fotoLibrarian

I sort of forgot how huge the Beatles were. When I was a teenager they were the biggest news item imaginable. John Lennon was castigated for claiming the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but at the time he wasn't too wide of the mark.

The influence persists. The other day publishers Peter Owen uploaded a collection of rare Beatles photographs by film producer Dennis O'Dell to fotoLibra, and as they were unusual and hardly seen, we sent out a press release.

A few papers picked it up, but I didn't think it was that big a deal until I checked the site stats and saw that traffic to fotoLibra has doubled since Monday. They've all come through word of mouth from a huge collection of Beatles fan sites on the internet.

I am amazed. The band still has incredible pulling power. But what a life they must have led, drenched in the public eye. Horrible.

Like everyone else in the 1960s, I was in a group. We were called The Sloane Squares, and we were appalling, but we did all right. We played with Hendrix, Clapton, Pink Floyd, John Lee Hooker, Small Faces and many others.

The classiest comment came from Beatle George Harrison. He said 'It's so boring, everyone was in a group in the sixties.

"But if you had to be in a group, it might as well have been the Beatles."

Here are the pictures: [url]http://www.fotolibra.com/gallery/user/?user_id=11087

The Beatles, who else? There once was a time when John, Paul George & Ringo were the best known human beings on the planet. Recently Jeff our former IT guru wrinkled his nose and said doubtfully “I think I’ve heard of them.”

Now Paul (that’s McCartney, Jeff, the one who played bass and wrote the pretty songs) is back in the news with his separation from Heather. Sad, really. Reminded me that the average British woman has fewer than two legs.

What the older folk at fotoLibra are getting excited about is the upload of a big collection of original Beatles photographs from the 1960s, many taken at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India in 1968 — including a rare shot of Prudence Farrow, the inspiration for Lennon’s ‘Dear Prudence’ (come on Jeff, you MUST have heard of that one?). I couldn’t find another shot of Prudence anywhere. And from the state of our picture, she didn’t like being photographed.

In cases like these, quality is secondary. The content is what matters. Here’s the Fab Four ephemera that children of the 1960s still crave: invitations, photos, memorabilia, little more than family snapshots – but for a little while these were the most famous people in the world.

It’s a riveting collection. And it’s only on fotoLibra. Have a look:
[url]http://www.fotolibra.com/?user_id=11087

I keep banging on about open access, and I believe strongly in equal opportunities, a level playing field, everyone getting a fair chance, all that guff. That was the guiding dream behind fotoLibra – to allow everyone an equal opportunity to sell their pictures.

The most commonly heard phrase in Welsh is ‘chwarae teg’ which simply means ‘fair play’. And there’s the fotoLibra corporate philosophy in two words.

But even I will acknowledge that information and knowledge occasionally needs to be kept from the general public, whether to avert panic, rioting or simply to protect them from unpleasantness.

So a problem arises when a number of people have to be made aware of a situation without alarming everyone else. A manager screaming “Fire! Run for your lives!” in a crowded theatre perhaps hasn’t sat down to work through a cohesive crisis management strategy.

On a recent London – Los Angeles flight an airliner hit clear air turbulence over Greenland and dropped several hundred feet, which alarmed some of the passengers. Matters were not helped by one of the air stewardesses running up and down the aisles shrieking “We’re all gonna die! We’re doomed! O God, help us!” It doesn’t inspire confidence in the crew. In this case, everyone was already uncomfortably aware of the situation, but unsure about the possible outcome. The stewardess saw only one eventuality, and lost no time informing the entire aeroplane of her opinion. Fortunately for everyone on board she was wrong, but I would not like to be a passenger on any flight on which she was working.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair code words are issued to exhibitors. If the public address system (thankfully hardly ever used) squawks ‘’Romeo! Romeo!” you are supposed to search your stand for unfamiliar packages. If you hear “Juliet! Juliet!” (all codewords have been changed) you shepherd your stand staff and all nearby members of the public to the nearest exit. We’ve never had to do it in the past 30 years.

Sailing across the Atlantic on the QE2, we were seated at the doctor’s table. Every evening as he took his first bite of dinner, “Starlight! Starlight!” came softly over the Tannoy. Emitting a noise halfway between a grunt of irritation and an apology, he would wipe his mouth and hurry off. The third night we asked him what was going on. “Starlight” was the code for a dead passenger, and with 1,200 people on board, the great majority apparently over 90, it was not surprising his evenings were regularly interrupted.

Conspiracy theorists will hear secret codes in every announcement — “The train arriving at platforms 7, 8 and 9 is coming in sideways” — and although I’m pretty cynical when it comes to wild, uninformed speculation, I did hear something the other day which made me wonder.

I was on the Victoria line tube from Oxford Circus to Finsbury Park, and as we waited for the train to leave Oxford Circus, a surprisingly well-spoken announcer said “Would Inspector Sams please go to the operations room immediately.” The message was repeated four or five times. I thought nothing more of it till we reached King’s Cross, where the station announcer said in purest RP: “Would Inspector Sams please go to the operations room immediately.” My instinctive reaction was to run for the open air, but either paralysis or lethargy set in and I held on till Finsbury Park where I got off — and absolutely nothing at all happened.

Or did it? Who is Inspector Sams? Is there an Inspector Sams working on London Underground?

Creepy!

Of all the pro-am contrasts, one thing in particular differentiates the serious photographer from the enthusiastic amateur.

The full-on professional will spend more time working on the photograph after it’s been taken than before. Lots of pictures will have been taken, the great majority will have been discarded, and only the very best will make it through to public scrutiny.

For want of a better term I’ll call this post-processing. That covers a manifold of subjects but here I’m going to concentrate on two things: horizontals and verticals.

Walls usually rise vertically. Water surfaces are usually horizontally flat. So our pictures need to reflect those two states, unless you are striving for a particular effect.

By far the most difficult effect to achieve is the vertical wall, and I will cover that in a future blog. The reassurance is that it’s a lot easier to do now than it used to be.

The easiest to get is the level horizon. There can be no excuse for not getting your horizons level. Look through all your photographs which have visible horizons – seascapes, those dreaded sunset pictures and so on. Is the horizon at 90 degrees to the side of the picture? If it’s at 88 or 91 degrees you may think that’s close enough, but you’d be wrong. Only 90 degrees is close enough. No musician can get away by always playing off key. Even a demi-hemi-semitone off is excruciating to many ears, and a guarantee of a short career.

OK, so you’ve spotted a barely perceptible tilt. Now look carefully at your other photographs. You know what? I will guarantee that you will find the same angle of tilt in all of them.

It’s natural. We lean. Our eyes may tell us we’re vertical, we’re right as a Ribstone Pippin, but they lie.

Accept it, because you can do something about it in post-processing. But first, there’s something you might be able to do about it in pre-processing. If you have a highly featured SLR, you might be able to change the focusing screen in your pentaprism – consult your manual. You can buy focusing screens with grid patterns engraved on them which makes lining up horizons and verticals a doddle.

Even better news is that virtually all digital SLRs have ‘on demand grid lines’ as a custom setting in the viewfinder, which you can turn on or off at will.

Yet even with these tricks of the trade many of my photos still have a perceptible lean, so out comes the trusty old Photoshop. There are other image editing programs, but if I tell you how to do it in Photoshop you’ll be able to find the equivalent feature in your preferred application.

Just go to View> Show> Grid. Click on it and a grid overlays your image. You then select the whole image and tug it about in Edit> Transform> Rotate to ensure that your levels are level.

You then have to crop the image, and in the process you will inevitably lose 10-15% of your image area. It’s worth it if the picture sells.

Alternatively, ensure you get the photo level from the start. I’m only trying to help!

Sometimes fotoLibra gets asked for pictures and we don’t send out a picture call. Are we mad?

Not really. There are two schools of thought: treat your product with respect and assign it the worth you believe it deserves, or Sell! Sell! Sell! at any price! Sell Now!!!

We tend to the former. No doubt there are some of the 10,000+ fotoLibra Members who would be happy to earn one thin dime from their photographs. There are arguments on both sides. The Sell! Sell! Sell! camp will say that it doesn’t matter if you only get a euro per picture as long as you sell a thousand a week, whereas the Respect forum will hold out for a proper reward for a job well done.

I believe the artist / creator / photographer, call it what you will, should be properly recognized and reimbursed for his work. There are stock agency sites which will sell photographs for a dollar. I think the owners of those photographs have sold out. The rich get richer, and the artist gets trodden upon. And everybody follows the well-trodden path of simply copying the images that sell. Which leads to dull, bland conformity.

fotoLibra won’t be going down that route. Granted, we offer Royalty Free images, but they sell according to size, the biggest images going for £80 / €100 / $120 (all price conversion are wild guesses in this blog). So the copyright owner gets a fair price and the possibility of multiple sales. With our Rights Managed pictures, we have 1,447 price points covering every usage we can think of, calculated through a combination of Size, Circulation and Repetition.

Are we mad? Should we sell at any price? Let me know!

Wales 18, Italy 18.

The first away points ever taken by Italy in the Six Nations. Congratulations and well played to Italy.

Wales, what were you doing? We should have annihilated them!

No direction, no fire, no passion, no brio – sorry, brio is an Italian word. Hwyl is what we lacked.

I shall go to the return match in Rome next season with a bunch of English pals.

They will be happy whatever.

Whatever.

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.

I saw this in the drab little town of Bayeux in northern France some thirty years ago. It was sort of interesting, but to this callow youth it was still just a long faded piece of embroidery.

But it permeates the mind set of every Brit; the stylistic representations of the fighting men and the distinctive lettering (now available as a font, but as I haven’t got The Encyclopaedia of Fonts to hand, I can’t tell you what it is right now) are woven into the national consciousness.

I didn’t really appreciate it till I read The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life-Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks. This is a really entertaining piece of scholarship. Not only is it extremely readable, it covers the full history of the embroidery, then continues to list much of the merchandising and spin-offs that have been associated with it over the years, from Guinness advertising to Hollywood movies. Fascinating stuff. I came away with a renewed respect for the old dish cloth.

Why was I reading it? Well, the publishers, Chatto & Windus, had come to fotoLibra and said “We know there are stained glass windows depicting the Bayeux Tapestry. Have you got photographs of them?”

We didn’t, but we emailed our Members and they went out, took the photographs and made two sales.

Nice work. And a lovely book.

Ever tried it? This is something I think you need to practice at. The plexiglass windows of your average MurphyAir Boing Boing workhorse doesn’t make for the finest lens filter, and there are only so many scratched images of the Alps or featureless countryside from 35,000 feet that one picture library can handle.
So you need to remove the window.

Don’t try this at home, or on your next jetliner flight, but here’s a thought.

Find out where your local flying club is. Turn up with the flashest array of camera gear you can (borrow if necessary). Pilots are just as easily impressed as the rest of us and if you can convince them you’re an expert in your subject they will try to convince you that they’re experts in theirs.

Find a guy or gal with a high-winged monoplane (Cessna 172s are quite common) and persuade him or her to take you up in exchange for a photo of their house. They’re usually so keen to fly anywhere that they’ll do it. Make sure the Plexiglass window swings right up so you can hang out.

Tell me how you get on.

But please don’t get out.