Commercial Photography Practice Exam

The key idea is who owns the rights to a photograph. Copyright automatically belongs to the creator as soon as the image is made, giving the photographer the exclusive rights to use, reproduce, display, and license that image. Because the photographer owns those rights, they can use their own images without asking for extra permission.

This is different from images found on the internet, which belong to someone else; using them generally requires permission or a proper license. The same goes for images licensed to someone else or images from stock agencies—the rights are controlled by the owner or the licensing terms, not the photographer who created another person’s copy.

So the images a photographer has taken themselves can be used without additional permission.