How I "met" Megan Markle

Just to be clear, I've never met the woman in person, but I did have a kind of "encounter" with her shortly after she announced her engagement to Prince Harry in November of 2017. 

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I was in London UK on January 10, 2018, and took the picture shown below. I really was not that interested in Harry and Megan. I thought having  Masks of Trump and Putin on the same rack was rather interesting, though.  I am a stock photographer. I take a lot of pictures of just about everything, especially when I travel.  

When I got back home, I edited this picture and submitted it to Shutterstock to sell as an editorial picture. 

• If you sell a picture as a commercial image, the customers can use it for anything, including advertisements. 

• If you sell an image as editorial, it can only be used for non-commercial uses, such as news opinion pieces or informative news stories. They just cannot be used to sell or advertise anything. 

This picture was listed as editorial because it shows people's faces and because it also shows commercially available images being sold by someone else.  A while after I posted the image on my agency, and it sold for more than any picture I've ever been paid for stock photography. 
I was really curious who bought it!  I still don't know the whole story, but I tracked that image down online (You never know from your agency who buys your images). What I found everywhere I tracked it were pages where that image was missing. It had been there, but wasn't any more. I found dozens, if not hundreds of those places online. I did a little more research, and it turns out that some company had made a movie and had wanted to use that image to advertise it. They purchased the picture as editorial rather than commercial, which wasn't an option for what they wanted to do. 

 

Evidently, someone in Megan's (for some reason, I could tell it was Megan,'s not Harry's) camp saw it online and demanded it taken down. What I encountered was the result of that.  I don't know if she sued the poster or not. She definitely is on top of anything published about her and even was back then.

I was not affected by her actions, and neither was my agency. Everything we did was legal and responsible. The customer who bought and inappropriately used the image was to blame, and that customer was the only one affected. I would have never even known about it if I hadn't dug around online to satisfy my curiosity.

Anyway, I still follow her rather closely, especially in the last few days, with all the drama of them moving back to the UK.  I really do not like what Megan and Harry have done with Spare, the Oprah interview and the Netflix special. I hope they break up so she will not have as much opportunity to attack the monarchy, and maybe Harry can eventually (but not until the split) land in some position he can live with. And I want to know if they really have kids or not!

What do you think? Do they have kids? Will she stay in the UK? I hope not! 

Note: I have used a few AI images along with my own photo.

 

Confessions of a County Fair Art Judge

I was privileged to judge the Fine Arts at the Washington County Fair this week. When I was a teenager, I won many blue ribbons on my art, sewing, and canning at the Rogers Country fair, so this experience was really meaningful to me.  

I have never judged an art show before, so I was afraid I would ruin someone’s life by not judging well, and I did my homework.  I even found instructions for judging at a country fair.

Actually, it was easier than I anticipated because the art was divided into so many categories.  All but one had five or fewer entries, some only one, and oil painting, none!  The other volunteers made it easy for me.  They sorted them and laid out each category.  The volunteers were a mother/daughter team.

The most important part of judging the young kids (as young as three!) is to encourage them to continue with their art, so I wrote a little note on the tags of those.

Most were fairly easy to judge, but when I got to tough ones, I looked at presentation, shading, depth of field, technical expertise, color use, and originality.  I know some people will be thrilled and some will be disappointed. I didn’t see the names of each work, but I hope the ribbons were given to a wide variety of artists. 

Video:  https://youtu.be/ms2ONoHYZMQ