Photography

A long time ago I was interested in photography.  I had a (cheap) SLR camera, and a selection of half-decent lenses and equipment to use with it, and I took a fair number of photos, some of which were reasonable quality.

Times moved on though, and I gradually fell out of the photography habit and stopped using the SLR, replacing it instead with a series of compact cameras and eventually with the advent of digital photography with a reasonable SLR-style Fuji S5700.

In July 2008 I took a photo of a fire in a scrapyard on the river Clyde, not all that far from where I live, and because I thought it might be newsworthy I emailed it to the BBC whereupon to my surprise they immediately published it on their news website.  Fame at last!

Yesterday I received a message via the photo sharing website Flickr asking me to contact someone direct by email as they wished to licence the use of one of my photos and pay me a reproduction fee for it.  I initially thought it was going to be a scam along the lines of "tell us your bank details and pay us a small fee and you'll get paid loads" but on searching online for the person who'd contacted me and confirmed that she does indeed work for who she said she worked for (which tied into the legitimate email address she had supplied) I emailed her and agreed that my photo could be used.

And so it came to pass that today on page 4 of the Scotland edition of The Times my photo of The Straw Locomotive hanging from the Finnieston Crane in Glasgow in 1987 was one of the small number of images used to illustrate an article on the 90th birthday of Scottish artist George Wyllie!

I'm still waiting for a form to be emailed to me at some point today so that I can arrange the reproduction fee to be paid, and it'll be a nice surprise because I don't know how much it'll be (although I expect it to be a VERY modest amount!).