Importance of photos and illustrations in magazine publishing

Handout-15

• A picture is worth a thousand words• That means a picture tells a story just as well as a

large amount of descriptive text• Roland Barthes says• Pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than

writing; they impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it

• For many magazine readers, the photographs and illustrations are one of the main reasons for buying the publication

• For periodicals as diverse as National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Vogue, Period Homes, Classic Cars, Country Life, GQ, MBUK, Heat, Hello!, Top of the Pops, and locally Mag, Sunday, etc., the pleasure readers get from their purchase is as much to do with looking as reading

• News periodicals such as Herald, Paris Match, Time, Newsweek and Stern owe much of their appeal to the quality of the photographs, although here the purpose is to offer an additional, complementary and often more emotive and dramatic dimension to the coverage of current affairs and news

Illustration and photograph

• Illustration: A kind of artwork -- drawing, watercolour, computer graphic, map, cartoon etc.

• Photograph: A static picture taken by a camera• The distinction between what counts as an

illustration and what as a photograph is increasingly fuzzy

• The word can also be used in a more general sense to cover any pictorial material that accompanies a text

Collage

• The amalgamation of both photography and illustration – what is called collage by some picture editors, composites or photomontage by others

• In its traditional meaning collage refers to any picture made from scraps of paper or other odds and ends pasted together but it has come to mean, too, pictures assembled from a variety of sources and is now gradually being applied to some uses of photography

Retouching

• Minor changes to photographs in the sense of retouching are nothing new

• Big publishers would have staff whose job is to eradicate facial hair or enhance the curves of fashion models

• Digital technology has simply made the process quicker, cheaper and easier

Photography or artwork? Who decides?

• The decision about which kind of illustrative material to use will be made in different ways on each magazine, depending on the size of its staff and its policy about visual material

• On most magazines, the choice is likely to be made by the art or picture editor

The process of picture editing

• Picture editing is, essentially, the process by which photographs and illustrations are created, selected and assembled from a variety of sources

• It mostly takes place in four steps:• Formulation of aims• Sourcing of pictures which may be done by commissioning

original photography or illustration, or from existing picture or art collections

• The images gathered must be edited and assembled or organised ready for the fourth step

• Which is preparing the images for production• The last two steps are now becoming one

Aims

• There are usually two sets of aims for the picture editor. There is the specific project and there is also the overall purpose of the publication or even the publisher

• So, for example, the aims of an upmarket fashion magazine such as Harpers and Queen are clearly different from those of a trade publication such as Media Week

• A publisher such as Conde Nast with a stable of glossy monthlies will not have the same corporate aims as the publisher of the radical monthly New Internationalist

Sourcing

• A great deal of a picture editor’s skill and effort is knowing how to get hold of the required images

• If pictures are to be sourced from libraries and agencies, a picture editor must be able to find the best as quickly and cheaply as possible

• Specialist publications may have staff picture researchers but a general-interest magazine may hire a picture researcher for one feature if the research for the topic is specialised

• If images are to be commissioned, a picture editor has to select the right photographer or illustrator for the job

Assembly

• The selection of a small number of photographs and illustrations from a choice of possibly hundreds is what most people think is a picture editor’s job

• It takes experience and confidence for a picture editor to be able to spot the gem whose brilliance is revealed only with deft cropping or when set imaginatively in a layout

Production

• Once they have been selected, photographs and illustrations must be fitted into the production cycle

• They will need tagging with caption information and then they may need to be marked up, retouched or scanned into desk-top publishing systems before they can be worked on by layout artists

• Even if a picture has arrived electronically, it may need colour correction and cropping

Technical standards for selection of photographs

• Film: Contrast should be normal; graininess should be low; colour rendering characteristics and colour balance should be normal unless variation in these is appropriate to the image and its task

• Exposure: Should be correct or appropriate for task; normally, mid-tones in subject should be reproduced as mid-tones in photograph

• Image quality: Good sharpness with details resolved to good contrast; rich tonal quality or variety of colours; a good depth of field which should be at least adequate for the subject; good colour correction and correct colour reproduction with no fringing;

• No ghosting or internal reflections on images due to stray light reflecting around inside the lens; the overall technical standard of the photograph should be adequate for the size at which it will be used on the page

• Orientation: The camera should be properly aligned to the subject so that, for example, the horizon should be horizontal or level, and vertical subjects should be vertical in the picture; the image may need to be portrait or landscape in shape to fit the space it has been allocated

• Information: Pictures should be clearly identified with the name of the photographer or agency, date, location, title of the event and names of subjects; a model release form may be required

Non-technical factors in picture selection

• Subjective response• Picture editing is a subjective process• Technical decisions are, in a sense, objective, as certain

requirements have to be met, but a picture editor still has to decide which technical standards to apply

• There are certain responses to photographs which are held to be more or less universal, for example response of nausea to a photograph of the victims of a massacre

• More usually, though, tastes, cultural background and life experience shape the viewer’s responses to an image