Guide to Great Photography
About The Book
The Guide to Great Photography brings together some of the finest images uploaded to ePHOTOzine over the course of its five year history. The pictures were selected from over a quarter of a million that have been uploaded into one of the 13 gallery subsections. These, along with hundreds of facts, tips and techniques, bring together a superb resource for anyone interested in photography who wants to gain inspiration, learn new tricks or just enjoy
great images.
When an ePHOTOzine member, Seb Wheeler, suggested in our forums two years ago that we create a book of images, I had no idea what a mammoth task I was about to embark on! At that time we had a gallery of around 153,000 images, split into 13 categories. A book, full of the best images and accompanied by tips and techniques, seemed like a simple plan to pull together. After sounding it out with members to see whether it would be something they’d like, the answer was a resounding Yes. The nightmare began!
What I had’t envisaged, those many moons ago, was that the gathering of the images would be such an arduous task. For starters, I had to look through our gallery of 250,000 photos and choose ones to go in. After around four hours of looking through one of the smallest sections, Sports, I’d delved through just 70 pages. I was only a quarter of the way through one section which equated to just 3% of the gallery! A quick calculation made me realise that I had another 243 hours to go just to choose the photos. Time to ask for help. I soon had several volunteer picture editors, and two months later I had a set of pictures. Following a template format created by my designer friend, Steven Handley, I began to lay out the pages.
Challenge two: over 200 pages of photos, all of different shapes and sizes needed to be placed. This reminded me of a complex jigsaw. Fortunately, I enjoyed jigsaws as a kid sadly, I couldn’t start with the edges! This took ages to get right, but once completed gave me a great sense of satisfaction. This satisfaction was soon to be shattered. Our policy on ePHOTOzine is that copyright of uploaded photographs remains with the photographer. If we want to use photos, we will contact each photographer. The email correspondence began. We sent out about 1,800 emails requesting the use of a photo. This generated many responses asking questions, many bounce backs and lots of clarification. Total estimate of email correspondence over the two years has been over 5,500! In one week last year we had four members of staff working almost full-time sending, receiving and administrating emails.
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