The stunning, full-colour pictures on the Internet are a great blessing and pleasure, but they can be a snare to do wrong as well. I have high personal standards close my eyes to the obvious filth garbage quite matter-of-factly. But recently I deceived myself and didn't know it right away.
I've built my novel my web site around a theme of gardens roses. Always, I'm on the watch for lovely roses that I could use for backgrounds or nice touches on the site. A free site, just personal pages may borrow from the artists' sites, but one that seeks to sell be a commercial site, has to pay for them - I'm still on a church mouse's income.
Last week I suddenly had an idea; why not go to that site where I got my fine wallpaper scenery photos, see what they have in the way of roses?
I've worked out a system of pulling up a photo in MS Word, turning it into a muted watermark. Next I open my old Paint Shop Pro (version 3 was shareware), doing a Capture of the picture in MS Word. I give the graphic a name save it. Then I go to 1st Page, my web editor, pull it up as a background image.
I'd done that with a photo of a bouquet of flowers that I took myself, in the photo editor I'd been able to do some pretty clever things with it, turning it into several backgrounds.
At the photo site, I checked the floral categories, sure enough, three unusually beautiful pictures of roses came up. Perfect for doing over my whole RoseBouquet section on my site! other sections!
I downloaded them, decided to try the capture without MS Word, to get larger graphics from my desktop voila! It worked. Wonderfully! Deep rose roses, pinks, mauves, yellows, with white baby's breath--Oh-my!
Making this picture faded in Paint Shop didn't quite please me, so I saved them all three, pulled them up in MS Word, turned them into watermarks then captured them again into Paint Shop, where I named them.
My, but I had fun trying them out in the web pages, deciding the I didn't even need a pale coloured background in my text table because the words would look so good, right on top of the lightly-there roses. I couldn't resist uploading three of the pages I'd experimented on. They looked SO good in the browser!
"A good evening's work," I told myself as I shut down the computer finally for the night, planned to do dozens of pages in that section over with the new background. Funny, the background that a friend had given me didn't seem good enough any more.
However, as I made my nightly hot calcium drink in the kitchen headed for my bedroom with it, I felt like I was stopped short with a tap on the arm that voice I recognize as the Lord's (sometimes my dear old conscience) said, "You're breaking copyright laws."
I winced and made woebegone faces.
The argument that others do it all the time, didn't wash. I knew better. I knew that my conscience would continue to bother me the next day; I'd have to undo my work. I didn't quarrel. I just went to bed hoping it would be gone in the morning. Dwelling on it would only enlarge the problem.
As I stumbled up to the bathroom six hours later, the first thought that struck me was, "You've got to undo those pages you uploaded last night, delete those altered graphics you made."
"Okay, Lord," I sighed, knowing that I would not be able to get a stitch of other work done, until I'd obeyed. I gulped some tears as I added woefully, "How will I ever find such pretty roses again?"
As I re-did my web pages, I noticed the old painted roses background didn't look so bad after all. It came to me that I could ask Ivy at church, who has a flower shop, if I could take pictures there.
She told me she doesn't stock a store any more, but runs a consulting design service for weddings. However, she suggested a shop in the city that would have huge buckets of roses, I could take photos there. Possibly others too.
Now I'm on a campaign to take my own photos of good roses, somehow I'm convinced that I shall see some that will make an even better background than those stolen roses! My conscience is free to dream and hope again. I've also got a thing now about checking for copyright notices.
P.S. That was 12 years ago. I now find many more sites that offer their graphics for free. However, I've taken to growing flowers in my garden, and I take photos of them often throughout the summer. I just do not have the hang of growing roses yet.
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Ruth Marlene Friesen makes friends wherever she goes!
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