GOLD. Coal. Turf. Potato. One word is often enough to book the ticket for the plane.
Thousands of miles later, a photographer sets to work on that most enviable of international assignments: a commission for National Geographic.
The job might take 30 months. Of 20,000 to 30,000 pictures, a couple of dozen prints may be used. The rest are sent to the archives.
Standards are sky-high; right into the 1950s, staff photographers served as apprentices in the magazine's laboratory before being released into the field.
Recently National Geographic decided it was time to have this massive archive pay its way.
For Jaimie Blandford and George Munday of Slidefile in Dublin's Merrion Square, who will be operating the National Geographic Irish office, this is great good fortune. But the result was not achieved without much hard graft - it is three years since the pair of photographers, who run one of this country's leading stock image agencies, heard the US monthly intended to throw open its archive.
"There are 19 million photographs dating back to the turn of the century, now available for reproduction ... and they approached us!" says Blandford, who admits it was not the first time he has received a phone call from Washington. He has two National Geographic commissions under his belt.
"The first subject was the Blaskets," he says. "The second was a rush job, to shoot a time capsule which had broken free from the Arctic and had been washed up on the Mayo coast.
"They paid very well for that shot, and ran it as a news feature one of the following months. And, yes, I was listed in their archive. I checked!"
Quick news assignments are not typical of the century-old publication, founded by geologists, explorers, teachers, lawyers, meteorologists, cartographers, and military officers, which has a staff of 2,000 at its Washington head office and a circulation of more than nine million.
The pursuit of National Geographic-defined excellence can often demand immense patience, not to mention energy, versatility, flexibility, incredible risk (shark bites, plane crashes, security threats). And, above all, "being there". Hence, every picture has its own story to tell. In 1969, for instance, staff photographer Vic Boswell used 20,000 watts of illumination to photograph the entire ceiling of Rome's Sistine Chapel in one mosaic. He required only one-tenth of that lighting to photograph the cleaned and restored ceiling 20 years later.
In 1906 the editor, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, published 74 photos of wild animals taken at night by a US congressman, George Shiras III who had used a remotely triggered flash. Two of the society's board members resigned in disgust, claiming he was "turning the magazine into a picture book".
In 1927 it published its first underwater colour images. The Leica camera and 35 millimetre Kodachrome film in the 1930s revolutionised photography; now, the camera could travel without cumbersome tripod anywhere, and by the 1950s, the society could boast dozens of "firsts" - first image of the curved surface of the Earth, first underground picture in natural colour.
In the 1970s, when adventurers and explorers such as Thor Heyerdahl, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Robert Ballard were synonymous with the magazine, the then editor Gil Grosvenor introduced controversial subjects such as Cuba Under Castro and Life In Harlem. The society's board of trustees reacted by threatening to appoint what Grosvenor termed an "oversight committee to throttle the editor".
SLIDEFILE represents about 45 Irish-based photographers, including Peter Zoeller, Liam Blake, former Irish Times photographer Tom Lawlor, Chris Hill and Vincent O'Byrne, and syndication of Irish images is an expanding part of its business. And the addition of the National Geographic archive to its collection of 110,000 frames will serve to protect its high quality market, say Blandford and Munday, at a time when cheap, "royalty free" photos on CD discs have become common currency.
