Image licensing

Using this work

Everything on this site was shot by me. It gets licensed rather than given away — but the terms are plain, and for most of what people want to do, the answer is yes.

Who owns the work

Copyright in every photograph and video on this site belongs to Mike Thezier, trading as Pilgrimage Media. Booking a shoot licenses the work to you; it doesn’t transfer the copyright. That’s the standard arrangement in commercial work, and it’s what keeps session rates where they are instead of where a full buyout would put them.

Athletes and individuals

If I photographed you — a Progress Session, a training shoot, a race — the images are yours to post, print, and use on your own profiles, your coaching page, and your sponsor applications, for as long as you like. Tag @pilgrimagemedia when you can. You don’t need to ask me first.

Teams, schools, and brands

Commercial collections come with a written license in the agreement for that job — normally non-exclusive use of the delivered files for your own marketing: site, social, recruiting material, press, print collateral. Paid advertising, packaging, out-of-home, resale, and exclusivity are quoted separately, because they’re worth more to you and cost more to grant.

Delivered files aren’t to be resold, sublicensed, or passed to a sponsor or third-party brand as their own. If a partner of yours wants to run an image, that’s a short conversation and usually a yes — it just has to happen.

Editing

Crop and resize freely. Please don’t re-color, filter, or run the files through generative tools — the grade is most of the work, and these go out under my name. Something you’d change? Tell me and I’ll change it properly.

Everyone else

Images here aren’t free to download, repost as your own, or use commercially, and they aren’t available for training generative models or datasets. Sharing one with a visible credit and a link back is welcome and always has been.

Credit and licensing requests

The credit line is Pilgrimage Media. Editorial use should carry it. To license a specific image — editorial, commercial, print, or an existing frame from past work — get in touch and tell me which photograph, where it will run, for how long, and in what territory, and I’ll quote it.

These are the standing terms; the signed agreement for a given job governs where the two differ. Last updated August 2026.