Versatile Hunting Dog Magazine
Photo Submission Requirements
For reasons of technical compatibility and quality control, the publication staff of the Versatile Hunting Dog magazine reserves the right to accept or refuse photo submissions using the following criteria:

What We Accept

What We Don't Accept

35mm photo prints (3"x5" or 4"x6") Photo prints made from 35mm negatives (3"x5" or 4"x6") Digital photos taken at a high resolution (file size requirements vary for cover vs. article photos - see article below for explanation) Please do not try to send us large digital files through e-mail. They will block up our e-mail boxes and be bounced back to you. Copy digital files to a CD or Zip disk and mail them to the main office. Your best bet: take your 35mm negatives in and have ordinary photo prints made of your favorites to send to us. Or buy a very good digital camera, do your research and take your photos at a high publishable resolution.

No low resolution "Web grade" digital photos. (please see article below for explanation) No prints made from low resolution digital photos No low resolution digital photos "sized-up" in photo software after shooting. (Again, see article below) No copies of 35mm photo prints made on a print-copier machine at a photo store. No poor quality/low resolution scans of 35mm prints. (Opinion of quality is at the discretion of the publisher) No enlargement prints of 35mm photos larger than 4"x6".

Digital Photos & VHD
We love receiving photos for publication in the VHD and we absolutely hate to have to turn them down. With the growing popularity of digital cameras, this is happening more often than we like.
    Please consider the following information before taking digital photos for the VHD. If you are in the market for a digital camera, do some research and make sure it can handle high enough resolutions for professional magazine printing - many point-and-shoot digital cameras are only meant to create images for on-screen display and e-mail swapping (which requires only 72 ppi). A higher price will get you a camera that produces a higher resolution and a far better photograph. The VHD happily accepts digital photos taken at the correct resolution or at a print size that is large enough to be transformed into a 300 ppi photo of usable size.
    It is often thought a digital photo can be taken at a low resolution and then “bumped up” to a higher resolution in a photo editing program to produce a better photograph. The following excerpts are from the Adobe Photoshop on-line manual: “Higher-resolution images usually reproduce more detail and subtler color transitions than lower-resolution images. However, increasing the resolution of a low-resolution image only spreads the original pixel information across a greater number of pixels; it rarely improves image quality,” and, “Using too low a resolution for a printed image results in pixelation—output with large, coarse-looking pixels.”
    Also from the Photoshop web site: “A digital camera image may print poorly if its resolution is converted to 72 ppi. To improve print quality, you can either specify smaller print dimensions or increase the resolution to the original* value.” *Note the use of the word “original,” not “higher.”

Some rules of thumb:

• Shoot your digital photos at a size that will result in the resolution you need them to be in the end. VHD magazine photo files are sent to our printer at 300 ppi. Therefore, any digital photos we use must start life at an image size that results in a resolution of 300 ppi.
• What you see on the screen is not what you get. Your screen and our printer produce images at different resolutions. An image that looks great on your screen at 72 ppi will print in the VHD like a mosaic tiled floor.
• Prints of digital photos are not of the same quality as film photo prints. They are made up of dots and we cannot scan those and bring them up to magazine publication standards.
• Keep in mind that the VHD cover requires an image that is 8 1/2 x 11”. This doesn’t take into account cropping or further enlargement that is usually needed for “framing” the image on the cover. The finished file size for a digital photo for our cover needs to be about 30 meg. Can your camera handle that?
• When in doubt, leave the digital camera at home and bring your trusty old film camera. This will result in versatile, quality film prints that we can scan and publish at any size we choose - including cover size.
• If you have a digital photo and are not sure if it will work for the magazine, please send it to us and we will check it out for you. If it is of a high enough resolution, it will be a large, slow file to send by e-mail (and will block up our e-mailbox). Please copy it to a CD or Zip and snail-mail it to the main office.
• If we are forced to refuse your digital photo on the grounds that it isn’t of a high enough resolution, please realize this is not a matter of taste or opinion, it’s a technical fact.
• Do some research, practice with your camera before “the big day,” and don’t let all these guidelines discourage you - we need your photos!

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