Getting Photo's in magazines

[simontaylor484]

This may sound a silly question i have found myself with some extra time on my hands and have thought about taking up railway photography as a little hobby. I often read rail magazines and often wondered how i could get published if i can ever get some decent shots. I dont have expensive gear and i do have access to a laptop. If anyone csn give me any advice i would be grateful.

[4630]

In my experience I’d suggest the following, in no particular order;

 

Put yourself in the shoes of the Editor and consider why they should use your photos over the several hundred others that regularly clog up their inbox?

 

Make sure your photos are correctly exposed, in focus and  well composed.  That may seem obvious, but it’s worth repeating.  

 

Don’t trespass or put yourself, or anyone else, at risk ‘just to get that important photo.  This one is actually really important.  

 

Don’t ‘over-process’ your photos in whatever photo editor that you use.

 

Ensure that you have sufficient information to caption your photos, i.e date, location, full details of the subject that you’ve photographed.

 

Try to submit material that is ‘newsworthy’, i.e. what is so special/unusual/unique about what you’ve photographed?   

 

If you submit something make sure it’s submitted promptly.   If it’s ‘newsworthy’ don’t submit it a week after you’ve taken the shot!  Editors work to deadlines.

 

Remember it’s not all about the rolling stock on the railway. The infrastructure, people working on and using the railway are equally important from a photographic point of view.

 

I tend not to submit exactly the same image to several different magazines at the same time.  It’s a personal thing but I’ve always worked under the assumption that one way to pi55 of editors is for them to see exactly the same image in a rival publication.

 

I also tend to submit a low resolution image in the first instance for consideration and invite the editor to ask for a high resolution copy if they want to publish.  Again, it’s just the way I operate, but I don’t want to clog up an editor’s inbox with some random large jpeg file if a low resolution version will suffice in the first instance.   Obviously they will need a high res file if the image is accepted for print.

 

Do follow the individual requirements of each magazine.  Some want images submitted in a particular way and to a particular email address.

 

Make sure that you have a robust and reliable method of saving your photos to files and subsequently finding your photos later.  I’ve had several instances over the years of an editor coming back to me some months later asking for a hi resolution image.  You look a bit daft if you can’t find the image.  Fortunately, it’s not happened to me.  Yet.

 

Those are some of the personal standards that i use and they’ve worked for me.

 

Don’t expect to make much money out of it.  You’ve used the word ‘hobby’, so I’m assuming that you do really mean that.  

 

Don’t expect instant success, unless you’re lucky, of course.  But do keep plugging away.

 

Good luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[simontaylor484]

Thanks for that 4630 

 

It's more the achievement of getting into print that interest a me instead of financial gain whilst passing the time of day 

[hmrspaul]

Decide on becoming well known for a particular type of subject

Take as many details as you possibly can

Wait 30 years. 

 

Paul 

[JimFin]

You will need to develop skills and technique to a standard the Editor can use - not sure exactly where you are but something like this would be a good grounding - https://www.shipley.ac.uk/courses/categories/digital-photography-and-adobe-photoshop/part-time/

 

[phil_sutters]

For archiving purposes and for display on the photo-sharing site I use, I put a caption beneath the picture. Having the information in the file label is fine but it can become shortened, corrupted or detached, I was told by a photo-archivist. However some photo editors prefer not to have captions within the jpeg. So check how the publication likes to have the images presented.