Hi there!
I’m trying to gauge the experiences of contributors who have sent Trains magazine photos through our ftp upload site (www.contribute.kalmbach.com).
Have you used it?
And if so, have you encountered any problems or frustrations that we could look into to make the experience better?
Are there things you find helpeful that we should be sure to keep, in the event of an upgrade to the process?
Thanks very much! I’m eager to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Matt Van Hattem
Senior Editor
Matt,
Just a general question about the uploads…can one submit anything and then it goes “on file?” Or does one need a specific story to send stuff in for?
For example, the story about the Frontier Days Train was photographically…er…less than inspiring for me. Since it’s something I get to shoot every year, I’ve managed to amass a solid body of work of the Frontier Days Train, including some shots I consider Portfolio or Fine Art grade. How do photos get selected for a story like that? Did the author and/or editors delve into the Kalmbach “stash” or were there shots sent in with the story?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Chris
Chris,
Anyone can submit any pictures they’d like to the photo archive.
The beauty of this system is the digital file goes into a searchable database that’s available for all of us to access anytime we are looking for photos to illustrate news stories, feature articles, gallery image selections, or anything else you might see in the magazine.
(One of the things that really helps us is having detailed caption information submitted with the photo. If you use Photoshop, embed your photo credit and caption information as meatadata in the File Information section.)
The ftp site should walk you through the upload process (www.contribute.kalmbach.com), although I’m eager to hear from people about how it’s working, and what we can do to improve it.
The database is only as good as the images you contribute to it. But I can tell you it has helped me on a number of occasions in the year and a half or so we’ve had it.
There are two other ways I might go about selecting photos for the magazine.
One, an author might illustrate a story with his own pictures. (If it’s a photo essay-type of article, we’ll typically only use that author’s images.)
Second, we might contact photographers we know, or who have posted photographs online, of a specific train or event. I’ll do this especially with stories that are harder to illustrate, like a piece I edited a few years ago on new moves of oil traffic from North Dakota to the central U.S.
Chris, I’ve seen the pictures you’ve photographed and shared with the Forum.
You are really good. Please think of us as an outlet for your images.
Send us pictures you like, photos you might consider newsworthy, or photos you think might illustrate a railroading “concept” well (unit trains, intermodal business, capacity improvement, crews at work, etc.)
If you’ve got questions, or would like some more ideas about wha
Matt,
The submission guidelines indicate that the photos go into a searchable gallery. Is that searchable by anyone or Trains staff? How big of a “deal” is it if a photo is edited?
Dan
Dan,
Basically, what we’ve created is a digital version of our library files of black and white prints for the internal use of Trains Magazine editors and layout designers.
The photographer keeps the original (yesterday, the negative, today, the original digital file); you send us a high-resolution file that is stored in the digital library. If it runs in the magazine, we’ll pay you a one-time use fee. But the image remains yours to use in other capacities.
We file the digital images by specific railroad. Some images may also go under other categories, like “two or more trains” or “mood shots.” So if I’m working on a feature article or a news story about, say, Amtrak, I can look in the digital library to see if a photo in there matches the needs of the article. (I wouldn’t want to run a shot of the Sunset Limited with an article about Wolverine trains in Michigan.)
As far as pre-editing your photos, we typically prefer you send us the RAW file or a high-resolution tiff. That allows our designers to do some color correcting and perhaps cropping here at Kalmbach, while ensuring the best reproduction possible in the magazine.
If you want to do some minor color-correcting first, you may. But we wouldn’t want “edited” photos that, for exmaple, remove wires and pole lines, change engine numbers, or alter reality in some other way. We want to show the railroad as it is.
Matt Van Hattem
Thanks Matt. When I say “editing” I’m referring to resizing/cropping or maybe a slight color tweak. My camera (Canon PowerShot A590IS) can’t shoot RAW or TIFF and only has 4x zoom so I sometimes crop extraneous “stuff” out of my pictures. Altering “reality” is, in my book, cheating.
First, you have to define what “reality” is. [alien]