#61 – Different window… same town & fee

New windows, Malmesbury, UK [Alamy image ref. ANBG7K]

Last week I wrote that most photographers, at some time during their passion, take shots of windows. For many this subject develops into a theme or collection… and I’ve been doing that for at least forty years and don’t feel like stopping.

Accumulations as such may build-up slowly if not thought of as specific themes… until one day you realize you have many, many examples. As far back as 25 years ago I was unaware of how many window shots I had saved until I grouped them together with the idea of producing a slide show (I think it was fellow Nikon UK lecturer Richard Tucker who produced excellent “slide-dissolve” shows with multiple projectors that influenced me in that direction) but when carefully slotted into A4 hanging clear slide files they numbered more than 400.

It was at that point I knew I had to stop… or start to edit very carefully. Editing one’s images was far slower in the film age… I’m not sure whether photographers generally took fewer shots in those days – whilst film and processing was expensive,there was also the tendency to overshoot multiple angles in case of missing something (no instant-replay visual feedback in those days) as well as take multiple shots of the same scene/subject with bracketed exposures for safety… not to mention the doubling-up of colour transparency/negative and black-and-white materials of the same subject with two cameras!

I eventually cut my “usable” collection down to under one hundred examples… of which about half were successfully scanned on a Nikon Coolscan V 35mm film scanner for uploading to Alamy. It is hard word taking this route… film scanning is fraught with difficulties as well as many frustrating minutes and hours of image correction because of dust, fingerprint blemish and possible tramline scratch corrections.

Because of the “imperfections” with 35mm film scans I took the debatable decision to register al mine – some 250 or so – as Royalty Free… using the rational that they were dated subjects and would probably be used small. However, some of my RF sales have been my outright best-sellers in money terms bordering the $500 mark for single image sales… whilst others have been at the bottom of the barrel at one-hundredth of the top figure… yep, go figure!

In fact I have made the decision to gradually remove all my RF images with Alamy and re-register them as RM… I prefer to know their usages rather than be left guessing forever with “unlimited use” licences. An annoyance which I hope is never repeated was when after a Royalty Free image that had been zoomed six months ago (thus an established registered buyer), was licensed three months ago… and then refunded a couple of weeks ago. For an RF image to have a refund after three months in the client’s hands with potentially unlimited use during that time does not sound like correct or ethical business to me. And, as the sum was for only $6 or so it makes me wonder how Alamy could allow not only this refund, but the sale in the first place when their commission would only have been around $2.50 which would be more than their overheads for the actual transaction. I mean, there is a minimum charge for most things nowadays… like when did your plumber last charge $2.50 for turning up at your house to replace a simple tap-washer?

The image was licensed around 30 years after I took it with a Nikon F2 and 28mm lens but as a 4mb file – scanned using a Nikon Coolscan V from the original transparency – by Alamy RF under my “UK Scenes” pseudonym.

#60 – Windows… the original photo subject

Windows, Malmesbury, UK [Alamy image ref. ANBG5X]

Most photographers, at some time during their passion, take shots of windows. For many this subject develops into a theme or collection… I’ve been doing such for forty or so years and don’t look like stopping, even though I don’t think I’m still “collecting” shots of windows with the same consuming interest. However, whenever I see an interesting one – either from the outside looking at, or from the inside looking through – I can’t help but raise my camera, frame, and click-off a couple of shots just in case they turn out to be more interesting than I thought at that moment.

Perhaps we photographers are preconditioned into thinking about and taking images of windows… after all, the first two famous photographers both used the window as their subject matter. Admittedly, exposures in the early days of photography – or “painting with light” as Hancock of Half-Hour infamy would have exclaimed, were extraordinarily long, and a window would have received and transmitted plenty of light and had enough tonal contrast to record a strong image.

A photograph of the latticed window in Lacock Abbey, made in 1835 by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877) was printed from the oldest, thus first, photographic negative in existence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fox_Talbot

However, a decade before in 1825 Nicéphore Niépce (1765 – 1833), a French inventor most noted as one of the inventors of photography and a pioneer in the field, produced the world’s first known photograph… a view through an open window – “View from the Window at Le Gras” (La cour du domaine du Gras), although it was a one-off and unlike Fox Talbot’s window image couldn’t be reproduced because there was no original negative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras

So we have history behind our choice of such subject matter and don’t need any further excuses. If we did, in this day and age, it would be the use of colour which was probably beyond the comprehension of Niépce and Fox Talbot but certainly beyond the techniques of the time and for many decades after.

Unless I’m walking or cycling around the French countryside, a window or windows are within my eye-line all my waking hours of the day, as with the above… a pair of windows on two adjoining houses opposite my own in Malmesbury, Wiltshire back in the early 1980s. The image was licensed around 30 years later as a 4mb file – scanned using a Nikon Coolscan V from the original transparency – by Alamy RF under my “UK Scenes” pseudonym.