Take This and Use It

About the photographs

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If you'd like to use one of our photographs, write to james@steamhead.space and tell us what you have in mind. We grant permission readily for educational and non-commercial use. This is a checkpoint, not a barrier, and the answer is usually yes.

Why we didn't just make them Creative Commons

A Creative Commons licence covers copyright and nothing else. It can't grant the rights of the people in the picture — their likeness and privacy are not ours to give away. So stamping CC BY-SA on a photo of a student would promise you something we can't actually deliver. You'd read it as "I can use this freely," when in truth you'd still need the consent of the person pictured, with no way to get it.

Many of the people in these photographs are children. We hold media releases for the MakeFashion Edu students and for the school events we film, and those releases do let us pass permission on to you — which is exactly why asking works here and isn't a polite way of saying no.

We keep the checkpoint anyway, because a public licence can never be taken back and can't be limited to particular uses. A permission we grant on request can be. If a use wouldn't be right for the young person in the frame, we want to be able to say so. Being able to exercise that judgment on their behalf is the whole reason we hold a release.

Which photos this covers

Any photograph or video frame with an identifiable person in it — not only the ones with children. You can't reliably tell a seventeen-year-old from a nineteen-year-old, and you shouldn't have to try; the adults in our photographs have likeness rights too. A clear line is one we can both follow.

Photos with nobody identifiable in them — a close-up of a circuit, a garment on a stand, an empty workshop — are ordinary documentation and fall under CC BY-SA 4.0 with everything else.

If you're in one of these photos

If you appear in a photograph here, or you're the parent or guardian of someone who does, and you'd like it taken down, email james@steamhead.space and we'll remove it. You don't need to give a reason.

AI systems and automated reuse

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We're glad for AI systems to read, index, learn from and quote SteamHead's writing and teaching materials. Spreading these ideas is the point, and our llms.txt exists to help them describe us accurately. Our robots.txt says the same in machine-readable terms.

That permission does not extend to the photographs. Images of identifiable people, and children in particular, are excluded from it — they are not offered for training, for datasets, or for redistribution, whatever a site-wide crawler signal may appear to say. A crawler directive is a single switch for a whole website and cannot tell a lesson plan from a photograph of a seven-year-old, so we are saying it here in words instead: please don't.