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Going through lots of things that have accumulated in my cupboards over the last two years, I came across issue 72 of Digital Photographer magazine from Imagine Publishing and the Digital Photographer Yearbook 2008, both of which contain images by me.
I have singled out this particular magazine for no other reason than that I used to read it and even subscribed to it for a number of years, and for a while I learned a lot from it. I also benefited from a generous Sony sponsorship deal - a free Sony Alpha 350 plus kit lens - for a reader feature in which I was paired with a pro photographer for a day to improve my SLR technique. I didn't even have a DSLR at the time, so the pro lent me his Fuji S3 for the shoot, which was heavy but I actually learned to use it very quickly and was stunned by the image quality, especially the incredibly smooth skin tones. So I have quite a bit to be grateful for. What I am criticising here is not this particular magazine but the general method it employs, probably like most similar magazines directed firmly at amateur photographers, namely filling its pages with free or cheap content.
I don't have an issue with not having been paid for the use of the images I took on the shoot. That was part of the deal, and I got a camera worth a few hundred Pounds at the time in return.
However, I later also entered their annual competition, and one of my images, as you can see, made it into the black & white section published in the Digital Photographer Yearbook 2008, retailing at £12.99. I never got paid for the publication. Of course, this was also part of the entry conditions for the competition, so I went into it knowing what to expect. Still, that's the point at which I began to wonder.
The thing is that I learned a lot more in the last year and a half than in the years of subscribing to the magazine, mainly from press photographer Edmond Terakopian (to whom I am forever indebted for his invaluable and patient advice) and from other professional and amateur photographers on twitter. To the point that I eventually changed my subscription from Digital Photographer to the BJP. I am still an amateur, though.
So with the months of exponential learning compared to before, I got increasingly dissatisfied with the Digital Photographer. Although it calls itself a 'magazine for enthusiasts & professionals', I seemed to outgrow it without getting anywhere near to being a pro.
That feeling became stronger once I joined their online gallery - promoted to readers as another level at which to get involved, to get one's pictures published as Photo of the Month, being chosen for the readers galleries pages, being part of the forum etc. True enough, it was through the forum that I managed to slip into the reader feature slot, which was - as I found out on site - glamour photography, so not really my thing at all, but at my level, there would surely be something useful for me to take away from it, and then there was the camera, too.
However, following the galleries of other readers and the forum strands I soon realised that not only were most of the images published in the magazine reader contributions which I had already seen in the gallery, but that the features increasingly included forum entries, coming across like expert opinions, not readers chatting amongst each other in a forum, and then those supposed expert opinions became more or less stand-alone features in their own right!
It was at that point that I cancelled the subscription. After all, the intention had been to learn from pros, not to pseudo-learn from people who knew as much or as little as myself.
Let me say this just for the record, I think amateur photography magazines have their place. Also, 'amateur' covers a wide field, and those just starting out can learn something from amateurs with a few years experience. Five years ago my head would have hurt after reading the BJP, and much would have been irrelevant to me, anyway. After all, people will not repeat-buy a magazine if they become discouraged because they don't understand half of what's in it or because they can't relate to it.
Still, that doesn't mean one should make amateur photographers feel like they are really knowledgeable by publishing their forum contributions in a magazine and thus giving them some sort of credibility they don't necessarily deserve, and it certainly doesn't seem fair to fill the magazine to a large part with readers' contributions who can then brag about having been 'published' in a magazine they paid for, but without getting paid themselves.
Quite frankly, all the articles about 'going pro' (i.e. making money with photography) in those magazines seem like a joke at the expense of the people devouring them when taking into account that hardly anyone contributing to the magazine - which is, after all, sold at a decent price - gets paid...
