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.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen