Trust the Process
I first began my career as a wildlife photographer when I was in college at Appalachian State University. I was one of those weird kids who already knew what they wanted to do with their life. I guess this makes sense given I did everything completely different up to this point anyways. I dropped out of high school but got a scholarship because I scored in the top 1% on my GED scores. But seeing how I didn’t want to be in school at the time, hence the whole dropping out part, I spent a year hitchhiking around the country and hopping freight trains while toting a Canon AE1-P camera with me everywhere I went. Upon returning home with a clear mind and visions of being a wildlife photographer dancing in my head, I enrolled back in college and earned degrees in both environmental history and biology.
I remember being a junior in college, hunched over a desk, putting together contact sheets and cover letters, fretting over the quality of the stationary I was using and the color of the envelope I was sending out to editors. There was no way I was going to use a manilla envelope. This needed to look like I meant business. A copy of the Photographer’s Market set on my desk, with sticky tabs and highlighters marking potential magazines and editors and markets and possibilities. I was quite proud of the fact that I printed my own shipping labels, hoping photo buyers wouldn’t know I was just some kid trying to figure all this stuff out.
I had been selling my landscape and wildlife photographs for about a year at this point. $50 here. $75 there. And at the time, it was all little more than beer money for an otherwise broke college student. I had a fulltime job at a snowboard shop because it gave me free annual passes to the better of the three ski resorts in the area. And I had a full class schedule as well. But somehow, I managed to still find myself in the woods or out on the Blue Ridge Parkway every week photographing and eking out time to send photo submissions to magazines – albeit for very little return on my investment of time.
That is until an editor recognized I was a college student fighting to compete against seasoned professionals for sales in the magazine.
Editors are notoriously busy people. As the senior editor of the Journal of Wildlife Photography, trust me when I say I understand why that is now. So, when this editor actually took the time to pick up a phone and call me directly, I can only imagine it was out of extreme pity.
Her: “Can you write?”
Me: “Yes, I believe so.”
Her: “Good. Photographers a dime a dozen. We never want for photographs. But articles are a different matter. Learn what a query letter is, send me a story pitch that way, and if it’s good, instead of a $50 sale here and there, I can pay you $500 for the text and our standard rates for any of the photographs you send over to go with it.”
I did the math as soon as I got off the phone with her. $500 for 2,500 words. Then, anywhere from $50 to $500 for each photograph they chose to run with the story. $50 for a small quarter page sized image on up to $500 for the cover.
My eyes widened as I realized the amount of money to be made from this idea.
I was a college student working fulltime and didn’t clear $300 a week after taxes. Just the story alone would be nearly two weeks' worth of pay for me. Then the photographs?
I went to the local bookstore and found a book by Writer’s Digest about query letters. What they are. Why they matter. And how to write them.
I took her instructions very seriously. This was a big deal for me. An editor took the time to call me. To coach me. I wasn’t going to mess this up.
The magazine accepted my story and ended up paying me $2,500 for the article and photographs – a mind blowing sum of money to me at the time.
This one moment changed everything for me and how I was going to think about business. First and foremost, I understood it was difficult to make a living $50 at a time. It was a lot easier to make this whole life thing work by stringing together $2,500 sales than selling one photograph at a time. The second thing I learned was something that every business owner must understand above all else – you make money by solving problems for other people. Sure, I was just a wildlife photographer who could piece together complete sentences on paper. But I learned that the biggest challenge magazines have is coming up with enough articles and written content each month – not finding photographs. If I could offer stories and high-quality photography to go along with it, then I helped solve a big problem for magazines I wanted to build a relationship with. And the third thing I learned from this was that there is a process to getting your foot in the door with a magazine – and 99% of photographers completely ignore this process.
Why do newcomers to the business of wildlife photography ignore the process?
Simple.
They don’t know there is a process.
Magazines, especially those that are worth investing your time into working with, will usually tell you exactly what this process is for them. It would be a grave error to assume that this stuff is standardized across the industry. I can assure you that 99.9% of all photographers and writers who make submissions or pitches end up with their work in either the slush pile (you never want to be there as a writer) or the trash bin (you never want to be there as a photographer) simply because they didn’t take the time to look up the process and follow the magazine’s rules for submission or reaching out.
If you can’t follow simple guidelines from the start, then the editor or photo editor has no reason to believe you will be anything but a pain in the ass to work with. And in an industry where magazines are drowning in photographs being sent to them on a daily basis, the last thing you want to do is be THAT person.
Almost every magazine, with few exceptions, keeps these guidelines on their website. Sometimes it’s a standalone web page. More often it’s a PDF file buried somewhere. Many magazines make it very easy to find. Others seem to hide these things, forcing you to do a little work to find them so as to filter out people who aren’t all that serious about working with them. And you have exhausted all possibilities for finding these guidelines, you can simply reach out to a lower-level editor and ask if they have photographer or writer’s guidelines they can send over to you.
One of the magazines that just about all North American based photographers attempt to publish with is National Wildlife Magazine. So, let’s take a look at their guidelines for photographers so you can get an idea of what this all looks like.
This is an excerpt that follows, and there is A LOT to unpack from these few paragraphs. . .
Submissions
Photographers may only submit images as digital files via email to photos@nwf.org. We are not able to respond to all emails, but if we see potential for your work as suitable for publication in the magazine, we will get in touch and/or invite you to submit more images. Please note: NWF is not liable for unsolicited slides, prints or disks sent by contributors. Such material will not be returned.
Note to Writer-Photographers: We welcome pitches from writer-photographers who have shot original stories and would like to write the text to accompany their images. Pitches should include a selection of compelling photographs that tell the story visually. For more information, please see our Guide for Writers at nwf.org/NWguidelines.
Email Specifications:
All unsolicited photography submissions should be sent to photos@nwf.org.
Put the subject matter of your photos in the subject line.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what type of photography you specialize in. Include links to any relevant social media accounts or photography websites.
Submissions should contain no more than five images. Please send only one email with multiple photos as attachments. Do not send file-sharing links or paste the photos into the body of the email.
Emails should be no larger than 35mb.
Include detailed caption information, preferably saved in the metadata of the images (“File Info” in Photoshop). Specify species, location, date, behavior, identity of people and landscapes, animals’ wild or captive status, and any controlled conditions or baiting.
Digital Specifications:
We prefer the RAW file or the original, unedited digital file of the image, which gives us the best chance to produce the highest quality image for publication. National Wildlife editors work with our prepress vendor to ensure that images will be of the highest quality when they appear in print.
File names should include (in this order): last name + one/two word subject + image number (ex: smith_blackbear_01.jpg).
Please include your complete name, address and email address in the metadata (“File Info” in Photoshop). Also include equipment and necessary disclosures as noted above.
Please do not send “read only” files or copies.
Digital tips:
• Optimize images (digital capture or scanned) for brightness, color, sharpness, etc., but be careful not to oversaturate or oversharpen an image, and always disclose any such alterations.
As you can see, this is very specific. From exactly where to send images the first time, how to name them, how many you are allowed to send, to what file type they want you to send. It’s all here. And as you have probably noticed, it’s not what most would expect. In fact, these guidelines are completely different from just about any other magazine or stock agency I have worked with.
First and foremost, there is a specific but generic email address for you send your photographs to. You can only send 5 photographs. They must be attached to the email, not linked or embedded, and you can only send one single email with all 5 of those photographs attached and none of the email itself should not be larger than 35mb even with all those photographs.
Next up we find that people want raw files. Although they say RAW, it’s technical raw, as in all lowercase, since raw is not an acronym and just means the same as raw ingredients or materials. Yes, you can edit your photographs. No, you cannot make significant changes to the photographs like removing stuff. And, you can save a copy of the raw file with those edits baked into them and send over for their review.
The editors at this magazine also want a very specific naming system for your photographs: last name + subject + image number. Their example is “smith_blackbear_01.jpg”
With this, however, we find a discrepancy in their photographer’s guidelines.
First, they say they want raw images. But then they use an example of jpg.
You have two options here. You can read between the lines, or you can simply reach out to the magazine and ask which is preferred. They should be clearer here. But I would argue that they want jpg to begin with but will want the raw files when actual submissions are made.
Why?
Because of the 35mb email size they want.
I have raw files that are twice the size of this email requirement.
So, if I were in the position of reaching out for the first time to this magazine via their photo@nwf.org address, I would send over jpg images but address this discrepancy in the email saying that you recognize the submission guidelines asked for raw photos but this was not possible given the requirement to keep the email under 35mb. This says to them that you read their guidelines very closely, recognized a slight confusion in the wording of it, but you wanted to make sure you prioritized the size of the email since anything larger than that would take considerable amounts of time for them to download (at the time of me writing this, most of their editorial staff is still working remotely and at least one of the photo editors is on satellite internet – shhhhh, don’t tell them I told you this!).
I don’t need to re-write everything in this excerpt for you. You read it all once before if you made it this far in the article. But I do think it’s important to point out the above as well as the fact that whoever wrote this guideline felt it necessary to put two things in bold: no more than 5 images AND the fact that they want detail caption information, which they explain exactly what they want in those captions.
Annalise and I have written about the importance of captions before. Not only do these captions help sell your photographs when it comes to searchability online, editors and photo buyers want these already baked into the file’s metadata. The last thing they want to do is have to turn around and reach out to you to get additional information. I work with a bunch of photographers and writers now. And I can assure you that it is a major frustration and time suck having to turn around and get “stuff” from contributors after the fact. We have had publication dates set back over and over again because contributors miss deadlines or only send in part of what we ask for.
Magazines such as National Wildlife are big and pay well. This means that they are inundated with hundreds of thousands of photographs. The editor of their sister publication, Ranger Rick, talks about this quite a lot. And in one recent email she confided that, “One photographer just sent me 10,000 images (almost 7gigs) on one subject. More does not equal better!”
I can almost assure you this photo editor will likely have heart palpitations every time they see that photographer’s name in their inbox now.
Doing simple searches on a magazine’s website for terms such as “photographers’ guidelines” or “contributors’ guidelines” will often turn up what you are looking for. Sometimes they are buried in the About section. Sometimes they are buried in the Contact Us area. Google does wonders for helping to sus out the hidden location of this information. But as I said above, you can always reach out to the photo editor of the magazine with these types of very simple questions. If their guidelines are easy to find, they will be annoyed that you didn’t look around for yourself. If they are notoriously hidden or non-existent, then the photo editor will likely be happy to help because they see you are at least trying to be mindful of their needs and follow their processes.
And for those of you who would like to look over National Wildlife Magazine’s photographer and writer guidelines, you can find those here:
Guide for Photographers: https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/Photography-Guidelines
Guide for Writers: https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/Writer-Guidelines