Narrow casting

            A photographer friend visiting London recently was amazed when I showed her seemingly endless sheets of slides taken on my recent trips abroad. She wondered if I’d ever slept.

            Well, I am a travel photographer, and true, I take a lot of pictures. Being in a place just once means I have to cover it well. Also, although from looking at numerous slide sheets it would appear that I shoot anything that moves or doesn’t at random, in fact I specialise, but in very different areas. These break down as: Travel, Aviation, Flowers & Wildlife, and Railways. Therefore I specialise in four distinctly different areas which sometimes overlap. This overlapping can make it difficult to decide which stock library I should offer certain images to.

NO OVERLAP

            Although it is tempting, I never place similar pictures with different libraries-- not doing this is one of the maxims of the business. To do so is easy, but you may be asked to come in and collect your pictures one day, as photo libraries find it too difficult explaining to clients why they have received more-or-less the same images from another source. So, as tempting as it is, I don’t do it.

            What I do, is mark on the mount the images which are too similar to place elsewhere, using a code letter system for ease of use, A, B, C, etc. Which means I keep track of what each library has. The overshoots end up in storage as a form of insurance, along with the rejects which I might like but nobody seems to want.

TWEAKING OF THE REJECTS

            But now I am happily going through those rejects looking for images which I can scan and send on CD-ROM to an on-line photo library. One of the great things about this is that I can do the small tweaks which may have been the very reason an image was rejected in the first place. I can remove power cables across a view, or if someone is in a very prominent bright spot I can darken it or change it to something that would blend in. It takes time of course, but I see this as part of the business now, something not possible when the images were originally rejected just a few years ago. A whole new world of potential has opened up!