Best Business Practices for Photographers [160]
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For works, I resolved to use the following titling nomenclature for an entire year's worth of work:
John Harrington Miscellaneous Unpublished Photographs 1999 (ref#U0608), 1,102 files on 2 CDs containing 11,841 photographs.
This naming nomenclature—annually delineated—is how I handled the titling when I needed to go backward to register work previously unregistered. Note the difference between the number of files and the number of photographs. In this case, the file was a single image of a 20-slide slide page, and it was important to note that the file is not "the image," but that the file/image is a functional device to document the 20 images on the page, so I wanted to draw that distinction.
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NOTE
It's important to note that each slide page contained from one to twenty images, and when the caption changed, the slide page changed. This allowed for maximum flexibility in my filing system. Therefore, each page had a date associated with when the image was produced, and this was the filename it would be assigned. Often, it was a news event with the date of the news event on the slide mount caption label. Where there may be some ambiguity in the exact date, see the Figure 17.22 notes later in this chapter. In a clear case in which a page of photographs was taken on May 1, 1994, the filename would be 19940501_NW_001.jpg, where I assigned NW to refer to the images' category "Newsmaker Washington" and others for other types. A submission, even with that filename, was followed up on by the Copyright Office, who requested a date associated with each file, so I produced a word processing document that included the filename along with the date and included that as a part of the submission. This satisfied the Copyright Office examiner. They might have preferred the official continuation form they offer, but it was not required. Yes, this took some time, but I was able to do it during downtime on assignments while waiting for a subject, assign it to someone who works for me when they had spare time while watching a batch process complete, or do it on trips from Point A to Point B.
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Once I had caught up, I then registered images by month. In the instance that I was publishing unpublished work, each month was named as follows:
John Harrington Miscellaneous Unpublished Photographs May 2006 (ref#U0605), 4,378 files on 2 CDs containing 4,378 photographs.
In this nomenclature, the ref#U0605 is my own assigned reference number. The U indicates the images were unpublished, 06 is the year, and 05 indicates it was the fifth registration for 2006. To remain consistent with the "by year" registrations and because someday I might need to again register more than one photograph per file, I continue to notate the number of files and photographs separately. Further, I indicate that there are two CDs so that they do not mistakenly believe that they're duplicates, but rather that each contains separate files.
I fill in that entire title in the Form VA Title of Work field, as in Figure 17.19.
Figure 17.19
With respect to published work:
John Harrington Miscellaneous Published Photographs May 2006 (ref#P0605), 4,378 files on 2 CDs containing 4,378 photographs.
Note the P within the reference. In this, the P is not a published subset of the U registration, but rather, just an example of how I would do the same registration were it a group of published photographs.
Nature of This Work
Section 202.3 - Registration of Copyright, section b, subsection 9, part vii, states in part, "The applicant must state 'Group Registration/Photos' and state the approximate number of photographs included in the group in space 1 of the application Form VA." Now, I have indicated that I place that text under