Selling Warbird Photo's

[warbirdguy]

I thought about this a few nights ago, I have some photo's of warbirds that I've taken at various air show's the last few years and I'm considering making copies and selling them. Say I took a picture of the Weary Warrior's B-25 or a privately owned SNJ would I have to get the owner's permission before I sell the photos or what. I took the photo but the plane is owned by someone, what would I do?

[RMAllnutt]

I don't think this would be an issue. I've never heard of property releases being needed for photographs of aircraft. The only time this seems to be an issue is at restoration shops where owners of aircraft under restoration have it written into the contract that no photos are allowed for publication. This wouldn't make it illegal to publish them of course, but would make it very awkward for the restoration shop (which is why no one transgresses this unwritten rule). I've never been asked for a property release by a magazine whenever I've had my aviation related photographs published. If they don't require a release, then I can't see why an individual would need one to sell images privately.

One word of warning though... there really isn't much of a market for current warbird images as prints. I've seen a lot of people try on e-bay, and the effort just doesn't warrant the pretty meager returns. They have to be stellar images for it to be worth anything, and even they rarely go for much more than $5 a piece.

Best of luck to you.

Cheers,
Richard

[corsair166b]

THERE ARE limited markets you can do business in, My partner and I sold about $400 worth of aviation pics to the old Clarion Hotel at Centennial airport in south Denver (now a Holiday Inn) so they could decorate their bar in an aviation theme...Likewise some aviation museums seek them to enhance their collections and add more color (they like wartime images too, but those are usually in B & W)...most photos we shoot are at what is termed a 'newsworthy event' like an airshow or fly-in and as such the images are available to anyone, but we honor the reqyests of restoration shops to not publish the photos of planes that are being restored until AFTER they hit the sirshow circuit and have been seen (mine were the first published images of Eddie Kurdziel's Fairey Firefly a few years ago, but were withheld until Eddie wanted the pics to be released)...honoring requests like that keeps you in good graces with the owners and the restoration shops alike....but you will always run into problems with someone somewhere, even when you try your hardest to please everybody.

Mark