by Tim Gander

My First Digital Photos

I’d like to thank commercial photographer Chris Pearsall for the inspiration for this week’s article when he posted his very first digital image to a photographers’ forum on Facebook.

My first digital SLR was a Canon D30, a 3.1 megapixel camera which I bought at the tail end of 2000 for about £1,600. It was a pretty terrible camera, but I was shooting a lot of news at the time and it saved me a lot of rushing to 1-hour processing labs to get my images ready for scanning and sending to the picture desk. The next model up, the rather more capable 1D was I think about £3,500 at the time and on the shift rates I was on at the time would have taken forever to pay off.

Its main drawback was the slow, and not very reliable focusing. I could have my finger jammed down on the shutter button, desperately trying to get it to lock focus and take the photo of some celebrity or other rushing from their front door to a waiting taxi. If I was lucky I’d get a photo of the back of the taxi as it pulled away.

On slower-moving people and static objects it was fine, but not perfect. It’s fair to say that digital cameras have come a long way since 2000.

The earliest image I can find is a rather dull exterior of a house. It was to accompany a non-story about a gameshow contestant.

A big house at a distance... yawn

A big house at a distance… yawn

Another story I covered using the D30 (I wasn’t using it for everything at this stage) was something of a struggle, it being a nighttime air crash near Aldershot. Focus was difficult and the image noise further softened the images. Nothing I took that night made the paper.

Late in December 2000 I covered a visit by the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to the Millennium Dome before it closed and went on to become the O2 Arena. This shot of the director of the attraction, P Y Gerbeau, is a typical example of the struggles I had with that camera to get sensible colours and to get fill flash to work convincingly. I’m so glad things have improved since then, but it was interesting to go back to my very first CD of digital images. Another thing it showed me is just how much my photography has improved since then too!

firecrews examine the wreckage of an aircraft after it crashed into an industrial building near Aldershot.

It was a tragic accident on a dark, wet night and the D30 struggled to work reliably

P Y Gerbeau at the Millennium Dome, Greenwich, London

P Y Gerbeau at the Millennium Dome, Greenwich, London

in Archive / Older Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

On The Mount

Tip: To see the image in full width, click the title of this post to lose the sidebar.

A bit of a change of direction this week; I recently started something which I hope will become a coherent series of photos journaling the real Frome town. I want to include the people and the places that get less of a look-in, which are often ignored for not being pretty enough, retro enough or chic enough for our attention. Like Standerwick, I want this series to inform the viewer without pushing an agenda. You see the pictures, you decide what they mean to you.

I don’t want this to be just another series of “petty observations” the like of which you see on Instagram or twitter every day. Certainly Frome gets its share of those with many snaps of Catherine Hill and Cheap Street, or the Independent Market. I’m looking for the slightly grittier side of Frome.

The image below is just the first instalment, a bit of a scene-setter if you like, and it shows The Mount, Keyford, Frome, which is just one of the areas I’ll be chronicling. This series will eventually get its own gallery on my website and perhaps become an exhibition somewhere in the town. Well, that would be super, but we’ll have to see about that.

In the meantime, here goes nothing, as they say…

Feltham Drive looking towards Austin Close, The Mount, Frome, Somerset

Feltham Drive looking towards Austin Close, The Mount, Frome, Somerset

in Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

An Alamyighty Mess

Sicilian sunset

It’s sunset time for Alamy

I believe I joined online photo library Alamy in 2004. Back then they were offering half decent rates and a healthy sales percentage to photographers.

Over the years the rates have fallen and the percentage paid to contributors has tipped inexorably in favour of Alamy.

However, it’s time to withdraw from what has become a rather photographer-un-friendly agency. The latest revision to their terms and conditions means even less power to the photographer wishing to keep control of their copyright, and even less likelihood of being paid for re-uses of images when a client decides to extend their original usage. It’s an issue too involved for this blog, and anyway you can read all about it over on EPUK.

Alamy’s reputation amongst photographers has been further strained when this week they sent out an email (which I also received) to thousands of contributors telling them the interest in their work had spiked. That is to say, more people were clicking on more of any given photographer’s images to view them. Not buy them, mind you, just looking. That’s lovely then, my bank manager will be pleased.

The problem with this email is it quickly became apparent that they had sent this to a very large number of contributors, telling them they were in the top 10% of contributors being sought out by potential clients.

Mathematically, not everyone can be in the top 10% (to be precise only 1 in 10 can), but while Alamy claim to have informed 4,000 of their almost 40,000* contributors of their good fortune, it seems odd that so many, like myself, only have a few hundred images on the site and personally I’ve not seen any spike in my statistics. I’ve certainly not seen any extra sales either and I hear I’m not unique in this.

It’s impossible to verify that Alamy really has only informed the top 10% contributors, we’ll have to take their word for it, but some have questioned the timing of this email while there are so many complaints about the new T&Cs and quite a few photographers already pulling their collections from the site in protest.

I’m sure Alamy would say that the email and the change in T&Cs are pure coincidence, but if that’s the case, who sanctioned the release of the email now? Did they not know about the T&Cs furore? Are departments within Alamy so unaware of each others’ work and the PR crash this would cause?

tweet and reply between Tim Gander and Alamy

Alamy denies all their contributors got the same email

Another problem with the figures is no one outside of Alamy can question them. Even contributors posting on the members’ forum about the new T&Cs and/or the “10%” email are finding their threads removed by forum moderators, presumably to stop a full-blown revolution and a loss of more contributors.

Now it’s worth mentioning I have 652 images on sale through Alamy. That’s a teeny tiny number compared to more than 55 million they host (again, how did I make the top 10%?!) My point being, if I leave Alamy they will notice my departure in much the same way a cow poo notices the exit of a single fly. Equally, my sales are so infrequent and the rates paid so utterly miserable, that like the aforementioned fly, I will barely notice that I’m no longer standing in poo. But being part of the fly swarm means all the work I do is devalued, and I think it’s time I valued my work more.

When I leave Alamy, which I’m 90% certain I will do (note to Alamy: that’s 90% of 100%, in case percentages are tricky for you) it’s possible I will not offer those 652 images anywhere else. If I do it’ll be through my own website and at prices I set. I might never sell a single frame, but at least I won’t have to get angry at the risible fees and overgenerous licences Alamy sell my work for.

So good bye Alamy. I’m sorry it’s come to this, but clearly you don’t need photographers who care about the value of their work.

PS. If Alamy are having a hard time, you should see the mess Getty Images is in. They’re so much in debt, they can’t even pay their interest charges.

*Alamy’s figures. In fact if they’ve got just under 40,000 contributors (see twitter grab), 4,000 must account for more than 10% of them.

Update: As of this evening I have given Alamy my formal notice to quit as a contributor.

in Industry Comment 1 comments
 by Tim Gander

If Hollywood’s Listening…

Yes, I’m a bit of a nerd. I think most photographers have a nerdish streak. Some are full-nerd, I think I just have nerdish tendencies. It’s not that I’m obsessed with kit or camera specifications, but where my nerdishness manifests itself is when I’m watching a film or TV drama and there is a representation of a photographer or a group of photographers.

This is when, without fail, the writers, directors or whoever is responsible for checking the accuracy of a scene seem to drop a cog.

One example is when you have a court scene in a UK-based drama. The defendant will leave the court room (triumphant or defeated) and step out into the court corridor only to be assailed by a mess of grubby, black leather-jacketed blokes with cameras all jostling to get their “snaps” and shouting “over ‘ere mate!”

The very first thing wrong with this scenario is that in the uk, photography is banned within the precincts of court, which not only covers inside the building but also an area around the exterior too (at the very least the court steps and apron around the main entrance).

Taking pictures inside the precincts of court is a contempt of court and risks a fine or imprisonment, so quite how these photographers managed to get past security with all their kit without being challenged is anyone’s guess.

Often in this scenario, and this happens in all kinds of scenes involving photographers, you’ll see the extras holding their cameras like iPads, vaguely waving them in front of their faces, one hand either side of the body with nothing supporting the lens. They’re stuffing a large telephoto lens into the hapless lead actor’s face. Presumably to get a super-fuzzy close-up of a left nostril, I really couldn’t say. It just looks daft.

DVD cover of Salvador, an Oliver Stone film featuring James Woods.

Oi James! The action’s behind you!

The other staple cock-up is when you see a police stakeout. In this case they tend to make the opposite mistake of the court photographers in that they have a woefully underpowered lens to get the closeup mug shot of a perp who’s ambling around about half a mile down the street from where the cops are sitting. You see the camera lifted, the lens is focussed and then the director cuts to the viewfinder view of the scene and the target fills the frame from the tip of their head to the tops of their shoulders. Normally this kind of framing would require a mahoossive lens, yet these cops either have amazing kit no one else can buy, or the suspension of disbelief has to be suspended. Or you’re not a photographer and you neither notice, nor do you care.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t care, but some of the inaccuracies are so blatant I almost expect one of the extras to turn to camera and shout, “See this Tim Gander? See how I’m holding my camera?! HAHAHAHAHA!” or something.

Maybe I should chill out and watch more cartoons, but it isn’t always thus. Though it’s a long time since I watched Salvador with James Woods, I always recall it being a reasonably accurate depiction of the experiences of a press photographer in terms of how the actors handle their cameras. It’s a film I’d like to watch again some time and I hope I don’t find myself distracted by poor attention to detail. Maybe I should get a photographer friend to check it through first.

In the meantime, if Holywood (or BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Netflix et al) need me as an on-set consultant, they know where to find me.

in Industry Comment 2 comments