Making Your Camera Pay For Itself!

Writers can quadruple their chances of acceptance and double their fees by submitting photos with their words…and you don’t even need to be an expert photographer to provide saleable photos with your work. So here are some tips on profiting from your photography:

1. Remember that a good picture is worth a thousand words. If you can provide photos you save a busy editor time sourcing pics to illustrate your article. This can be a huge factor in determining whether your work is accepted or rejected.

2. You don’t need an expensive camera but you do need to learn to use it properly. Know it so well that you never have to refer to the instructions and can remember all the modes without thinking.

3. Always take more pictures that you expect to use – it doesn’t cost any more and you can delete the rubbish. But you may just get an unexpected bonus!

4. Make sure that you save your images securely and that you have 2 copies of each set – one as back up, and one to work on.

5. Few photos can be submitted without being enhanced in some way; so learn to manipulate your images. Buying a good manipulation package such as Adobe’s Photoshop Element or Adobe’s Photoshop (depending on how technical you want to get) is a good investment.

6. Learn to think visually. Do this by studying articles in magazines and the colour supplements to see how they are illustrated.

7. Beautiful sunsets and pastoral scenes are all very well, but editors usually want photos that involve people. And they prefer people who are doing something interesting that will involve the reader in the subject matter.

8. When you send photos electronically, always find out the magazine’s preferred format and then use it.

9. If sending photos on a CD by post, enclose a covering letter together with a printout of your article and a printout of the caption sheet. A clear, descriptive caption for each photo is essential and each image on the CD should be numbered sequentially so that they can be identified easily on the caption sheet.

10. Make it very clear that you are giving permission for ‘single reproduction rights only’. By doing this, if an editor wants to re-use them he has to pay again! Alternatively you can use the pics again when you re-write your article for another publication!