Original negatives- underrated? Show yours

[Forever Young]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

Can someone tell me is 2,965 the complete Conlon collection? Just wondering if there are more?

http://www.gettyimages.com/search/mo...opular#license

More original conlon images outside of neg collection? Yes.. nany more

[mikejanesphotography]

When mentioned sending them overseas I was referring to the digital files and not the actual negatives. Those never left my house.

$46,000 for those negatives,where was I when they were sold, assume it was with rights as sold to Rogers, would have jumped on it. Be nice to know their plans.

[mikejanesphotography]

The Digital Archive Group that purchased what was left over, 225,000 negatives, said they own the rights to all images now, including the ones Rogers sold off without permission as he scanned them and they have the digital copies. They're giving them away to all the teams to fill out their archives. So guess the collection is still together technically speaking.

[thecatspajamas]

So how is it that DAG have the digital copies of the negatives that Rogers scanned and sold off prior to them purchasing the remainder of the archive?

[Keith_Loving]

TDAG: http://www.digitalarchivegroup.com/

Here is their recent blog where they seek baseball club owners to contact them http://www.digitalarchivegroup.com/t...ge-collection/

[mikejanesphotography]

They answered my questions on their Facebook page...


"The Digital Archive Group So, my company now holds rights to all physical and digital rights to the entire collection, regardless of what Rogers sold. The court case is officially closed."

"The Digital Archive Group Yes. He scanned the ones that were sold off and I have that digital copy."

If had known about an auctions pretty sure a bunch of people here would have been involved, wonder why it went under the radar so much?

Also thought the same thing about Mary Brace, she should have been given them back, however she was awarded over $800,000 in missed payments. Though, in the original deal she was supposed to get digital copies of everything, doesn't look like that happened but not entirely sure on that since they do not mention that. Also says the teams will get them exclusively, which think is a mistake - the Hall of Fame should have them, Mary should have them, and if it were in my possession there'd be a site dedicated to them!

Hate seeing archives disappear, and unfortunately it seems this one will - though it won't be broken up, the average person will never see these scans unless team releases them. Wish a writer would dig deeper on all this...

[Keith_Loving]

I am hoping the scanned images could be made available for purchase through a site like gettyimages. Seems like many Conlon is available on gettyimages. I've bought a dozen scans myself from gettyimages and would buy more if this archive was made available. Here is hope in a few years time, this archive and metadata can be searched and scans can be bought.

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

I am hoping the scanned images could be made available for purchase through a site like gettyimages. Seems like many Conlon is available on gettyimages. I've bought a dozen scans myself from gettyimages and would buy more if this archive was made available. Here is hope in a few years time, this archive and metadata can be searched and scans can be bought.

I am not thrilled reading that they want to have the ball club to contact them for exclusivity of their photos. I'd say that would be a mistake. As they should make that scans available for purchase by the general public as well. I plan on e-mailing them again next week to see if I can get any information on a certain player that interests me.

I posted that as well, saying if had known would have bought and made the money back via licensing as Getty does. It's just odd that teams would be the only ones getting them, if they went to the Hall of Fame you could purchase copies and help out the HOF at the same time, teams though depends on if they have a good system in place or not, many not so sure they do.

[Keith_Loving]

Kelch Returning Brace Collection To Teams

(this was a one-on-one interview we had with Kelch on Thursday afternoon. This all original content for these pages.)

Jeffrey Kelch, CEO of Digital Archive Group, the group that purchased the remants of the massive George Brace collection in a January court-ordered auction, is finally going public with the details of that purchase. And what he had to say was remarkable.

Kelch, contacted this week, isn’t ready to spill all the details, but the headline is that the Brace collection was actually purchased intact. The auction, conducted in the aftermath of the collapse of the Rogers digital images empire, drew only $46,500 as the winning bid -- a modest amount dwarfed by the $1.8 million that the Conlon Collection (also a Rogers acquisition) had drawn the previous August.

“We have been trying to acquire the collection from Mary Brace for the last three or four years,” Kelch said. “But her asking price was a steady $2 million. She finally got someone to meet her price – even though she would only wind up getting about half that. What she didn’t get were the rights.”

Meanwhile, as authorities were closing in on Rogers, he was busily selling the elite players out of the Brace file – Robinson, Mantle, Ruth (with four different teams as a player and coach), Gehrig – seemingly stripping the massive collection of much of its value. But Rogers was no fool. He did not sell the rights, and the numerous court claims on his estate prevented them from reverting to Mary Brace, despite an agreement with Rogers.

“Rogers was all about selling as much as he could as quickly as he could to make a quick buck, and as a result a lot of the best players were gone. But they missed a lot of stuff,” Kelch said. “And the one thing Rogers did – everything he sold, he copied digitally.”

The January auction, conducted by the executor of the Rogers estate, was held to pay off claims with whatever the remaining negatives would bring. But the digital copies were also part of the lot that Kelch’s group won – a gold mine that was still there.

“We had digital copies of everything,” he explained. “Some 250,000 images, with all rights.”

But the wrinkle is that, for all the years that Kelch pursued the collection, he has had a specific destination in mind.

“I have no interest in holding onto these images,” he said. “I bought them with the idea of returning them to the original organizations – images and rights. We intend to return the entire collection back to the teams.”

One thing Kelch did almost immediately was to assure Mary Brace that the collection would not be sold piecemeal, and has kept his word in the months since.

Kelch’s Illinois-based group went about the painstaking process of organizing the collection, even as Digital Archive entered into negotiations with every major league organization separately for their own unique treasure trove. But he wisely did not merely put the Brace photos out in a vacuum.

“We want to work with the clubs to allow them to have a better understanding of the players in the photos, who they were,” Kelch said. “Like Wimpy Quinn; he pitched in five games for the Cubs, went off to World War II, never to play again. He's there.”

An admitted diehard Cubs fan, Kelch said that his beloved Cubbies were one of “seven or eight” clubs which which Digital Archive had come to terms with over the Brace images. The process is ongoing.

“We’re not in a hurry,” he said. “We’re not giving them away. There were a lot of costs involved in production and organization. But we are not selling them to individual collectors.”

For the time being, Kelch is happy to gradually return the Brace Collection to the teams. After all, their cooperation and access allowed Brace and his camera to have a unique place in the history of the sport in the 20th century. A longer term goal for Kelch is to find other such collections from Brace’s contemporaries in order to return them to the teams in order to protect their own history.

“We haven’t even talked about what we’d do if a team does not want its images,” Kelch said. “There’s always the Hall of Fame.”

SOURCE

[TCMA]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

I am hoping the scanned images could be made available for purchase through a site like gettyimages. Seems like many Conlon is available on gettyimages. I've bought a dozen scans myself from gettyimages and would buy more if this archive was made available. Here is hope in a few years time, this archive and metadata can be searched and scans can be bought.

Problem is, Getty is selling the digital image files for $500+ and they are intended for editorial use only. If someone were to sell prints of the images (legally) they would not only need rights to the images but also rights to the team logos. That's how they get ya.

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by TCMA

Problem is, Getty is selling the digital image files for $500+ and they are intended for editorial use only. If someone were to sell prints of the images (legally) they would not only need rights to the images but also rights to the team logos. That's how they get ya.

Legally a stand alone print is editorial, it's been challenged and courts have been very clear that selling a print is not commercial. If it wasn't imagine all the lawsuits against photographers and newspapers. There's photographers who sell their work today (Walter Iooss, meager starting price of $2,000 for an 11x14). Leagues of course look at it as a commercial product and require licensing, and if you don't want to cooperate they have the power to shut you down....though literally thousands, if not millions, of photos are for sale on eBay, most stolen.

Topps got sued by Buzz Aldrin and a lower court ruled it was a historic event so they did not need permission from him, it fell under editorial because of its significance. It unfortunately got settled before the appeal happened, as many wanted to see if higher courts would also rule the same.

[Forever Young]

High end, single Gehrig on GLASS is very tough for some reason. 1927-30

[Keith_Loving]

Originally Posted by Forever Young

More original conlon images outside of neg collection? Yes.. nany more

Interesting, I wonder what happened to the other negatives for the other Conlon images. Surely, the other Conlon negatives must exist somewhere as well?

[TCMA]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

Interesting, I wonder what happened to the other negatives for the other Conlon images. Surely, the other Conlon negatives must exist somewhere as well?

There are lots of original photos and several negs in the archive I work with. We have everything separated alphabetically though, so it'd be a lot of work to figure out exactly what's there.


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[GKreindler]

Conlon destroyed a ton of negatives himself, supposedly because of the amount of space they took up. But there are definitely a lot of original photos that have survived and made their way to various auctions, even as far back as the Christie's Baseball Magazine auctions 20 years ago.

Andrew, granted I wasn't there for super long, but when I perused Photofile's archives almost ten years ago, I didn't remember seeing any Conlons. Admittedly, I was only looking for specific players though, and it was what seems like forever ago. Regardless, they do have a ton of really nice and expensive stuff.

[TCMA]

Originally Posted by GKreindler

Conlon destroyed a ton of negatives himself, supposedly because of the amount of space they took up. But there are definitely a lot of original photos that have survived and made their way to various auctions, even as far back as the Christie's Baseball Magazine auctions 20 years ago.

Andrew, granted I wasn't there for super long, but when I perused Photofile's archives almost ten years ago, I didn't remember seeing any Conlons. Admittedly, I was only looking for specific players though, and it was what seems like forever ago. Regardless, they do have a ton of really nice and expensive stuff.

Graig, I think it's great you got to take a look at the archive. End up pulling anything? Lots and lots of great stuff in there. Most if not all of the archive was accumulated by my father and was his resource for creating TCMA cards in the 70's and 80's.

There are four Conlon glass negs that I'm aware of but likely more. Will post some pics later this evening .


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[TCMA]

So here is a Judge Landis, followed by a Zack Wheat with the Brooklyn Robins in 1919. Based on the handwriting I'm guessing this is a Conlon but could use some opinions on that. Either way, 1919 makes Wheat the oldest glass plate negative I've come across in our archive so far: