I have been a professional photographer and designer for over 20 years and I have a lot of experience working with newspapers and magazines such as Field Magazine, Shooting Times, Scottish Sporting Gazette and a host of angling titles. These days I specialise in wedding, wildlife and commercial work.
The job of District Magazine Editor is more than just editing text and gathering pictures. It entails the detailed design and layout of each page, assessing the technical quality of photographs submitted and liaising with printers over production schedules and delivery dates. It takes me about two weeks to assemble a magazine and package the files into the format required by our printers using software you might never have heard of: Quark Express, Photoshop and Illustrator are most used.
The biggest problem is the technical quality of submitted photographs. To reproduce a photograph in print at say A5 in size requires a file size of 12.4 megabytes at a resolution of exactly 300 dots per inch. A smaller reproduction at A6 needs to be 6.2 Mb and A7 3.1Mb. So you can see that sending me anything less than 3Mb is not going to be used and the majority of photographs that I receive are less than 1Mb. Photographs generally are not very well composed and need to be cropped to isolate the subject or just to remove excess floor and sky from the picture. This zooming in results in a massive loss of resolution rendering the photograph useless for publication.
The next magazine will be delivered to clubs at the District Council meeting in Aberdeen on 16th November with a full conference report and an exclusive interview. The deadline for submissions of news and articles is 10th October.
It has always been the intention to develop a magazine of a high quality, with high quality content which can be read and enjoyed by Rotarians and the public at large.
The Committee aims to develop our District Magazine in such a way that Rotary District 1010 Scotland North will be seen to be trailblazing and leading the way in the UK. |
