Bit of a long gap between updates, basically because there’s nothing happening. Image rights for another museum duly paid and I’ve sent them some of the spare shots from my visit to see if they can use them as well.
The biggest annoyance, as with a lot of things, is people simply not getting back to you when you contact them, be it a phone call/message or email. Worse is when a webpage says “we’ll contact you in x days”, you’re still waiting x months later! I can’t nor daren’t go to print without confirmation a museum is happy for me to use their images without charge and just with accreditation, or after paying them a donation. So far I’ve spent just over £250 in donations for image rights, I’ve yet to get any response from half a dozen other places, so I can easily see that doubling. So now more waiting whilst the publisher’s commissioning editor sees if they get more response than I do.
With holiday season approaching, I can see it might be quicker to revisit a couple of nearby museums and sort the image rights problem out directly, as well as get a few better images, hopefully with a bit of sunshine, a few photos currently slated for use were taken when the weather was a bit grim shall we say, just plain foggy would be another description!
The text for Volume 1 has had one trip across the copy editor’s desk and I don’t think I did too badly, though the subject matter is obviously not something they’re familiar with, when one of the comments says “TSR2, what’s that? I’ve yet to get a reply to “The most famous aircraft we never built”. I’m also unsure why “appropriate” wasn’t the correct word to use for the only complete Vickers Valiant bomber to be preserved, when it’s the only V Bomber (thankfully) to have dropped what they were all designed around, an atom bomb, even if it was in a test. You may or may not agree with what they represent, but nearly 80 years of basically peace in Europe, despite or because both sides having the means to turn the continent into a radioactive wasteland either means deterrence worked, or we were lucky and yes, at the present time, it’s looking like the latter!
After my acquisition of a couple of 35mm SLRs, the means to get from the analog to digital domains was required. As the Canon flatbed scanner I’d previously used had departed some years ago and the cost of dedicated scanners is ridiculous, the arrival of something cheaper, smaller and a bit of fun in the process will be on no surprise. Lomography released the DigitaLIZA a while back https://shop.lomography.com/uk/digitaliza-max and the results have been pretty good, though seeing yourself on 35 year old slides is a bit of a shock as well. Amongst the boxes of holiday photos were also some whose original owner I’d love to know, as they appeared on my doorstep well before I’d departed from home for the RAF. One of the slides was more prophetic than was realised at the time.
