fotoLibrarian

Quite understandably, we’re often asked for advice about scanning. Equally understandably, we can only tell you what we need, and not how to achieve it, because we’re not a school.

What we need and want from Members are 300dpi TIFF files between 48MB and 100MB, using Adobe 1998 RGB as the working RGB profile.

We’re not a school, we just sell pictures, but I can put you in touch with some sites we’ve found helpful:

Photo.net has a great tutorial site.

We give Members scanning advice on the fotoLibra site but I’ll repeat it here. The best scanning tips site I’ve found so far is scantips.com.

And to my mind the scanning software that comes bundled with any manufacturer’s scanner (except the top-end pro machines) is not a patch on Vuescan from Hamrick Software.

Every scanner can give you higher resolution than most digital cameras, depending on the rating and size of the film being scanned of course. Don’t be surprised when your 25ASA 10x8 transparencies come out looking better than your 800ASA 126s.

I wasn’t really aware that we had a careers master at school (which was all boys, of course). I believe the Geography Master would put on a false moustache and sit at the end of a dimly lit room booming ‘Rubbish!’ ‘Nonsense!’ at any career suggestion which didn’t involve the army, the Church, law or accountancy.

After earlier and only partly successful attempts at being a typographer and a rock star, I settled for book publishing. Nice work, pleasant people, badly paid, lots of books to read. No thanks whatsoever to the school.

How come I’m now a picture librarian? Well, I had this idea, and it wouldn’t go away, and I couldn’t let it go away, of making the hitherto closed world of picture sales available to people like us. Everyone, that is. Everyone has one book in them; I was, and am, even more convinced that everyone has at least one great picture in them. Henri Cartier-Bresson said as much, and he should kno ahem ahem.

So here’s fotoLibra. It fills a need. It’s growing rapidly. We’re selling loads of pictures. People who never made a penny out of their pictures before are getting a payback.

Some people have artificially high expectations, however. Here is a message, reproduced in its entirety, received yesterday morning from one of our free trial members in response to a picture call from my colleague Jacqui Norman which specifically offered contributing members a commission per image in the region of £60-£70 / €88-€100 / $100-$120:

Fuck off you freeloading twat who doesnt pay no one for good photos. Why don't u send out an e-mail about how little you paid contributors?

This writer has uploaded just one photograph, for free. It’s of his pet dog, and so far we have been unable to sell it on his behalf. He is a shining exception to Cartier-Bresson’s dictum. A lot of people are filled with a lot of rage, and they spread it wherever they can. I think we’re simply a random target, and this guy is just striking out blindly. However we’re a business, not a care home, and we have to let encouraging messages like this just roll off our broad backs. But damn, it still hurts.

And we pay contributors at least 50% of what we get. It’s a thankless task, my masters.

Anyway, back to careers. Taid (my grandfather) summed up career choices for his son (my father) as follows: “He’s too dull for business, too bright for the army, put him in the church.” And so that’s where he went.

I spent my 44th birthday in Krakow, or Cracow, in the company of my great friend Mike Shatzkin. We passed the evening in a jazz cellar where I spent the entire time talking to a highly intelligent and stunningly beautiful Dutch woman, whose name I cannot remember. Rats.

This sole conversation makes me recall Krakow with great fondness. It was (and probably still is) a lovely city -- the centre, that is, because Shatzkin and I shared a room in some anonymous tower block of an hotel on the outskirts, less clearly remembered.

Why does this memory return? Today fotoLibra was asked for photographs of a ball set in southern Poland in the 1930s, in the Krakow region. Hadn't thought about the place for years, then I thought of my birthday. That was fun.

Here's the request: Krakow picture call. If anyone sees this, the pictures are wanted by next Monday.

Tomorrow is the London Book Fair, a small, quiet, expensive, provincial event compared to the BEA in America and to the daddy of them all, the Frankfurt Book Fair.

fotoLibra doesn’t have a stand because quite simply it is very expensive and we have to budget carefully. We exhibit at the BAPLA Picture Buyers’ Fair in May and the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, but that’s about it.

Book publishers are very important clients of fotoLibra. Two of us come from book publishing backgrounds, and we like to think we know what they need. Oddly enough though, the majority of our individual sales have been made to magazines. Hey -- publishing is publishing.

This is the first time it’s being held at ExCeL, a large shed with eccentric capitalisation. So I’ll be able to give you first impressions.

As Fred Nolan memorably wrote in 1972, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Is that the earliest appearance of the phrase?

I can drive a car, but I’m no Schumacher or Alonso. I can take a photograph, but I’m no Snowdon or Cartier Bresson. I guess Schumacher makes something like $20 million a year. If I were one twentieth as good as him I’d be happy with $1 million a year. But thanks to fotoLibra, I can make a dollar or two out of my adequate photography, simply because nobody else will take a photograph exactly from my angle, or I was there at the right time, or the weather was amazing, or it was the only photo of that building before it was torn down, or any of a hundred reasons.

But before fotoLibra came along, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. None of the picture libraries would have taken me on, good as I was because I couldn’t ensure continuity of supply. I had other things to do, other turbot to poach. So the world was fated never to see my true genius. (Well probably the world did see it, once or twice, decided it wasn’t genius and there was an end to it).

I always wanted to level the playing field, to allow open access to all walks of life and fields of endeavour. OK, I might draw the line at amateur brain surgery, but otherwise why can’t we all have a crack at doing what we enjoy doing, and all the better if there’s a little cash to be made from it by and by?

We can’t all win seven world championships. But every sale made is a lap record for someone.

Why is Belgium the butt of so many jokes? Especially by the French. I guess it’s the nature of rich countries to put down their poorer neighbours (US : Canada; England : Ireland) to assert their intellectual and physical dominance. The standard challenge to French students was to name five famous Belgians (does that ring any bells, mes cousines Americaines?) but you’d have to be as uneducated as the average student (that’s why they’re students — they’re still learning) not to be able to reel off Georges Simenon, Johnny Hallyday, Hervé, Hercule Poirot (very real to some people) and of course Adolfe Sax.

He was a native of Dinant, a picturesque town on the banks of the Meuse at the foot of a fairly spectacular 100m cliff, and there’s a statue to him near the bridge.

The boulangeries of Dinant sell large biscuits in the shape of bas-reliefs of views of the town or animals. I have one of a Golden Retriever. It’s too pretty to eat. I suspect it’s beginning to rot.

They speak French in Dinant; it’s in the Francophone region of Belgium.

I speak English in London. Am I therefore Anglo-Saxophone?

One thing fotoLibra hasn’t yet been asked for is a picture of a tribe of sparrows in London. That’s one image which won’t be born digital; it will have to be scanned. Because, as many of you will have noticed, there are virtually no sparrows left in London. And despite all the advances of modern civilization such as a ban on smoking, a ban on hunting and a war on Iraq, nobody knows the reason why. I believe The Independent has offered a reward for the first plausible theory, with lead-free petrol being an early contender. But other cities have lead-free petrol, and they have sparrows. Not as many as they used to, mind.

I miss my sparrows. In 1896 Alfred Newton in his Dictionary of Birds wrote of it “Far too well known to need any description of its appearance or habits.” Yet I haven’t seen one this year.

Let’s not forget our Cockney sparrows. “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” — Luke 12, v6

Bizarrely enough, this is a recurring question from all sorts of photographers, from amateurs with their first cameras to successful semi-pros with the whole kit & caboodle. I’m a bit dumbfounded at first, but after a while an element of sympathy creeps in. I only pick up a camera when I’m going to photograph something in particular, but I often pick up a guitar with no song in mind. Then I sit there for ten minutes, thinking “What shall I play?” Same situation.

So I will admit that suggestions are always helpful. At fotoLibra we send out Picture Calls which not only tell people precisely what to photograph, but that a picture buyer is actively looking for pictures of a particular subject.

And if you need further inspiration, I’ll try and drop some suggestions in this blog every week. The difference between my suggestions and fotoLibra’s Picture Calls is that mine are simply suggestions, whereas the Picture Calls have hard cash behind the requests.

Here’s this week’s Suggestion: Go into a bookstore and look at all the photographs on the front covers of the books. Someone has to take them. Why not you? We’ll market them for you. Look at the sorts and subjects that are covered. There’s imagination aplenty there for you, and it’s not just travel photographs.

But please, enough with the sunsets already!

The things I do for the benefit of the Anglo-Saxophone world! Selfless, fearless, and sometimes legless, I am in the habit of trawling the backstreets of Naples – no, even I wouldn’t be that foolhardy -- the backstreets of Lucca, Siena, Venice and Rome searching out obscure little bars to check out their selections of Amaro. Amari come in those strange gaudy dust-gathering bottles at the back of the bar, and they contain a substance, usually dark brown in colour, which Italians drink.

The question that has perplexed Brits and Americans since time immemorial is Why? I went to taste some, and here are my notes:

Amaro Ramazotto: orange, bitter, rich, sweet, round, closes cleanly, brown, not an intense flavour.
Herrenberg: Amaro d'erbe: bitter, rich, sweet, round, closes sourly, warming, brown.
Amara Francescano: from Assisi - herbier, rougher, coarser, faint metallic overtones.
Amaro Lucano: softer, bitter, rich, sweet, round, closes cleanly, more warming, brown
Amaro Montenegro: pilot's amaro! (from a TV ad for it) Much paler than the others, thinner but more delicate taste.
Cynar (pronounced Cheenar): artichoke amaro. Lighter, more sophisticated flavour. Has a delicacy the others lack.
Aperol: served long (17.5cl?) with soda & a slice of lemon. Pale orange in colour. Orange & gentian bittersweet.
China Martini: (pronounced Keenar): Rich, dark like tawny port, succulent & sweet.
Borsci San Marzano: faint liquorice scent, black, opaque, sweet, less bitter
Zucca: dark brown, not intense, light, sweet,
Unicum: great bottle, a globe with the Swiss flag (or is it the Red Cross – can’t remember). Really strong. Disgusting and drinkable, but not as vile as
Fernet Branca: people cannot drink this for pleasure. There’s no denying it gives you a jolt no coffee can hope to emulate.

Previously sampled but not commented on due to a baffling inability to read my notes:
Averna
Arquebus
Underberg
AMARO DI CALDO is the cure for the Common Cold. Take any amaro and add boiling water.

Amaro means bitter. This was a bittersweet experience. I’m pleased to be able to share it.

Sad news that another great British company has fallen into the hands of foreign devils (heavy-handed irony by the way). I refer to Pilkington rather than P&O, the glass company rather than the shipping line, though I hear that since P&O got itself taken over by the Arabian devils it’s allegedly running into difficulty docking at American ports. Now does that make sense to you? Or anyone other than a terrified, paranoid child? Well if I was a deranged Arab terrorist a clever way to allay suspicion would be to set up a company, work hard at it for fifty years, grow it into a business wealthy, prosperous and successful enough to acquire a majority stake in one of the most venerable shipping lines in the world, then I’d fill one of my newly acquired luxury liners with high explosives and point it at America. Good plan.

They’ll never suss that one out.

But they did, Abou, they did.

What’s this to do with zoom lenses? Well, Pilkington has offices either side of the Anglo-Welsh border, and near St. Asaph in north east Wales is said to be the finest, purest sand known to mankind. Those eye-wateringly expensive Japanese and German lenses you’ve been forking out for are largely contrived from Welsh sand. Nippon Sheet Glass has taken over Pilkington to become the second largest glass manufacturer in the world (Pilkington was the second largest anyway) and presumably will have access to this lovely sand. Sheet glass or optical glass? Anyway, my pal David Redfern used to disdain zoom lenses because he believed the optics were inferior to any fixed-length lens. He was right then.

Is he right now? Is any of this true?

Enough on take-overs. There's nothing sadder than misplaced patriotism. If you want to read a sensible writer on the business world, read James Surowiecki in The New Yorker.