Pingle Pangle

When I switched my PC on this morning it said the filesystem may have become corrupted and it needed to do a chkdsk. The chkdsk did modify some files, but unfortunately doesn't give the file names of the files it modifies. So after the chkdsk had completed and the PC was up and running, I opened the Photoshop files of all the panos I added descriptions to yesterday to make sure they were still okay.

They all seemed okay so I started doing a backup, which showed that a few .xmp files and one .pts file had a size of 0 on my hard drive. These must have been the files modified by the chkdsk. So I copied back over the versions from the backup, and then did a backup.

I carried on preparing the panos I'd been working on for the last few days for upload, then had a meeting about doing the CTH website. After that I finished uploading the panos.

When that was done I tried to see what stock library / libraries Bjørn Rørslett uses, so I could try and sign up to them too. I thought I had made a note of them before, but couldn't find them. When checking his site, I came across a technique he uses, which he calls the Multitemporal Technique. It is quite simple - take 3 B&W photos of a subject, then use each photo as a colour channel. But it is not something I have ever thought of, or probably would ever think of myself. A very interesting and creative idea.

On Bjørn's site he says that his images are handled internationally by the Science Photo Library. However, looking at their submission guidelines, they require photos that are 36MB when open with 8 bits/channel as a minimum. The 12MP images from my 450D are 34.8MB, so just under their limit, and the guidelines say not to resize files to meet the minimum. So I can't sign up with them unless I got a higher MP camera. The other thing their guidelines say is that they have the worldwide exclusive right to license any images you submit to them. So you can't also upload any images you have with them to other agencies, or license the images yourself as well.

Next I checked Corbis, they require 50MB TIFFs, but do allow interpolation. They recommend a minimum native image size of 11MP. However, they have a rather strange policy of requiring a minimum black level of 5 and max white level of 250. I can understand wanting images with the maximum tonal range (no blown highlights and no solid black shadows), but having a policy like this does not ensure that. All it means is that would you loose 10 tone levels. If a buyer then expands the tonal range back, information will be lost and the tones will become interpolated.

I also looked at Getty, but looking at their submission categories, they only seem to accept News, Creative, and archive (old) images.

In the evening I set up a copy of the CTH website in my dev environment so I can work on it, and then did some work on it.