Inchiquin

Do Yourself In? Alan

As Martyn says, PEC-12. I actually bought some a few years ago as a result of Chuck's recommendations but the thought of getting all my Kodachromes out of their mounts was too much for me at the time and I never got round to investigating whether it would be sufficient or possible to clean them in situ. Alan

An additional question for those of you who use the archival route: do you spend any time cleaning and spotting old trannies? I've got thousands but most of them are Kodachrome so there's no possibility of using ICE in the scanner. Cleaning them would be an enormous task, spotting them a thousand times more so. Alan

I often spend a lot of time on captions, involving maps, Wikipedia, Google Earth etc. At least with digital it's easy to take a quick snap of any signs, information boards etc while you're there, without wasting a precious frame of film. Alan

It's probably a bulk deal, in which case Alamy wouldn't care how many contributors their income was split between. Why would they? One deal for them, one payment into their coffers. Alan

Doesn't seem to work for me like that Stephen. The vast majority of my sales over the last 12 months were uploaded between 6 and 10 years ago. Some of them were from the very few trannies that were up to standard, the oldest shot in 1979. Alan

It's kind of appropriate to the literal interpretation of the search though, isn't it? I'm assuming your photo showed a man in an opening high in a castle. Alan

Thanks Danny, and Kumar. It shouldn't really be a long slog but when you've got so many other things on your to-do list... Alan

I'll get round to that eventually. I've got loads of interesting stuff particularly from the 1980s. But it's not a high priority any more. Alan

When I joined Alamy in 2008 my target was 4000 by the end of 2011. I'm only just over 7 years late. My mistake was to assume I would scan my thousands of transparencies. When I did so I was horrified to find that 90% of them were not sharp. Alan

Like I said, it's all down to location. If the café is in London you'll get far more than if it's in a downtrodden post-industrial town in West Yorkshire which is where I live. I do however have an excellent local printer who will do A3 prints for £5. Before my Epson 1800 gave up the ghost I was printing them myself for about £3. Alan

We can't possibly answer that without more information. What camera were they taken on? What size was the original image from the camera (pixel dimensions)? Did you enlarge them? If so, to what size? Can you post a 100% crop of an area that should be sharp? Alan

It might depend somewhat on whether you live in an affluent area and what kind of customers the café attracts. I sell prints locally in an area which is not very affluent and I would struggle to get more than £40 for a framed A3 print. Generally people are willing to pay more for original artwork than for photographs. The ones that do sell have to be eye-catching. Alan

In my first year I sold one, in my second year none, and in the next three years just a trickle. It was only in the sixth year, 2013, that I started seeing regular sales and the number of sales has increased steadily every year since then. Already this year I've sold as many as I did in the whole of the first five years, and that's despite the fact that my new submissions have slowed to a trickle over the last couple of years. Alan

To guarantee regular sales I'm afraid you need a lot more than 269 images. Alan