Fingers Crossed

I'm a superstitious photographer. Back in the days of film and chemicals, no matter how well I knew the process, I was never quite convinced it would work out and always held my breath while I took the film out of the developing canisters.

Because it was magic.

Much as I love the digital world now, that magic has pretty much gone. The superstitiousness of it hasn't though. That resides in one place in my mind. The Alamy stock library website. I managed to pass the technical quality tests for the site many moons ago on my 2nd attempt. The ability to pixel peep has made image library QA a dark art. In my day the grain in the film was far bigger than pixels are now so it was never an issue really. Even with large format stuff. If you knew your chops you were fine.

At Alamy though, it depends whether the moon is full, how grumpy the QA person is, and if there have been any squirrels sighted that day*. I know I've done what I can to get my work on the site, now it's down to the small gods. I've spent the day whittling 250 images down to 10 I'm fairly confident of and then tweaking them. Keeping my submissions small until I'm happy I can predict these dark masters.

I can't hold my breath for days though, so I'll just cross my fingers.


*squirrels are the harbingers of DOOM.