Questions about starting to upload..I think

[JPD]

Hi,

A friend has a very large private library of primarily science and technical books. Many are very rare, some are the only known copy. He has books going back to 15th century, and the earliest science book on many subjects. He also has various original letters (Charles Dickens, for example) and an important collection of cloth-bound Victorian books. He has very early books and pamphlets on flying, etc. He has amassed the collection since the 1960's.

He is willing to allow me to use these for stock photography as a joint venture. But I have a few questions:

 

-Should I photograph the books as collections or individuals, or should I focus on the contents eg. rare and unknown early scinece/technical images?

-Are images of book covers of rare books in fine condition saleable?

-How does copyright work given the majority of his collection is so old, it would be in the public domain and copyright free (I think?)

-Do individual images from publications sell? For example he has the first known image of open cast mining. Is it worth uploading these?

-Is an iphone 13 acceptable as a camera? The taking of images will be a very simple process with the set up I have in mind, but I'm not sure the phone will give the size of image required.

-Am I likely being accepted as a contributor here by submitting what on the surface appear to be generic and boring technical or book images but are actually very rare things?

-Ultimately, is this the right place for such material?

 

Any and all advice is gratefully received

Many thanks

[Betty LaRue]

No iPhone images. Only shoot with an Alamy acceptable camera, which are the midrange to high-end consumer cameras that will shoot RAW.

I recently asked Alamy if I could submit a very few jpeg images my deceased husband took with a Nikon P(something) camera that only shoots jpegs. I cherry-picked a few sharp, great looking images of bugs/butterflies. I've been at this long enough to know a good image when I see one.

But no…no exceptions, even though I provided a couple of the images for review. The camera was not acceptable.

 

As far as the rest of your questions, I’m no help other than without cutting the pages you want to shoot out of the books, it seems it would be very difficult to get the pages flat enough to shoot well without distortion. Since these are rare books, cutting them out is out of the question, and I suspect an old book would not react well to having its spine manhandled.