fotoLibrarian

Well, the time has come to up sticks and leave. I've had fun blogging with Opera, and over 50,000 people have visited the blog (and hastily left, I imagine) but now is the time to Go Pro.

I'm moving the location for my blog. This will be the penultimate posting, because the blog is splitting into two. There will be a Gwyn personal blog, which will only be of interest to my friends, family, private detectives, typographers, architects, rugby and guitar players.

There will be a fotoLibra Professional blog, specifically concerning fotoLibra and the image library business. It will NOT be a tutorial on how to take better photographs, although sometimes my patience will snap and I'll be screaming 'For God's sake hold the camera straight! And use the TypoChecker!'

The reason this is the penultimate posting on Opera is because the Pro blog hasn't been set up yet. Thre are some other matters with version 4.0 to sort out with more urgency, notably the problems for users of Safari 3.0.4 (earlier versions are fine), but as soon as those are fixed the blog will be up and running, and I'll post the new address here in my last posting.

Meanwhile here's the link to my Personal blog: http://fotolibrarian.fotolibra.com/. (Note: no WWW in this).

See you there.

... when we finally launch fotoLibra Version 4.0, the Ashbourne Edition.

I admit it; we are three months behind schedule. But if you are a fotoLibra user, you will see why it took so long. It's new from the ground up, and it's so much improved it rivals commercial standalone computer programs.

I think you'll be impressed.

I am.

Oddly enough my recent dreams have featured people. I normally dream about me in unavoidable situations, but over the past month I’ve had a procession of celebrity nocturnal visitors, as well as a couple of friends. I’ve hung out with the Queen (friendly but reserved), Gordon Brown (you’re my best mate, you are), Bill Clinton (hail fellow well met) as well as my friend and colleague Keith Price, who died four years ago, and several others who I hope are still hale and hearty.

But last night I dreamed about hedges; more precisely spinning a car inevitably through a hedge. I woke up this morning thinking what a strange thing a hedge is, and how they affect people differently. Down the road in Mount Pleasant Crescent someone has clipped the hedge to his front garden in the shape of an elephant.

All this is probably to take my mind off fotoLibra Version 4.0, which I hoped would be launched this Saturday December 1st, but now looks like coming a few days later.

The tallest hedge I have ever seen is at Meiklour in Scotland, but in Germany’s Nordrhein-Westfalia, villages like Höfen outside Monschau are characterised by extremely tall (about 40 feet) angular and precisely clipped hedges shielding every other house. Crisp rectangles resembling windows and doorways are cut in them. I’d like to know what the thinking is; whether it’s competitiveness, custom, tradition, religion or what.

My friend Shatzkin speculated they were supported by a hedge fund.

Our beloved Golden Retriever Padi died at 11:30 this morning.

* 17/III/1992
† 22/XI/2007

A long and happy life.

Sports stadia are the cathedrals of the twenty-first century.

The design for the 2012 London Olympic Stadium has just been unveiled. It was designed by HOK Sport, part of a large US architectural bureaucracy, and it is not exciting. It looks like a gasometer.

Now the new Allianz Stadium in Munich, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, really is exciting. The exterior changes colour according to what’s going on at the stadium. Apparently the gasometer will too, a bolt-on extra inspired by copying the originality of other practices.

HOK’s effort demonstrates a depressing lack of inspiration. It may be insipid, but at least it’s expensive; the cost of the Gasometer is £500 million, which works out at £6250 a seat.

It’s a stadium built by bureaucrats for bureaucrats.

Ken Livingstone, unsurprisingly, raves about it.

Sneak preview, for sure.

You can probably hear me screaming from where you are. There is no such thing as a sneak preview. If you were caught having a real sneak preview, you’d either be beaten to a bloody pulp by corporate heavies or hounded to death by their lawyers. Yet pathetic, unimaginative journalists and copywriters overuse it to promote some unimaginably ghastly schlocky B-feature when they have to paper the house. I hate the phrase, for sure.

And also for sure, for sure. I have nothing in particular against the actual phrase ‘for sure’, but like ‘resile’ it has been appropriated for the sole use of one group of people, namely Formula 1 drivers. I guess it may have orginated in Ireland — it sounds Irish — from whence it was exported to the USA, but one thing’s for sure, it sure ain’t Briddish.

Nobody in Britain says ‘for sure’. They may be two English words, but it's just not English.

I blame Michael Schumacher. Every sentence he spoke included the phrase ‘for sure’. As he was the supreme champion, everyone else tried to ape him. The Finns are especially vulnerable. Raikkonnen, the current World Champion and next to Andy Murray possibly the world’s most interesting man, uses ‘for sure’ in ways so innovative he would make Shakespeare proud. Whether he’s won the world championship or crashed out in a blazing fireball, his answer to the question “How did you feel, Kimi?”, will mainly comprise variations on the theme ‘for sure’ delivered in his haunting deadpan monotone.

He epitomises all the thrills and excitement of Formula One.

Gravs was a rugby player for Llanelli and Wales. He died on October 31st.

He was a good, if not great, player. He played during Wales’s last Golden Era, was in the Llanelli team that beat the New Zealand All Blacks in 1972 (the only club side ever to do so), and later he became President of Llanelli RFC.

His funeral took place yesterday. There was not a church in Wales big enough to hold the congregation. So they held it at Llanelli’s home ground, Stradey Park.

Ten thousand people came to pay their respects. Three television channels covered the funeral live. BBC Radio 4’s Today programme dedicated ‘Thought for the Day’ to him this morning.

All this for a retired sportsman? Gravs was much more; he was a proud, passionate Welshman, commentating for S4C after he retired from the game, using his natural friendliness and ebullience to win hearts and minds all over the country.

He became a national icon. You can’t manufacture that. He was a genuinely nice man who finished first. So it can be done.

Close readers of ‘The Encyclopaedia of Fonts’ will have noticed that the author’s bio finishes with “He has spent six months of his life at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and to his eternal regret has never scored a try for Llanelli or Wales.”

Gravs did.

Ffarwel, Ray.

I started this blog on Opera on February 28th 2006, and since then I have written over 80,000 words in it, all unpaid. I used to have a little card on my desk with Samuel Johnson’s wise old saw: “No-one but a fool ever wrote, but for money.” Clearly I have mislaid the sign.

Now I find myself doing twice the work for the same amount of money, i.e. zilch. Under pressure from my lovely fotoLibra colleagues, we’re integrating my blog within the fotoLibra site, so it can use a similar look and feel to the spiffy new Version 4.0 and all signed-in members can participate.

My question was how do I dribble off on unrelated topics, if it’s all going to be part of fotoLibra? Picture professionals aren’t always going to want to read my views on the Pallant House gallery, hedges, Boots the Chemist, the 2012 Olympic Stadium or even Welsh rugby. These are subjects not always germane to picture libraries or selling photos.

The solution is to run two blogs. Great, I hear you murmur.

Blog 1 will be the Pro blog, published on fotoLibra, dealing with picture libraries, metadata, copyright, money, computers, keywording, business, finance, photography, publishing and all the daily oil that makes the wheels go round.

Blog 2 will be the Am blog, published elsewhere (I have been told where, but I’ve forgotten) and will cover rugby, wine, fonts, guitars, architecture, old fart’s rants, cricket, follies, Wales, F1, scuba diving, Proust, cars, cigars, scotches and watches and anything else that takes my fancy. It will no longer be on Opera, because nice though the Opera folk are, I’ve had lots of problems accessing my own blog myself, so I can’t see that other people are going to be able to find it too easily.

Work and play. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. Anyway, each blog will link to the other and both will be reached from my final fotoLibrarian post on Opera’s blog, which will shortly appear here to announce the arrival of fotoLibra Version 4.0.

In the Guardian Review on November 10th was a large, striking purple photograph of a Eurostar train and a Japanese bullet train at St Pancras International, credited to Lewis Whyld/AFP/Getty Images.

The following day the identical photo appeared in the Observer, but this time credited to UPPA/Photoshoot.

Who’s right? Who got paid?

BAPLA runs an award for the national newspaper that runs the greatest number of picture credits in the year. It's usually won by the Times, Guardian, Telegraph or Independent.

fotoLibra insists on proper picture credits. But, ultimately, we are at the whim or mercy of the editors. Credits can be dropped for the oddest reasons, but the usual culprit is the designer, who simply forgets. He's not penalised for it, because where's the profit? The time taken to add the correct credit doesn't make the proprietor any more money.

In order to get proper credits we have to be nice to people. And as we are nice by nature, that's not too hard. But sometimes all our efforts come to naught.

We sold 11 out of 12 pictures to a major national calendar. They kindly sent us proofs, and we spotted a major error — all the photographs were credited ©Yvonne Seeley / fotoLibra. Now Yvonne is many things, but she's not a photographer, she's a picture librarian. So the correct attributions were hastily sent to the printer, the receipt was acknowledged, and we were assured the corrections had been made.

The calendars arrived this morning. All the photographs were credited to ©Yvonne Seeley / fotoLibra. What can we do? It's their calendar, and it looks great. The picture credit is insignificant and unimportant to them. It's not to us, or to our photographers. It's their fault, but we get to shoulder the blame.

I was asked to write the Foreword to a newly published book titled 'Bizarre Buildings'. I was sent a proof, in which the word 'Dalek' had been replaced by 'futuristic tanklike robot', and I had been described as 'Founder of the Folly Fellowship'. I made the corrections — everyone outside Canada knows what a Dalek is — and I was co-founder, not sole founder, of the Folly Fellowship. The corrections were received, acknowledged and ignored.

The book packager has expressed his regret, and has offered to write to the other two co-founders of the FF to admit the mistake was at their end.

I doubt we can ask the same of the calendar company.