[drcy]

The silly thing about photos and the baseball card hobby is once a photo starts resembling a baseball card, it can zoom up in price because card collectors will buy it as a baseball card.

Normally with photos, the larger the better. A 14x20" photo will be worth more than the same photo in CDV size. But baseball card collectors may value the small size better because it "more resembles a baseball card." . . . But I guess you could say the photo then starts crossing two collecting genres, so it should be expected that demand and price for those pieces should rise.

But it also says rules of normal logic are sometimes thrown own the window when baseball card collectors get involved in an area.

My last separate note is, if you have a list of say 10 qualities that define the best photo, rarely will you find a photo with all 10 of those qualities. You may find a photo that has all of the qualities but the image isn't clear, or all of the qualities but it's small, or all of the qualities but the player shown is a Giants common player and not Christy Mathewson. In photos, as in life, perfection is rarely found, and valuation is a complex equation involving many moving parts (I think I may have just mixed my metaphors).

Most will say the one constantly required quality is the quality of the image-- the pose, clarity, focus, artistry, etc. A photo may be rare, huge and have an ornate mount, but if the image is out of focus and underdeveloped, it may not be worth buying. Many other deficiencies in a photo (including condition) can be forgiven if the image is crystal clear. And other wonderful qualities won't make up for an ugly image.

A friend and Net54 board member showed me a panorama he bought of an old baseball game in action. The image was so detailed and clear that I could (and did) look at the details of the players and horse drawn carriages and trees under a magnifying glass. I could have looked at that photo for hours, and returned and looked at it again and again. It was like a story book. If the image was out of focus and less detailed, I would have have looked at it once said "That's nice" and forgotten about it.

It's amazing when you get a antique baseball photo and it's so clear you can see the stitching on the socks. I looked at an 1860s General Custer photo and you could clearly see every button on his coat and the individual leaves in the grass around his feet. Those are photos you will want to revisit again and again, and you'll marvel and get something new out of it each time you look.

This also points to the problem of buying photos online. You won't know what a photographic image really looks like until you have it in hand.