My brother John lives in a very nice Atlanta neighborhood. The houses are valued at about $500K and up (way up) and he and his wife know their neighbors, having lived there for many years. They are generally frugal, especially when it comes to cars, so they have an old Explorer and an old Honda Civic–both from the 90s, if memory serves. The Civic has over 200K miles on it, but it runs well and gets good mileage, so they haven’t seen any big reason to get rid of it. The Explorer they keep for moving large numbers of guests or loads, but besides that it sits on the street down the hill in front of their house, mostly. The Civic is parked in the driveway, within spitting distance of the house.
Today, someone stole the Civic.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because an object of little to no value to one person or group of people can still be of value. The thief of the Civic chose it for some reason–over all the BMWs and Volvos in the neighborhood and even the easier “get” of the Explorer (on the street, remember). For some reason, that Civic was of enough value to the thief that he (she) was willing to risk jail to get it.
So, to continue the analogy, often a photographer will say “I gave them all rights (at this low rate) because this image really won’t be of value to anyone else ever again” when, in fact, it might. You are probably the worst arbiter of what future value one of your images may have. Maybe you shoot Bob Smith CEO of TinyCorp for their sales brochure but, because it’s a tiny company, you give them unlimited usage (worse, unlimited exclusive; or even worse, sell them the copyright) for a small fee because you can’t see any future value. Then TinyCorp turns into Google and all the re-licensing income you could have earned goes *poof*. Or Bob Smith turns out to be a major crime boss and you have the only images of him…but you can’t license them because you gave your rights away.
Just because you can’t see the value in something doesn’t mean it doesn’t have great value. Another example: I’d rather be bludgeoned repeatedly with a frozen salmon than watch American Idol. I do not get the attraction at all. Obviously, it has great value to others. Go fig.