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Posted
The cheapest option for either magazine alone is a annual subscription by direct debit at £47.99, Studio plus (which is studio and a printed magazine) is £52.99. I'd say for £5 it is well worth it. Both magazines are in the Studio library, so you can read the one you don't get through the letterbox online, plus all the back issues.
I did a little article earlier this year I doubt anyone has looked at it but I was chuffed to be asked.
Posted
Alan - yes: my inadequate camera equipment led to an article that was being considered, considered no more. I have the Nikon camera you advised, and that's certainly helping; don't know if it'd be good enough; I may try submitting something else one of these days. But in your case, there are three things making you the ideal contributor: you have good equipment; you're very good at explaining things; and your work is top of the range.
Is it fair? Perhaps not - but then; life isn't!
Back in the day, not so far behind us (and I know they're still working, so good on 'em) we had just about every article written by Ian Sidaway, Ray Balkwill, Hazel Soan, and occasionally Wendy Jelbert; and I did think, not that I was just as good as they were/are, but that the mags relied on them rather heavily. There was also a Tony Paul, and a writer in a rival magazine whose name I wish I could remember: it'll come to me in the middle of the night; age, this is; and a blithering nuisance - ah! No, it's come back! Tom Robb! And then there was David Curtis, and others whose names I really have forgotten. In reality, it was quite a healthy mix - but you did get a bit used to them.
I think I'm just too easily bored, but there we are; your entry into the pantheon has been entirely welcome: and I did manage to help a couple of others get articles published, because while I'm a rotten camera-man, I was a journalist; so the Devon Painter (who is now very successful, even though - yet again - I've forgotten his name), and Alan Owen benefited from a bit of help with the words. The former no longer needs any help at all, and the latter - well, he's painting prolifically and wonderfully on YouTube and Patreon; Alan O never really did give a damn' about sales - he still throws a lot of his stuff in the bin, I believe, the pleasure for him lying entirely in the painting, and not the flogging thereof. Which, nowadays, is basically where I am, too; he said to me "do you really want to run a business, with all the tax, and returns, and packing things up for t'post?", and I thought - no; no, I really don't!
Anyway, my real point here is - if you want to join Alan Bickley, invest in a very good camera, and Photoshop; learn to write; be a good painter - but most of all, develop some confidence - the lack of that was all that held The Devon Painter, and to an extent Alan, back - lack of confidence in their ability to write, rather than paint. Have a crack at it, because although I think the magazines have a good spread of contributors these days, there should always be room for more - stop moving forwards, and you invariably fall back.
Posted
Robert, your Nikon would possibly be good enough, you just need to set it to the highest resolution which may actually be the default setting anyway.
Just simply check the file size when you are editing your photos with your software… Apple button plus i on a Mac / on your PC in your case, It could be Windows button plus i - It will probably be 72dpi and under 2mb, in which case it wouldn’t be good enough, unless they were printed relatively small.
As I mentioned yesterday, most glossy magazines are printed at 300dpi, so that’s the amount of CMYK or 4-colour dots per inch - so you should get pin sharp images.
In comparison, a newspaper is printed at 180 or 200 dpi, depending on the stock - less CMYK dots per inch because newsprint is more porous and absorbent a higher resolution would end up a saturated blob of colour!
For reference: CMYK > Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and K is Black, stands for keyline.
Are you still with me? I’ve probably gone a bit too technical… sorry about that!
My DSLR Nikon gives me a file size of 300dpi and around 15mb on most photos / certainly more than is needed in fact.
I’d be interested to know…
Posted
On the subject of cameras....I have always been rather surprised by how changing the settings, speed, aperture, on my digital Nikon D90 (probably considered a relic these days) affects the the colours on the final image. I inevitably take a number of shots at different settings and then choose the one that looks most like the original. Even then, sometimes, I need to do a quick tweet in GIMP, though never more than brightness/contrast adjustment.
Posted
We aim to add at least two new demonstrations from our talented PO artists per month - one will be available for all PO users the other for Studio only. There are also articles adapted from both Leisure Painter and The Artist as well as extracts from practical art books. There must be about 1,000 to browse through by now - hope you enjoy them all!
Don't forget all the art materials reviews in the reviews section too - in exciting news we may well be coming to you for product reviews in the near future. Watch this space!
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