Picture this in the magazine

Aim high, shoot big

Larger images better your chance of getting in the magazine pages

We get a number of truck owners submitting their rig’s photos into our Reader Gallery every week. At the end of each month we look at each entry so we can choose a few to show in the pages of our parent magazine,  Overdrive,  and Custom Rigs.

Now, here’s a little secret to making the first cut on the road to fame and glory: Picture quality.

Just about any photo looks fine when it’s put on the web. But, unfortunately, when a picture is shown in a magazine it has to be of a minimum size and “quality” to be reproduced on the printed page.

Most of our cell phone  cameras are designed just for capturing web images. So when readers submit a cool photo of their truck taken with a cell phone, it’d be about the size of a postage stamp (literally) when converted for magazine use.

Most of the digital cameras are also set from the factory for making perfect web-size images. Many also have a way to select a higher quality image, which allows the camera to save a whole lot more information and, thus, allow the picture to be enlarged to a much greater degree and stay sharp.

If your digital camera has a picture-quality setting, move it to the highest available. That’s the setting you want anytime you are going to submit photos to a magazine, newspaper, or just to make enlargements for your own use.

Making just that one little change in your camera makes a huge difference in overall picture quality in a magazine or printed out at a Wal-Mart kiosk.

The image file size needed for magazine reproduction is going to be about four times bigger than a web-sized one because of a thing called pixels-per-inch, or PPI. (Read the hyperlinked article for an explanation.) Web images are typically 72ppi while print images are 300ppi.

But the upside is when you submit the bigger image to our Reader Gallery  it’s going to  immediately catch the eyes of those on the other end  who pick and choose which rigs make the first cut to get into the pages of Overdrive and Custom Rigs.

So get out there and start shooting big. I want to see your rigs–and I really want to see them in the magazine!