The prices of quality digital cameras are becoming more affordable nowadays. They produce photos with high resolution and great detail level for magazine printing. Majority of magazines, book publishers and even newspaper are now accepting digital photographs submission by freelance photographer.
Digital photography For Magazine
By providing images with the right resolution and pixel size in a format that operating systems of other computers can easily open them, digital photography submission can be a way for freelance photographers to assess for themselves how good their picture is compared to others’. Be it about travel, sports, fashion, arts, cars, computers, trades or business, you can choose any photograph subject and sent them to the magazines.
Some magazine offers photography blog and voting machines for freelance photographers to learn how to conquer your own digital photography challenges. When you take the best shot of your favorite photo and send it to the magazine, you know how good you are from the vote you get.
Photographers Love National Geographic
National Geographic is known for inspiring people to care about the planet. National Geographic website has become a site for photographers to share pictures of amazing stories, critical expeditions and scientific fieldwork to promote natural and cultural conservation.
Take your best shot and send it in to National Geographic. All you have to do is submit one of your favorite photographs to find out if it is good enough to be selected for the publication. National Geographic offers a Daily Dozen where you can find out what are the editors’ selections of photographs. Every weekday the photo editor for the magazine posts her choice selections. These are the photographs that will be published in National Geographic. If you have a talent for taking photographs, you should definitely consider submitting your work to National Geographic.
You also stand a chance to have your own National Geographic webpage. To get your own webpage, start by submitting your best photo. Each month National Geographic magazine will select among the photos for publication. Once you are selected, you will be given a webpage where you can create and share albums, puzzles, and games based on photos you upload.
Magazine and newspaper publishers are always on a lookup for photographs that can make cover story for their next issue. If you are a freelance photographers thinking of selling photographs to magazine, you must know that some popular photographs are especially in high demand. In particular, sending celebrity and pet photographs to advertising magazine is always a great way to earn a profit from your photography skills.
Demand On Celebrity Photographs
If you have some unique photographs of your favorite celebrities, you could very well be sitting on a gold mine. People are obsessed with photographs of famous celebrities, anything from celebrities’ fashion to car to music, magazines and books are prepared to pay you a pretty penny for your work.
Magazines are always looking for quality up-to-date photographs of celebrities. You would not believe how eager gossip magazines are to get their hands photos of rock bands, TV stars and Hollywood actors. The bigger the star the more the magazines will be willing to pay for photos.
Demand On Pet Photographs
Taking pictures of cute little pets and compile the pictures nicely in a scrapbook or photo album can be quite an enjoyable activity. If this is the sort of thing that you like to do, you should consider selling your pet pictures to a magazine for a little extra income.
There is actually a huge demand for puppy pictures nowadays. There are several magazines out there willing to pay a fair price for your puppy pictures. For instance, you can submit your photos to magazines that cover stories about animals.
Promoting Your Photographs
A great way to promote your pet pictures is to set up a website to which you can direct magazine publishers and other buyers. Your main concern should be the quality of your photographs displayed in the website. Make it a point for every one of your photos to be crisp and clear.
Make sure that your pictures are updated regularly. If you are showing pictures of celebrities, do not waste your time trying to show old celebrity photos. Old photos will provide you more of an income if you send them to an online stock photo site.
The magazine industry is by far the largest market for a freelance photographer. Millions and millions of photos are published every month. Assuming that you have some photography skills, there should be nothing to stop you from sending your photos to magazine photo editors right now.
High End Photographs
Magazines generally pay different fees for photographs according to the size of the photo that is published and where it appears in the magazine. Typically, a cover photo is valued at anywhere from $200 to $700.
A full size photo that covers a page inside the magazine usually pays from $75 to $300. The highest quality commercial originals at 2000 x 3000 to 2900 x 4300 pixels (varies from 6 to 13 Mpix) are in high demand among publishers for books, car magazines, fashion magazines, music magazines, art magazines and sports magazines. These publications require maximum resolution and detail for graphics processing. The common price range for these photographs is around $200 to $300.
The cheaper alternative is commercial Hi-Res of about 1600 x 2400 pixels (around 4 Mpix) which is more for newsletters, brochures, product packaging, computer magazines, trade magazines and business magazines. Magazines would purchase them at $100 to $200.
Lower End Photographs
The fees get smaller as the photo size gets smaller. Each individual magazine sets their own price for purchasing photos from freelance photographers. Commercial Low-res photographs at around 800 x 1200 pixels (1 Mpix) are used for low end publishing. At $45 to $90, these photos are good for newspaper, commercial web sites, presentations and marketing blogs.
Personal Low Resolution photos at 800 x 1200 pixels are most common for online magazines, personal blogs, websites and presentations. These photos are not easy to sell as they can easily be found free of charge in internet by doing image search. However, if you believe that you photos are unique, the price tag of $25 to $40 per photos is reasonable.
Included In The Purchase
Many magazines will require exclusivity for any of your photos that you submit; others only ask that you do not submit the same photo to other publications for a certain period. Be sure to check the guidelines for the particular magazine to which you are submitting.
There are magazines all around the globe with articles and photographs on any topic that you can imagine. If you have a talent for photography, there is good chance that there are car magazines, fashion magazines, computer magazines, sports magazines, art magazines, music magazines, trade magazines and even business magazines that are willing to pay you top dollar for your photographs.
Choose The Right Magazines For Your Photographs
If you want to make a little extra income from your photographs, it is important that you approach it in the right way. Begin by choosing a market that you are interested in and want to photograph. Purchase a few of your favorite magazines or newspapers, study the images within their pages, and compare each one to your work. If your photos are just as good as the photos in your favorite magazines, then you should shortlist this magazine for your consideration.
Write a letter or send an email to the photo editor for each magazine and tell them all about your work. It is a good idea to have a website set up so you can include a link to samples of your work.
Submitting Photographs to Magazines
Always remember to stick to photographs that are relevant to the subject matter to which you are submitting your work. It is best to submit your photographs on a CD-ROM so the magazine’s digital team can clean up the picture to its best.
When you submit your digital photographs to a magazine, make sure to include your name and address as well as a brief description of your submission CD with printout of your images in high quality. If you are submitting photos by mail, be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) so that you can get your photos back.
Several magazines have photographers of their own. However, staff photographers may not always be able to get the best shots; this is where the freelance photographer gets his opportunity. Freelance photographers specializing in taking photos for cars, fashion, sports, arts and even music are known to be in high demand. There are guidelines that must be followed in order to successfully submit your photos to a magazine.
Picture Formats
There are several different formats for photos. The most popular are gif, png and jpeg.
GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) is one of the most widely used image formats on the web. It is most suitable for images with sharp edges and relatively few gradations of color, such as line art, cartoons, and text. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a bitmap image format to improve upon gif. PNG employs lossless data compression and it supports palette-based (palettes of 24-bit RGB colors), greyscale or RGB images. It does not support other color spaces (such as CMYK). For geometric line drawings, lettering, cartoons, computer screenshots, and other images with flat color and sharp borders, PNG and GIF image formats are most popular.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a standardized image compression mechanism with high compression ratio. GIF images can only achieve 4:1 compression on full-color data while JPEG can easily attain 20:1 compression. JPEG compresses both full-color or grayscale images and works well with photographs and artwork. It is the most popular format used by publishers and it is the most compatible format for operating systems of all types.
Picture Resolution And Pixels
Before submitting your photos to any publication, make sure that they are in the right resolution and pixel size. This way your photos will be viewable to the magazine regardless of which operating system they use. Commercial photographs for books, magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, calendars and any other applications that require maximum resolution for detail uses 2000 x 3000 to 2900 x 4300 pixels.
You may want to consider purchasing a good graphics editing software to help you with the bitmap and image manipulation. Many photographers are well-versed with Photoshop which is the most popular graphics software used by publishers for preparing quality pictures.
Magazine editors are generally writers, not photographers. What they look for are stories, not photographs. Finding subject for a photograph is to give the magazine a story to feature and write. This is the most challenging task for photographers who want to submit their photographs to magazines to earn good income. A photographer who has the same mind as an editor can make handsome income by submitting photographs to magazines, newspapers and book publishers.
Photographs With A Story To Tell
To ensure that your photographs are all inspiring, interesting and related to a subject topic, one simple approach is to shoot everyday people and objects from a child’s perspective. Be it car, computer, art, music, travels or fashion, shoot everything for the height of a three-year-old and you will achieve photographs that depict an emotional, mental point of view. Work continuously to improve your macro photography, perspective and field depth. Do not be afraid to experiment with all of the different focal lengths and shutter speeds.
Do not see obvious, easy-to-shoot subjects as they are. Think of what a child who be wondering on the subject and put together a storyline on what you can photograph to be featured in the magazine. If you can write well, try packaging your photos with the story that came to you when you were shooting the photographs.
Know The Writing Style Of Your Target Magazine
Shoot your photographs according to the subject of your storyline, with interesting and unique angle to let your pictures tell the thousand words. Your article needs only to tell the minimum once your picture becomes alive. Write in the style of the targeted magazine, with similar word count. Many freelance writers re-purpose the same article for different magazines as this will create competition to your advantage. Depending on the size and placement of you photo subject, some magazines pay as high as $1,000 for the photographs with 600-word article. Photographs are charged around $50-$500 per image and so the more photographs of the same subject would get you more money.
Taking photos on a consistent basis will prove to be beneficial to ensuring that you always have great photographs with good story for your magazine.