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Antiquity

This could be a long one but I’ll do my best to be brief.

My wife has an incredible collection of family furniture. Originally Scottish, some of the family wound up in Montreal where they were prominent engineers involved in, among other things, the building of the earliest canals along the St. Lawrence. Wealth followed and a mansion was built somewhere around the year 1800. The family had furniture built specifically for this home, sourcing the wood from as far as South America.

I’ll pause here to say that I’ve yet to entirely read the massive volume of family history that is somewhere among our packed belongings and I haven’t done any real research on this information. But, family lore has been passed down and I’m repeating it here. Hopefully I’ll get at least some of it right.

Not long after the construction of the mansion in Montreal, it burned. To the ground. But not before the servants were sent inside to save a few pieces of furniture including a large gentleman’s press (like a combination wardrobe and dresser), a gaming table, a foot stool and an enormous gilded mirror. In the following years, the family’s fortune disappeared but these few pieces of furniture survived and were dutifully passed from generation to generation. For the last 20 or so years, they’ve been in our possession.

The 200-plus years haven’t been entirely kind. We had the table restored a few years ago and, when it came time to move last year, we decided to deliver the gentleman’s press to the restorationists for its turn. It’s big — really big — and we figured that we could move it fewer times this way.

To make a long story short, it’s been there for a few months now and we’ve visited from time to time to consult on the details of the work. We made another stop yesterday and I decided to bring the camera along to record the progress. The piece had become nearly black with age and this trip would be the first where we would see a few of the parts with the build-up removed and the original glow restored.

restored piece of antique furniture

Suffice it to say that they are doing an incredible job. I was photographing a few of the resurrected parts like this door bracket, marveling at the glow and depth of the wood grain when…

I got distracted.

Did you notice the texture of the table that the woodwork is sitting on? I’ve been a semi-obsessed collector of textures for decades. They are part of an ongoing project of mine and this work surface was a gold mine. The restorationist probably thought I was nuts as I began to photograph the table top instead of the fruits of his restoration efforts. In the end I had over a dozen textures with a wide variety of tones and color like this:

texture

It may not look like much but — trust me — this kind of layered surface isn’t easy to find. What do I intend to do with them? Well, I’ve long been working on a series of artificially aged images that involve textures like these overlaid on other images to create the look of a worn and aged photo. I’ll post more of these later and plan an entire gallery on my site but here’s an example from last Fall’s trip to China:

Shanghai Pearl Tower

The original of this image can be seen here.

See? There was a photography-related aspect to this story after all. I’ll post more of my texture experiments later and, when the gentleman’s press finally arrives, I’ll post a before and after of it as well.

Just goes to show you — always take your camera.

Pearl of Shanghai (part 1) and goal setting

Pearl Tower, Shanghai, China

I mentioned in an earlier post that my main goal on this trip to the Shanghai region of China was to get a good, iconic skyline shot of the Oriental Pearl Tower and the recently developed Pudong area. I showed a photo of two nearby skyscrapers — currently the tallest in China — with a fairly blue sky behind. This shot was taken from the observation platform of one of those skyscrapers, the Jin Mao, a few minutes later. The haze was much thicker from above and I’ve actually boosted the contrast quite a bit here to somewhat compensate for it.

A tip for those of you who have also found yourself shooting through glass in situations like this: get your lens as close to the glass as possible and drape your jacket over your head and camera to block any reflections coming from behind and beside you. You might look stupid but it gets the job done. Any color cast from tinted glass can be corrected in Photoshop.

This was not the iconic shot I wanted but in some ways the haze helps to separate the Pearl from the older city in the background so I don’t think it’s is a total loss. I still wanted the shot that was in my head, though. I’ll post my progress on that front as my last two days in Shanghai sped on in the coming posts.

Meanwhile, in the present, I’ve been making goals for the coming year. I’m not really a New Year’s Resolution kind of guy but I do like to have goals. They keep time from getting away from me.

Over the last year, I neglected my image files on Alamy. Between travel, moving, and feeding other stock agencies, I just didn’t increase the number of images placed with Alamy the way I should. So… 2009 is my catch-up year.

As of yesterday, I had 1024 images online with Alamy directly. I say “directly” because other agencies I put images with also put them on Alamy so, technically, I have more on Alamy but these 1024 images are those that I am directly responsible for. For those of you who don’t know, Alamy requires more of the photographer in return for a larger percentage of sales. You do your own editing, you do your own keywording, etc.

I’ve decided to set a goal of basically doubling my Alamy files by May 1, 2009. My goal is 2000 images posted and keyworded. That comes to about 10 images per day which doesn’t sound like much to keyword, but I’ll also have to prep and upload about 900 of those. This morning I keyworded a dozen images so — so far — I’m ahead of schedule. Which I need to be, because I’ll be away the first two weeks in February so I need to get a head start.

If I meet my first phase goal by May 1, the second phase will be to double the number again by the end of the year. By January 1, 2010, I want to have 4000 images with Alamy. Quadrupling my files in one year seems daunting but I have a backlog of images that need to be on the market. My hope is that, by quadrupling my images this year, I can quadruple my 2008 income from Alamy in 2010. When you put it in dollar terms, there’s quite an incentive.

I’ll post progress reports of my new goal on this blog. I’m still deciding how to do that exactly but it may just be a series of short “progress posts” or a line at the end of each regular post. Either way, I hope by making my progress public, it will provide a further kick in the pants.

Wish me luck.