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Haha! If you're ever in the region of Hathersage, take a tour around and inside the factory. It's a round building (called the Round Building I believe) by Michael Hopkins. Brilliant place! My images are all on 35mm film, so no use, but there's not a whole lot on Alamy. Especially the visible roof structure only has one image here, while it's a thing of beauty. Very much like a bicycle wheel: (not my image) They do have a Factory Sale now and then. - However my cutlery is from Ikea. wim

There are 91,978 images of Milan Fashion Week and 121,423 of Milan Fashion on Alamy. Now how many searches have there been by clients? For that go and search All of Alamy. Try: %milan%fashion% Let me do that for you. For the whole of 2020 this is the result: Search Term: Amount of searches: milan fashion week 2 milano fashion week 1 Milan, Italy. 21st Feb, 2020. VERSACE FW20 Runway during Milan Fashion Week February 2020 Milan, Italy 21/02/2020 1 milan fashion runway finale 1 milan fashion week 2020 1 milan fashion week versace 1 Milan Women's Fashion Week on September 25 1 STOCK PHOTO of Italian runway in Milan during fashion week with stylish colorful clothing, featuring men and women, if possible, from one of the famou 1 milan fashion 1 milan fashion runway finale men 1 milan fashion runway men 1 Even taking into account that this was a strange year, I think it's fair to say there's not much of a market here. wim

You mean of elderly people stealing food from their dogs? 😂 wim

Images of mine that have sold as covers do not look like any of those 😁. One of the things you'll notice that all of them are verticals. Or portrait like the filter says. The other is that the search term is concept. Or there's a filter named concept. (Where is that filter?) Some people actually have book cover in the keywords. (Use "book cover" as a search term.) However when clients are searching for book cover, they are overwhelmingly looking for the cover of a specific book. Not an image to design a cover for a book. (Use All of Alamy to look for %book cover%.) Some contributors have book cover in their pseudonym. Probably because they already have licensed lots of images as book covers. (Put cover or book in the Contributor name box under the Advanced search tab.) And that could be the main reason for being included in that showcase. Selling images for covers. However you will have to work on that. I have just downloaded my all time sales records and they show 41 images sold as front cover and 107 in total for cover. And I'm not in the showcase. BTW you will not or may very seldom see that in your sales report because all your images are RF. wim

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mästarnas_Park Ungdom (Youth) by Carl Eldh. Could be it's another copy though. It seems there are more of them. If it's that park, it's in Hällefors, about 3 hrs west (by car) of Stockholm. wim

Thank you for your praise! A pseudonym is just a name you choose to present your image under. One account can have maybe hundreds of pseudonyms. Honestly some contributors have hundreds of pseudos. Sometimes just to keep some order in their portfolios, sometimes to woo clients or to deceive them (or us). Women have male pseudonyms and the other way around. And some have both male and female ones. How to make a new pseudo? In AIM select an image; go to the upper left hand corner and click on the + button next to Pseudonym. There's a filter named Pseudonym in the task bar. Which explains why somebody would use it to keep order in a big portfolio. wim

Germany Magazine inside - mid $$ The real water level in Amsterdam if we had no water works to protect Holland. A show by Daan Rosegaarde. (Of glow in the dark roads.) 2015 Live News finally selling for the first time. wim

In the past one could use one pseudo for generic images and one for images that would be likely searched for with one or very few keywords. Plus possible hero images. That worked remarkably well. However because someone's rank got higher in the course of the year much was done by Alamy to quell that, because it was seen as cheating or gaming the the system. So after each re-ranking my #1 pseudo rose, but after each re-jigging of the ranking algorithm my #1 pseudo fell considerably, to rise again after a few re-rankings. (I am a tiny contributor btw, but with nice sales.) So in stead of recognizing there was a flaw in the system and that contributors who had some images of a higher potential were not gaming the system, but providing clients with a certain category of images they were looking for, Alamy chose to lump all pseudos into one ranking. Which is now the ranking of the contributor and not the pseudo. (There's much more to it, with more weight to the individual image allegedly.) All this is from before you joining Alamy, so you would never have encountered the problem. My pseudos are still largely intact. Which may be foolish. But if you want to have a look, here they are: #1 and #2. wim

Have you included sales and/or zooms? wim

Yes and then things are not equal. However the most important instrument we had: the different ranking of pseudos has been disabled. It was seen as cheating or gaming the system in stead of being a remedy for an omission of the system. People have long been complaining about why there was no way to change the order in which images appeared. Causing them not to upload valuable extra images, because the newer ones would bury the best ones. This problem exists now more than ever. Creative keywording can only solve a little bit. And only just for some of the keywords. But it's indeed all we have now. wim

I would start with only 1 image per subject. Just choose your best. And do look at All of Alamy (or AoA) if clients are actually searching for such subjects at all on Alamy. (You have to be logged in to look at AoA.) It's not too difficult. There's nothing that can go wrong, so just play with it a bit. Here are some previous bits of advice to get you started: link 1 link 2 link 3 link 4 (Sorry, these are all mine, because for me they're easy to find.) More about AoA: Search for "All of Alamy" AoA in this forum. (The search box is in the upper left hand corner.) Do include the "" and don't forget to check the box Include all of my search term words. wim

Yes, but for a given keyword like Tuscany, you want your best image coming up first. The same for a key phrase. Btw this is why one should not upload 40 images of one subject. Especially not when starting out with an archive to choose from. wim

Of course it matters. All other things being equal, your images will turn up in the order you have uploaded them, newest first. Only after some have been licensed the order changes. Some have reported that in certain cases the order changes after images have been zoomed. wim

Ah yes that's a good price. Go ahead, I'm not going to get it. Though part of me does somehow still remembers the crave 😂. How does Brexit affect the sales? With slapping on some import duty I presume. It's not a ham sandwich, so they will not confiscate it. (I'm not proud of that btw - I think it's a disgrace. But yes they did ask for it. And they got it. So we all have to live with the consequences. No use crying over spilled ham sandwiches. Google Stoicism. However the Stoics believed it was essential to distinguish truth from fallacy through reason.) /rant mode off wim

You have probably found out that it's very easy to focus these process lenses, because longitudinal chromatic aberration is usually quite visible. If everything is in focus the color fringe is absent and the whole thing is neutral, but a slight bit of of focus turns red or green. Like enlarging lenses, they are designed for flatness of field. Common focal lengths are 150mm; 210mm; 240mm; 300mm. Very often the aperture starts at f9. The biggest ones in my drawer come from the huge Klimsch camera and are marked Rodenstock-Klimsch-Apo-Ronar. I still have some other bits from that camera too. It could function as an enlarger as well. wim

Hold your horses about the Sony 90mm. Yes it looks exceptional on DXO, however read on. Here are 2 good tests of lenses at 1x and the Magnagon is included: the old one: https://www.closeuphotography.com/sharpness-test-1x and the newest one (Dec 29 2020): https://www.closeuphotography.com/1x-test-2020 - Where the 90mm Zony is being dissed as one of the worst, one day after I bought it. 😂 But otherwise the whole site has pretty good descriptions and tests or at least comparative tests, which is exactly what I"m doing, just with a different subject. I have long looked for a 75 Apo Rodenstock. Found out that there are actually two versions, a 1x and a 2x. And that maybe the 2x is better at 1x than the 1x. Huh?? After that I turned my attention to the Minolta Scan Elite lens, but by then I had been too late by a year. Besides the Elite only has an image circle covering half frame 35mm at best. (It's a scan lens for 35mm film after all. Because it turned out speed is one of my requirements, in my case the Zony 90mm is not a bad choice. So at the moment I am testing to optimize it's performance in my setup. Contrary to Robert OToole (that guy from closeuphotography.com) I don't think baked-in lens profiles are evil if you have the rest of the process in place. However, the profiles are good, but not perfect. Not a huge deal, but still. wim

From my Sunday paper: Short history of domestication; Kat - 15000 yrs ago - now; Dog - 15000 yrs ago - now.

The focus peaking is useful to see if a setup is in alignment: if you move the camera or the lens up and down and the peaking moves diagonally across the image, you know there's something not right. So it works in a global way. Sharp lenses and sharp apertures show a larger blob of peaking and cycling through the apertures of a sharp lens you do see the peaking move from the center outwards to the corners and then vanish in the end. It does help, but for critical work I never depend on it. And it helps to see if a lens is a total dud: those will not show any peaking. Not many lenses are best at their largest opening. If they are, it's only in the center. It's very rare if a lens performs really good over the whole image area at the largest opening. But it's easy to think of a scenario where that will be the case. Take a moment to think and formulate your answer here. 😂 OK here goes: suppose the largest opening is exactly that where it is the sharpest, but the next lens that's not the sharpest has a much larger largest opening? Right that's one. Then consider a lens that has a much larger image circle like my 150mm Apo Gerogon, which combines these two qualities: it's from a process camera and designed to copy 50x60cm (20x24) originals to a film format of maybe 30 by 40 cm. Or maybe even larger. So you're only using that sharp center here. And it's largest opening is f9! It's smallest is 45, but f9 is indeed the sharpest. Then again most of the lenses will have sharp corners around f9. Actually a lens like that is not a bad choice at all. And most of them were free at one point, because nobody knew what to do with them. I was surprised to see it was that good. wim

This 105mm EL Nikkor is an old 5.6 enlarging lens. Here (>enlarging lenses >Nikon El-Nikkor 105mm) is a test. Page 2 has a picture. It's indeed best at f8. The performance is a tiny bit under my 2 Rodagons 5.6/80mm, probably because the Nikkor has some haze. This often occurs when enlarging lenses have been left overnight or longer with the lamp still on. Those condensers were quite good at projecting all those hot rays just through that hole were the lens sits. As if they were designed to do that. Oh wait.. 😁 I don't see any reason why an image from a D850 should be reduced. Other than maybe the quality of the original. Those Tamron 90mm SP or DI's are very fine macro lenses. wim

Thank you: good clear explanation. I know what it is though. Just not that it could affect enlarging lenses when I was printing. I have no means to determine focus shift or even to attribute faults I'm seeing to focus shift. What I do is quite simple: look at the file size of the JPG image that comes with my RAW. It is how digital point and shoots determine the sharpest image in a burst if they have such a function. This is valid because the rest of the process is stationary: the setup of course, but also the rest remains exactly the same. In cameras the system can be fooled when the same details or high contrast areas appear in different places in the image. Like with motion blur under a stroboscope as an extreme example. Also a kick to a tripod could cause it, with the start and end of the movement causing two distinct sharp images of the same object. After crunching the numbers I load the images into Photoshop layers and look for overall sharpness. Because my goal at the moment is copying b/w negatives, I'm mostly concerned with the corners showing sharp and correct grain. This run was all about 35mm which is the bulk of my archive, but my friend's archive consists mainly of 6x9's. I have used a pretty grainy ordinary Tri-X negative and a microfiche because those are very flat and detailed. I have used the same microfiche since 1984 or so. The Tri-X (from 1978) was not totally random, but still nothing special. It does contain signs for Agfa and Kodak and lots of bikes. 😁 After finding the best apertures for the best lenses, I load those images into Photoshop layers again to find the best of the best. Bridge users will recognize the procedure. The universal value is not that high, it's mainly the best from a pretty big amount of lenses that are available to me. (I bought 6 more in the process 😂.) And in the end decided to buy this Zony 90mm. Mainly because my findings were that it was as good as or better than the best of the enlarging and macro lenses I had available and that manual focusing was the weak point in the whole process. And the most time consuming. With no way to improve upon: only tethered focusing could have sped things up a little bit, and make it more accurate and consistent but that's impossible with a manual setup. (Macro bellows and all that.) If speed and consistency would have been no criteria, one of my 50mm Rodagons; my 2 80mm Rodagons; 105mm Nikkor; 90mm Apo Rodagon; 40 and 50mm Focotars; 75mm Tominon and surprisingly the Meopta Meogons were all up to the task, but usually only at one aperture. My old manual Olympus 90mm Macro was also good. Don't trust any lens that has been opened or serviced. Period. The worst in my test: all three of the much hyped (Ctein!) Computars. They probably were great right out of the factory. But they do not age well or people hold on to their good ones and the ones on the market are all rubbish. One thing this test proved to be good for: ferreting out the bad ones in our combined collections. And there were some unexpected (bad) surprises there. Caveat: all this testing was done on 1:1 and most enlarging lenses are optimized from 1:5 and up. The more expensive ones from 1:10 to 1:20. wim

Oh no! It's all of us! OMG I'm having a Planet of the Apes moment here. 😁 wim

Yes all that! Focus shift, don't start me on focus shift! Have you ever seen it while using them as enlarging lenses? I can honestly say I had no idea focus shift even existed. But them macro guys now counter that by firstly checking all their lenses at a whole series of images at 1 micron distance apart for every aperture. And then doing the final copy at 10 to 30 images which they then focus stack like insects. At the largest aperture (or the sharpest which ever comes first) of course. I am still in the testing phase of all this obviously. All with my own images, but the goal may be the digitization of the archive of a friend who died last year. We have not decided yet. Otherwise it will be just my own stuff. I knew one of the problems would be to keep the information that comes with the negatives, like what's written on the sleeves, but was still amazed by what else has to stay with it. My own sleeves are full of just marks. Like lots of marks: used often. Negatives upside down: printed and put back in. Strips missing, turning up in a separate sheet: do I file them with the first or the latter? The separate sleeve usually means I have printed them for a show. So it's a very useful test run so far. No definite conclusions yet. My light source is the one DDoug recommended 2 years ago here: Viltrox 116T. wim

That's an important benefit if you're in an unstable workspace: With macro, the tiniest of movements have a serious impact. At the moment my setup is in a part of the house with wooden floors on a steel sub-frame, which means that someone walking in another part of the house will cause just a tiny bit of vibration. Just enough to be visible in my measurements. Cars in the street are visible too, because we have a speed bump next to the house. Luckily it's a quiet street. I have been testing all my enlarger, copy and macro lenses to see which ones were the best. 47 in all - 22 lent by friends and 1 rented. In the end I bought a new one like the one I had rented, but decided against the A7RIV - for now 😂. I found the workflow where the camera could do it's digital magic (exposure & WB) quicker even if once in a while I had to wait for a quiet moment. The same for the auto focus vs manual focus. However like manual focus auto focus can and does have flaws. But it's a lot quicker than I am. With flash there would be no AWB and no automatic exposure and no auto focus. Though I may probably use some sort of focus hold if working tethered. However I have yet to find that one out. After I was done I was gifted the big IFF stand. The stability of the small diy Omega stand wasn't too great, but in the real world the big expensive IFF is not a whole lot better. Alignment was done a lot easier on the Omega: I had exchanged two Philips screws for Allen screws and alignment took about 10-20 seconds this way. While the IFF has no way of micro alignment at all. So I ended up shimming the column as far as it would go and doing the rest on the light box which is the base for the negative stage from my old diy Franken-enlarger. It's originally from a Krokus (Polish). (I do have Liesegang, Leitz, Omega, Beseler, Opemus, and probably a few more as well.) The humble Krokus is good enough. wim

I would kill a cheaper enlarger to use as a copy stand. And a more adaptable one. Unless you already have the copy attachment (around $200 for a simple piece of metal) in which case, you could try it out and change back in seconds. Not sure what the cheapest enlargers in Britain are at the moment, or what your local website is for free and cheap stuff, but it cannot be too hard to find one. The simplest ones may be the best. Recently I have adapted a very basic Omega and now I'm struggling with a huge IFF Super Repro. The Omega is much easier to get into alignment. It did require a hacksaw initially though to get the enlarger part off. The IFF doesn't, but is a dog to get true. With a depth of field around 0.5mm at f5.6 or 8 when you're copying a 35mm negative, that's quite critical. My Illumitran was a useful piece of kit in film days, but would not be very convenient for digital, unless you have to use flash. I still have a flash base unit by Beam; I have sold the Illumitran long ago. I have not used the Beam in 15 or 20 years I think. (Not entirely true: I have tested it for some post in this forum.) In my collection I also have a Leica Reprovit IIa which is the finest copy instrument I have ever worked with. But it would be very difficult to adapt and a shame as well. Then again, it's all just tools. What to look for in a stand: you do need height adjustment. Preferably fine adjustment. An easy way to get the thing aligned in both ways. And an easy way to keep it aligned. For that I use cheap Chinese Arca Swiss knock off QR adapters. Sometimes I just drill an extra hole for an off-center screw to keep it from rotating. But that's the easiest plane. To and fro is the hardest of course. If everything else fails: add an extra base board and align that. (In seconds with some pieces of cardboard at the corners underneath.) And it has to be stable. Most stable: bolt it to a wall. wim

Time for another plug for this site/blog: The Center Column. Here you can find the best; the worst; the stiffest; the stiffest for the money and so on. wim