CM photo

Crikey, you must be even older than me.

If you're concerned about mis-captioned images, don't even think about going through natural history photos. On some pages up to half are incorrectly identified, sometimes honest mistakes and sometimes, I suspect, to generate more "hits". This is a massive problem for Alamy, caused by allowing contributors to do their own captions and keywords and reflects on everybody. Unless it affects me directly, I no longer contact member services about this as I have better things to do with my time than police other peoples images.

You have nice stuff and I'm sure it will sell over time. Natural history is a tough area with lots of competition so it will be important to get your images seen - i.e. on the first few pages of searches. Check this by doing some searches of your own, and check in Alamy Measures, to see if tweaking your keywords helps to improve your ranking. Forget visibility and don't be tempted to use spurious keywords just to change the colour from orange to green; it won't help. There's always been a trade-off between shooting obscure subjects (not much demand but not much competition either) and "popular" subjects - loads of demand but, equally, loads of competition. Looking at your images, it seems to me that you shoot what you enjoy rather than being focussed entirely on sales. Not a bad attitude, in my opinion, when returns across the board are generally poor. Good luck. Chris

And April is the time to opt out of the distributor scheme if you decide you can't live with the extra commission charges.

Deleted (mis-understood!)

In fact, "agouti" is often used as a colour, in cats, rats, mice, guinea pigs, etc. It refers to a flecked mixture of black and brown hairs (like an Agouti).

Glad to hear it! Thanks for pointing this out; I probably should read more of the small print. Chris

It all looks pretty straightforward to me - if you have the same image with another agency then it is not exclusive, otherwise, it is. I noticed a change in the rates for "affiliate sales" whatever they are. Can we opt out - I prefer my fees to be divided between the photographer and the agency, not some other hanger-on. Or perhaps I've misinterpreted something. Chris

We had the same email message a few days ago and, in one of those coincidences you can do without, the hard drive crashed the following day, so it's definitely worth following up. In our case we managed to get the laptop to boot after three attempts, contacted Apple support, who were brilliant, and have made an appointment with the Apple store in Cardiff. We were told it would take about one hour to replace the faulty part(s) but that data may be lost. We have backed up to iCloud and will also make a copy on a portable drive with TimeMachine. The take-home message being: if you have had a warning I seriously recommend that you get the laptop looked at, pronto. Good luck with it. Chris

Or, indeed, use a Canon tilt and shift 90mm lens, which is "almost" a macro (it goes to about one-third life size). But don't expect to earn enough to pay for it anytime soon! Personally, I'd go for selective DoF, or use a small number of stacks. Helicon Focus is an alternative to Photoshop stacking. Chris

Thanks, Kevin. The reason I asked was that I have placed PU restrictions on some of my images but I am still getting the odd distributor sale (I am only signed up for a handful of territories). I think I need to go through my distributor sales to see if any of them involve images for which I have restrictions, but it's unlikely to be conclusive. And, as you point out, the word "may" will cloud the issue still more.

While we're on this subject, did anyone come to a firm conclusion over the link between personal use and distribution? There were rumours that preventing personal use would also prevent distribution. Is this correct? And, if so, does this apply to just those images that have personal use prevented or is it "one out, all out"? I don't remember seeing any conclusive statements from Alamy on this - perhaps I've missed something?

John Obviously, I don't know if the direct sales come as a result of opting out. However, I do get sales from parts of the world where I would normally expect them through a distributor (based on the time when I was opted in). I understand that buyers might prefer to go through local distributors, and I'm sure I lose some sales because of this. My point is that the enhanced fees obtained from forcing them to buy direct, might compensate - at least to some extent - for those lost. It depends what you shoot, obviously, but if you have images they need then there should be at least some occasions when they will use Alamy directly. whether they like it or not. As I said, I have no way of knowing. I do actually allow distribution in territories where there could be a language problem (Japan being one example but there are obviously others). I do not get reduced commission from derisory sales in other parts of the world though, which is good for my blood pressure. Chris

That, of course, is assuming that foreign buyers don't go straight to Alamy if they can't buy through a distributor. After all, that's the whole point of the "world wide" web, isn't it? I have had direct sales from overseas that have avoided the distributor system because I have been opted out. Obviously, there's no way of knowing how many distributor sales I've missed out on but at least I do get a reasonable share on the odd(?) ones that get sold. Does the higher fee make up for the ones I miss? I don't know. My strategy is to allow distribution for certain countries where I have had good sales in the past, especially where English is not widely spoken. Chris

I've gone over to Energizer rechargables, which got the highest rating in a recent Which? survey. But as Bryan pointed out, it's hard to know if you've made the right decision until they've been in use for a while. So far so good though. I've been concerned for a long time about disposing of spent batteries, especially in countries where there is less awareness of the hazards involved.