There comes a point, surely, when any amateur photographer asks the question “now what?” - now that I’ve got thousands of photos squirrelled away, that I’ve learnt what all the knobs and dials do, forgotten it, and learnt all over again. Now that I’ve bought and read all the HOW TO books. What next? The answer often seems to be, buy a new camera, or software, or something. Oh, and blog about it. But surely even Gear Acquisition Syndrome loses its allure over time? Maybe not for everybody, but for me just making semi-random photographs which a new camera every 3 months doesn’t really bring much satisfaction. The next step, if you can avoid the gear trap, is often to embark on projects. Such projects are greatly loved by the photo magazine industry. Every month, garish covers scream “SHOOT LANDSCAPES! / GARDENS! / PUPPIES! / BARE LADIES! / BITS OF TOAST!” or whatever, but all too often this is a thinly veiled cover with a gear selling pitch barely concealed beneath it. My feeling is that the biggest step comes from getting away from concentrating on the mechanisms of photography, and getting into the actual product of the creative process. I’m sure there are plenty of different ways of doing this, but I’m increasingly attracted by the idea of the photo series. By which I mean creating coherent sets of photographs, each of which may well stand alone, but which together reinforce each other through some form of common theme, structure, or intent.  This is one reason that I find online photo sharing sites quite unsatisfying, as they’re pretty much all focused on the latest upload, on displaying single shots, and leave the photographer no significant control over presentation and layout.  On this site in recent months I’ve tried to take a “series” approach, and even if this means nothing to anybody else, it gives me some sense of purpose. As an aside, I long ago realised that it is extremely easy to attract visitors to a photography site - just be controversial about gear. This post is by far my most viewed, and remains perched high on top of the weekly rankings. Heavens only knows why people find it interesting. So if I wanted eyeballs over all else, I’ve no doubt I could get them.

Anyway, all this web stuff is all very well, but it doesn’t set the bar very high. Getting a photo published here and there in OLYMPUS magazine is neither challenging nor exactly earth shattering. The next step is to have the nerve to submit a printed portfolio to a real, honest-to-goodness magazine, and one with good artistic credentials at that. Is it over-ambitious of me? Probably, but you have to start somewhere.  So I put together a series of photos which I actually have a strong connection with. There aren’t that many subjects that I really connect with - and the name of this website is a good pointer to one of them. Combining this with what some have described as my “signature”, more heartfelt panoramic format, putting together a series was relatively easy. At least it was easier than writing the description, CV and covering letter. I’d finished the actual prints before Christmas. I finished the covering letter last night, and the whole package went in the post this morning. One small step…

The contact sheet

Obviously there is perhaps more than a passing resemblance here to the work of Stuart Klipper, whose praises I’ve sung on this blog. But, in my self-defence, I only discovered his work on the day I took the first photo in this series, and indeed had it not been for an unfortunate encounter with a gale in the Arctic, I’d possibly have made a similar series some three years ago.

I’ll let you when the rejection letter arrives. It will be in French.

 

Today I received an unsolicited email informing me that “Getty Images is interested in ANOTHER 12 of your photos! Wow! Awesome! High Five!”.

So what does this actually mean?  Some algorithm, trawling through Flickr has picked a set of photos which have, for whatever random reason, picked up a lot of “faves”.  In order to benefit from the privilege of Getty putting them up for licensing, and, in the extremely unlikely event of getting a bit, grabbing pretty much all the paltry sum that would accrue, I’d need to spend several evenings uploading high resolution versions, filling in forms and generally being a part-time Getty slave.

I guess if they throw enough mud, some of will stick. They can’t really lose, and they cruelly raise many people’s hopes of making money from their photography.  But I’ve been on the other end of the licensing game, and what the vast majority of buyers want is well-executed, but neutral, bland imagery with can serve their brand. That’s what stock photography is about.

And while opinions may differ on the merits of my photography (recently I was told that it is “overdone technically and cold and sterile”), it certainly isn’t designed to please anybody except me, and looking at it from the perspective of a stock imagery buyer, I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. The selection they’re proposing is, frankly, weird. I certainly hope no human calling themselves a photo editor was involved.

Oh, and that bloody puffin. Why does EVERYBODY choose that one??? Even Getty’s sodding algorithm.

So, yeah, thanks Getty, but don’t call me, I’ll call you. Real soon.

Following a very limited experiment last year, this year I decided (under much persuasion) to attempt to create a good quality calendar of Icelandic images, purely for family & friends.

My first attempt was through Lulu. This is a US web-based self publication service which includes services for book printing and calendars amongst others. It seemed ok, even after visiting the forums where there was a fair amount of complaining. Having done plenty of pre-press work in the past, it seemed that preparing photos for print on their digital printer would be feasible.

Lulu provides a couple of lightly customisable calendar templates, to which users can upload photos. The system is not very user friendly, and requires far more fiddling than it should do. Customer support is also very poor, with customers (paying customers that is) being largely fobbed off to the forums. At the prices Lulu charges, this is pretty bad.

Cover for the "lulu" calendar

Of course, the most important thing is the quality. Well, at nearly $30 a copy (and double that for shipping, in some cases), it is really bad. The paper is horrible, an off-white stock (described as "white") with a quite inappropriate texture and the coil binding does not have a hook (the pages are perforated for hanging, which defeats the point of coil binding). Print colour is ok, quite a close match to my prooofing, but shadows up to at least 10% are muddy and detail-free (despite a shadow threshold of 12), and there are nasty vertical streaks on most pages. Very amateur and certainly not worth half the price. One plus point, the packaging is robust and secure.

Interior page from the "lulu" calendar

I was ready to give up at this point, but at the last moment heard from a friend about XPress Printing, a digital printing service in Romania. In this case, it is print & print only - although they do offer a design service. So I had to do a very fast design using Adobe InDesign, and uploaded a 30Mb PDF for them to print. They provided excellent support and could answer all questions I put to them, immediately and with no hesitation.

Cover page for the final calendar

The printed calendars arrived a few days later. The quality is fantastic, at under $10 a copy, on very nice paper. They are coil-bound, and have been very well received. The packaging was not so good, but the second batch was better. I'm not sure if the people at Xpress speak English, but I think they do - they are well worth getting in touch with if you need printing services like this, but do be aware you need to know what you're doing. They will just print whatever you send!

Interior page from the final calendar

All of the photos were taken with the Olympus E-1, except for the cover, with is an Xpan image. The rush job resulted in two errors, a typo in an Icelandic title, and somehow ending up with "01.2006" for August - which took quite a while for anyone to spot (grazie Stefano!).

We had 30 printed. We have got a few spares, so if anybody out there is interested, I'll be happy to send you one (if you ask in time) against the price of postage.