders in the arena but I also made horse portraits on the side. They knew I was there and why I was there. After the show, I would put on a slide show and allow people to order prints of whatever they liked. The horse portraits were arranged shoots and always sold prints.

While it wouldn't qualify as public domain photojournalism in that sense, the images were sold only to the people in them, not to outside ad agencies or publishers. There was never a model release. I would view it as not much different than shooting a wedding except you would have a number of individual customers instead of a single customer. I did provide complimentary images to the association for their magazine and newsletters but I didn't view it the same as selling images to a publisher. It was my "entry fee" for the opportunity to do the shoot and sell images to the contestants.