All the text and images you see on this website, unless noted otherwise, are copyrighted Colin O’Brien, with all rights reserved. I hope that you enjoy them, find them interesting; maybe even want to own a print, or use an image on your website or blog, or in a book or advertising. But before you do any of those things, before you start to save the image to your device or copy it, you need to get a written, signed, agreement with me. This may involve money, depending: whether you are an individual, a non-profit or a corporation; where and how many times you want to use the image; how many people are likely to see the image; things like that. I hope you find something on the site that you like, and will visit often; and if you want an image, please contact me first. Thank you.

Occasionally, the Journal (blog) pages will contain links, such as to amazon.com. These are affiliate links. The account belongs to Clearweave, who provide hosting for this site. Any purchases you make during the session in which you clicked on one of those links, the affiliate fee will help to pay for the costs of this hosting.

This site does collect information regarding your visit and does place cookies on your computer. These activities are designed to satisfy a number of needs regarding the maintenance and well-being of the site.

• I use an opensource package, Piwik, to provide statistics on visitors, such as where you are in the world, what sort and version of computer (operating system, monitor, browser) you use; the only “personal” information retained is what IP address you visited from. Piwik places a cookie on your computer so it can tell if you are a repeat visitor.
• The website is built using another opensource package, WordPress, and I use a number of plugins built for WordPress to try and prevent spam and other unwanted web activities. One of these packages will want to place a cookie on your computer as part of determining if you are a human or some sort of attack robot.

If you submit comments to a Journal (blog) post, they get queued for me to review and approve before they appear on the site; depending, this may be very quick or take a while, and I could, for any reason, decide not to approve them. By submitting material to the site in this way, you are giving me a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide and free license to use such material. The comments sub-system does retain your name and email address (as well as IP address) but only displays your name, and I am not going to share your name or address with anyone else.

About This Site

The cover (home page) photograph used to be one of twelve taken in Cornwall in 2011 and used for a calendar that I gave to friends and family in 2012. There was no calendar for 2018, so the cover photograph is randomly selected from the portfolio.

I have been emailing “sketches from my photographic life” to friends for years. I have taken applicable texts and images and used them in the Journal, which is how it can have a lot of content already, when this site went live in July 2012.

In most cases, the images used in the Journal are not the finished article, they are not fully developed, but rather early versions, or even JPGs straight out of the camera, merely intended to illustrate a story. Indeed, some may never find their way into the portfolios, because of subject, composition or technical issues.