As a professional photographer, you have to make the decision as to whether or not you want to watermark your images. When we first started the business, we watermarked the images mostly because we thought that was what “professional photographers” did. However, after doing more research and seeking opinions from our mentor photographers, we quickly decided we needed to do away with the watermark. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Images look more professional without a watermark.

The watermark does not make your images look more professional. The quality of your images does. We are willing to bet if you look at any established, high-end photographer’s websites you will not find one watermarked image. We want our website and blog to look like a magazine of sorts, and we think watermarks can distract from the over all image.

02. Watermarks don’t prevent stealing. 

Let’s be honest, someone that really wants to steal your work can crop or photoshop out just about anything. It breaks our hearts when we hear stories of other photographer’s work getting stolen, but we don’t think it’s worth adding watermarks to all of our images.

03. Watermarks don’t affect marketing.

Although many photographers photoshop their logo onto each one of their images directly for marketing purposes, we don’t because we never want our images to look like a photographer has inserted himself/herself into the image. We want our clients to shine through. We believe the best form of marketing is word of mouth referrals not photo credit on social media. So if we can make our clients and vendors we work with love us so much that they have to tell everyone to hire us, we can leave our logo off our images!

 

The most important thing when deciding how you want to share your images is what is true to YOU. This just happens to be our opinion on this pretty controversial photography topic!

Thanks for reading!

-Chelsea and Hannah