Not sure why the strong negative reactions on this. It should really come as no surprise to anyone that different "outlets" have different standards for what they want or will accept for publication.
Photojournalistic places will want as much realism as possible and photographers who shoot for AP (for example) have been "axed" for altering that reality (such as the recent story involving a guy clumsily cloning out his own shadow from a photo).. National Geographic is simply stating *their* standards for publication. They aren't making value judgments on your work, unless you are submitting (or hoping to submit) to them. Anyone who writes for a particular publication needs to understand (or request) that publication's Style Guide and hopefully be familiar with the tone of writing that the publication selects. To send them something outside of that tells them that you haven't even *read* their publication enough to become familiar with what they typically use. You have to know that curating/editing this stuff for publication takes a lot of time... time that somebody is paying a salary for. If you can prevent such stuff from being submitted before someone has to spend any time on it, then you'd do it too. If most of us are honest with ourselves, we'd have to admit that we'd be delighted if an image of ours was "discovered" or requested by National Geographic magazine. You may think it will never happen, but it is happening right now with some of my son-in-law's work. He didn't come to them. They came to him. No idea if they discovered him through Flickr, or Getty, or Alamy or his personal blog www.bigstormpicture.com, but the point is that anyone could have this happen to them. Being aware of the existence of style guides, such as the one Tim posted, is valuable if you want to submit work that will get you a 2nd look. None of this means that I can't enjoy Instagram-ing my images or dialing the contrast & saturation to eleven, or producing garish "HDR" work, if that is what pleases me. But it means that the version of the shot that I will submit to an individual place had better be in line with what they want, if I want it to meet with *their* approval. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
