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Sometime in early January 2006, La Angela took Baby Emma out on her first walk. Emma was about 3 weeks old. Wifey, looking for picture fodder for her newly-deployed husband, took our nice DV cam which had a crappy 1.3-megapixel camera function and took a horridly off-center but cute picture of Emma. In La Angela’s defense, though, she took the pic one-handed while pushing a stroller. Anyway. She sent it off to me; I thought it cute and cropped it with crappy photo editing software at work, mostly for me. I uploaded it to my (poor, currently neglected) Flickr account not much later.

This picture has become the start of Baby Emma’s college fund. This week, after about 3 months of back-and-forth, we finally received payment for the rights to put this picture on a greeting card. I don’t know what the odds are of getting your hands on one, as they’re primarily sold in England (and my contract was actually for an amount in Pounds, not dollars… hooray slumping dollar? ). If I get my hands on one, I’ll scan it and post it.

The contract was easy, and written in plain English (The Queen’s English!). Basically, I have given Susan (the card publisher) exclusive use of the photograph in greeting cards for the next 3 years, and she gets notified of any other intended commercial uses of the photograph. The payment we got is renewable for every thousand cards, and was actually a decent price for what I perceive to be a small operation, i. e. not Hallmark. Not bad terms, honestly, because no one’s beating down my door to use my other photographs in commercial settings.

For the rest, I’ve requested the transfer of the funds out of Paypal, and once they hit my bank I’m setting up Emma’s college savings fund.

I feel so… professional.