Becalmed

The title says it all, really. Very few new enquiries coming in, and whilst the days are just packed, the pay-days are further and further apart. The few enquiries I have had have come to nothing so far: in particular, an academic organisation enquired about reprinting my award-winning photo from 2008, and added the giveaway phrase “We are a not-for-profit organisation”. I offered them a discount price on the reprint, as they did give me some publicity at the time that I won the award, “in view of our previous business relationship”. So far, there has been no response, either to agree the price or to try it on to get the image for nothing. They may be “not for profit”, but I have to be “not for nothing”!

Still, I did have a bit of a smile today. I was cold-called by a major charity this afternoon, and when the nice bloke on the other end of the phone was just beginning to get into his spiel, I cut him off, saying that I was self-employed, and given the state of business right now, sorry but he wasn’t going to get any money out of me. Just to be nice, he asked what my line of self-employment was. When I said “professional photographer”, we got into a discussion about the state of trade and people expecting work for nothing, and how even the staple business – weddings, christenings and bar mitzvahs – were being affected by the “my brother’s got a good camera” brigade.

“Oh, when I got married a couple of years ago, we had a professional photographer and you can tell the difference – all the proper gear and you get far better pictures than someone’s brother” he said.

“Please tell all your friends – especially those planning weddings!” I said.

I’ve got the images scanned now for Chapter One of the book – Derby, Belper and Nottingham stations, 1972-75. So here’s another picture of the old Derby station in 1972.

Derby Midland station, 1972

Apart from the fact that this glorious building has been replaced by something far less ornate, the main items of interest in this picture are the cars of the era: and visible in the picture, in front of the Hillman Minx parked behind the tree on the left of the picture, is an original Midland Railway cast-iron boundary marker. As the Midland Railway ceased to exist in 1923, we can safely assume that it had been there for at least fifty years when this picture was taken, and probably a lot longer. Whether or not it’s still there is another matter…

Scanners live in vain?

Not too much to report recently; I remain as busy as ever, but without a vast number of new commissions. C’est la vie.

Still, it’s enabled me to start work on my book, as reported a couple of posts back. I have until September to produce a synopsis, sample chapter and provide a few photographs; the photographs will enable the publishers to see whether my scanning gear is up to scratch or whether they need to get really high-resolution scans of my pictures made themselves – which would still mean my getting my scanner working to make prints for them to scan in, as the prints of my 1972 exploits were made in – well, 1972.

But I could see a problem on the horizon. My scanner is some ten years old; not only is it no longer supported by the manufacturer, the manufacturer has gone out of the photographic business altogether and now only does photocopiers (Minolta, for the uninitiated). The driver I’d got was designed to run in Windows NT; my current computer runs Windows 7 and is a 64-bit machine to boot. So I didn’t even try to load the driver and just go.

(My scanner isn’t a bog-standard flat-bed; it’s a dedicated negative/slide scanner, and it cost £450 ten years back. That made it reasonably high-end gear in 2002. The trouble is that negative scanners have gone two different ways – either you can buy a cheapo one for about £100 from the catalogues that drop out of the Sunday papers, but many of them lack proper powered film transport mechanisms, and although the reviews I’ve seen do suggest that cheap scanners can make good images – as can flatbeds that have the capacity for “transparent media” – there is the issue that I’ve got somewhere in the region of 17,000 images on film that may need scanning in the next couple of years, and ease of use and robust construction is a must that I don’t think a £100 scanner or a flatbed could manage, no matter how good the image. Alternatively, I could go out and spend £1500 on a Nikon Coolscan, but that was something I was trying to avoid.)

(Much of the rest of this post could get rather tech-y. Sorry.)

The first thing I did was Google my scanner; and as I suspected, it wasn’t going to work with Windows 7. However, the first site I visited offered a patch to make the old NT driver work with Windows 7 – or it suggested buying Vuescan. Still wanting to avoid expense, I went for the patch.

“Step 1 – install your existing driver.” So I did that – and got the error message “Unable to install because PQueen.dll is missing”.

So I Googled PQueen.dll. The first site I got was a free download of Chinese PC diagnostic software. It promised to fix the problem, but then proceeded to run a diagnostic on my whole machine which came up with a great long list of issues that the software could fix. The absence of PQueen.dll wasn’t one of them. I uninstalled that pretty quick; I’m sure it was pukka, but I just got the feeling that it was going to take me down all sorts of blind alleys and would probably pester me to buy something on a regular basis.

The second site I got was a Windows discussion board. The one thread devoted to PQueen.dll was no help at all – it dated from 2008,  the expert said “I’m not familiar with that”, then the first poster came back and said “Oh, I just kept clicking through, and eventually it ended up working. I had to uninstall and re-install about 75% of my applications, though.” and then I saw that since the date of posting, the poster himself had been banned by the site admin.

At this point, I gave this approach up as a bad deal, and plumped for Vuescan, which turns out to be a generic scanner utility that supports a whole range of different scanners, old and new. You can download it for nothing, so you can install and test it and see if it works with your scanner. I did this, and found it worked perfectly – especially when it came to embedding an indelible Vuescan watermark in your pictures. So it was either $39 for the basic version, with free updates for a year, or $79 for the pro version, with free updates forever. So that was me $79 the lighter.

But it works! And works well!

Here’s one of the images I scanned (after a bit of extra Photoshop work, I admit):

Derby Midland station, 1972

Now that’s a picture I’m quite pleased with. Derby station was rebuilt about ten years ago, so it certainly doesn’t look like this anymore. And it’s only when you look at an image like this that you see how much things have changed in nearly forty years – a half-cab double decker bus in a restrained livery (though Derby’s light blue was a little modernist in 1972), Belisha beacons on the pedestrian crossing, and a high-maintenance station building with probably a lot of excess unused office space (after all, this was once the headquarters of a major railway company, and one that wished to project a certain image to its customers through the medium of its infrastructure rather than its branding). Oh, and a Rover 2000 – with twin carbs (tasty!) – making a dramatic turn into Midland Road that wouldn’t have disgraced The Sweeney even though he wasn’t chasing, or being chased by, anyone.

If anything, I think this is probably a bit better than the scans I made with the old driver; certainly, I was able to tweak the contrast up to a quite pleasing result.

So I’m all set for the next phase; decide what my subjects will be for the first chapter, select my pictures, get them scanned in and ready for reproduction, and then actually write the text to go around them. Sounds easy, but we’ll see…