Publishing Photos (1 Viewer)

Over the summer, I have started taking digital pictures of dragonflies. I feel that one or two of them are really very nice pictures.

I have two questions;

1) If I want to get some of them published, what should I do? Do I leave them as they came out of the camera? Or is it best to clean them up in photoshop first?

2) How do I go about getting them published? DO I just send them straight to magazines, or is it best to join an agency?

I have attached just one picture as an example.........

Andrew

I don't know much about getting them published, but I do know that publishers want to print pictures at 300 dpi, not the usual 200 needed for inkjet printing. What this means to you is that you need images that are larger (width x height in pixels) for publishing than you do for inkjet printing. If your pictures are cropped a lot, you might have a problem, unless you have a pretty high resolution camera.

The attached image is not cropped, just resized for posting on the site - it was taken with a 60mm Macro lens, and original image is appox. 3000 pixel wide.....

andrew_chick said:

The attached image is not cropped, just resized for posting on the site - it was taken with a 60mm Macro lens, and original image is appox. 3000 pixel wide.....

Click to expand...

That's great then. You shouldn't have a problem.

Andrew,

You might find this useful: http://www.birdingworld.co.uk/Photo Submission.htm

It is the instruction for making photographic contributions to Birding World magazine. Unless you are a very experienced user of Photoshop they would rather just have the file straight from the camera and preferably in RAW format. I imagine that most other magazines would be the same.

Colin

Andrew,


I agree with Swamp Hen on this. To use Adobe Photoshop properly you do need to know about colour ratios and balancing. It’s too easy to go to one of Adobe’s demos and see one of their operatives alter a chosen contrast image within a minute’s timeframe and think that’s all you have to do. Photoshop is a heavy duty programme.

On publishing there will be a set of colour profiles for the magazines press, unfortunately, no ones seems to have told the people compiling the magazines just exactly what these settings are!

Shoot RAW, and try to learn one thing in Photoshop, which is your highlight and shadow settings, if you can crack this then you’re half way there to getting images reproduced correctly.

Try locally in your Counties Nature Publications to get your images printed. You won’t earn a fortune, but it’s rewarding to see them in print.

You could try a photo magazine such as 'Amateur Photographer' which is published weekly and always has two or three readers' portfolios in each issue so they're constantly on the look out for something good, I'd think. They pay £50 per published portfolio and you'll be in a national magazine.

To my mind some of the shots that they use aren't always that good - you start to get that 'I could do better than that' feeling with some of them - so a portfolio with the required number of first-class shots must be in with a chance.

You'll need more than just technically competent shots, though. A bit of life and variety - flight, ovipositing, mating pairs, etc. - along with sharp images. It's not always possible to keep everything in focus with the limited depth-of-field in the macro range so make sure that the side of the insect closest to the camera is as sharp as you can get it - it's hard to judge your small-sized image, above, but it appears that the 'spines' on the nearest back leg are not as sharp as the legs in front, so this is something you'll need to watch. Once it's in print you can't go back and replace it with a better one!

Good luck!