On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
Remember that the number of (highly skilled) staff required to
operate that sort of process may not show up on the NPG payroll, as
they may contract that sort of work out to others.
Granted without a question. But that just begs the question.
If they are claiming a "creative act" in producing the image,
and not being satisfied in acknowledging they are just copying
it, is it not really even "best practices" for them to acknowledge
the authorship to the person doing the creativity? Personally I
think aggressive approaches by them for some purported
creative function they have provided, when not even supplying
the name who might have standing to declare their creative
contribution was being impinged upon, is frankly ludicrous!
And my guess is that the photographer or scanners
or other people paid
to do this were doing nothing more nor less than as professional a job
as they could do, to earn the money they were contracted to be paid.
Not everyone has noble thoughts about free culture and freeing public
domain material, running through their minds all the time.
Just being professional doesn't mean you aren't being creative.
I want to be very clear about that. But even if you are being
very inventive in the solutions you employ in producing a good
and professional _result_; the result would in most cases aim
to be "faithful" to the original image, and not to impart some
"creative spark" from the forehead of the photographer themselves,
which would forever mark the image as the work of that and no
other fungible photographer, I rather suspect.
Agreed. Ironically, if the NPG *had* done photographs of the portraits
in their gallery settings, including the 3D frames and with lighting
and angle considerations, and there had been a developed 'style' of
how to frame the photographs of the pictures, that would be a greyer
area than faithful archival quality scans. I think.
Carcharoth