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Very important. Please describe the picture as best you can, including the following: names of the people in the shot, vessel names, location, name of the diving diving contractor, and your name. If your subjects want to be anonymous, that's fine. But we need your's to pay you. Under US copyright laws, a photograph belongs to the person who took it. By sending a copy of your picture to ODM, you grant us permission to display it, but ownership always remains with you. We respect that in our captioning and our policies toward website poachers. Also, PDF files of back issues are security enabled to prevent individual pictures from being saved out of them.
It should be a picture of a commercial diver. The cover shots on this page show you pretty much what we're talking about here.
The diver should be in a marine setting. Shots of inland divers are welcome, but probably won't make it onto the cover all that often. We want to publish an inland special issue every once in a while, so whether or not your inland shot makes the cover we still have a home for it.
The upper portion of the picture should have room for the ODM banner. It's okay if some of the subject is under the banner, but it ought to be some part that isn't really important to the picture anyway.
The picture should be perfectly in focus. Printers call this tack-sharp. If your camera has a high-res setting, use it. Experiment. Brace yourself against a piece of gear, keep your elbows at your sides, exhale half-way, pause, click, get the shot. Better yet: get a little tripod at Walmart for 20 bucks and use the timed shutter release feature on your camera if it has one. The thing is to keep the camera absolutely still.
Your shot needs to be taller than it is wide. Turn your camera sideways. We often receive pictures that would have made great covers if only they were oriented the other way.
You need to use a high resolution camera.
ODM is printed by an art house
in New Orleans on a digital printing press. Most other magazines print at
about 150 dpi on a web press, which is more like printing a newspaper, but
we're working to create a permanent record here. We also use archival
quality paper. The art press that To check the size of your photo, right click on it and select: Properties > Summary > Advanced. The info for width and height is what you need. Disregard the bit about resolution. Width in pixels divided by 300 = width in inches when printed. Same for height. Most pictures can be enlarged to fit the cover if they are are too small at 300 dpi. The minimum usable resolution for a cover shot is about 200dpi. In other words, the minimum usable width and height of a cover shot is approximately 1700 pixels wide by 2200 pixels high. But this is not always the case; certain photos can be sampled up with no detectable loss of definition - it very much depends on the image itself. If you have a great shot but you think its too small, send it in anyway and we'll see what we can do.
Special preference is given to underwater shots. The right underwater shot can disregard most of the previous criteria and still be a contender for the cover. Resolution remains important, but, as said before, it depends on the picture.
Of course there are going to be a lot of great shots that won't fly according to the criteria on this page. Don't sweat it; send them in anyway. You never know. Happy hunting. |
Captioning & Copyright
ODM comes off of prints at 300 dpi. Dpi is dots per inch. On your
computer, a dot is one pixel. An 8.5 x 11 inch page is 2550 pixels wide by
3300 pixels high. An 8 mega-pixel camera turned sideways takes pictures
that are just about the perfect size for full page display. However,
pictures this size are still sort of rare.