Go photos from the Mainichi Shimbun

You can find many Go photographs from the Mainichi Shimbun here (with great thanks to kokiri and his 2009 post on SL).

The site shows relatively low resolution thumbnails (which can be extracted with screenshot) and offers to sell their full-resolution originals. They also supply higher resolution photos with watermarking.

Here are some examples.

Iyama in thought

Sumire using her laser vision

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Games in kimono

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Traditional seating

Apparently there are also very old photographs if one scrolls down far enough. They can possibly also be accessed by date searching; I haven’t tried. Anything published by a Japanese newspaper before 1968 is, I believe, now in the public domain (which is, ofc, not to say that you won’t still have to pay).

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Not sure what’s up with this price list, which seems to be massively expensive.

I suspect that the main business of the site is to sell the photographs to other newspapers and magazines, in which case these rates would make sense.

Sadly, there may not be a way to purchase them affordably for personal use.

I don’t think this is excessively expensive, professional photographs are usually priced around this much per image as well in the Netherlands.

I think it’s a bit strange that the price differs depending on the product.

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Covid screens

130 euros for a digital image strikes me as absurd, unless the real purchase is the rights to print it in some publication.

Well, it’s not. My sister’s a photography student, she does usually ask around 50 euro per photo, while she isn’t even professional yet.

Here’s a site that compares prices that seems to agree as well.

Interesting.

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Sumire (?) has a Union flag blanket.

Interesting shot with a rock garden

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More Covid screens, with Cho this time

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Playing on a similar (but not identical) frame to the one discussed in the AGA E-Journal in 2019. Note the unusual red stones.

Traditional dress

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Interesting to see a scored board. I wonder whether they scored it themselves.

Why not? Pretty common to score

Hmm, I don’t remember having seen it recently.

I probably haven’t been looking out for it.

Dapper Cho

Sumire again displaying her excellent kimono game

Yes, that is precisely what they are aiming to sell, commercial licensing of their stock photos.

These prices are fairly typical for commercial stock photo licensing. Businesses like this usually don’t even bother to address the minuscule personal use market.

This is common practice for stock photo pricing. Since the license can legally restrict the type and size of the audience, the intended application and medium differentiates the product. However, taking a larger view, I agree that the whole system is quite bizarre, an artificial scarcity incongruous with digital content, but what they are selling is permission, not a physical product.

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