By Aaron Swepston
My father used slide film when I was a tiny kid, all of my favorite photographers shot either color slide or B&W print film, and occasionally print film. My favorite hang gliding photographers shot on slide film too, generally because the colors were better than print film and the fine grain of the high end slide films provided for excellent clarity and sharpness. Film has always been the preferred medium for serious photography. And then digital was born.
Digital photography has taken the casual photography world by storm, relegating consumer grade film cameras to the back shelf, but it has not been a serious contender for 'real' photography or 'real' photographers. Or has it? Digital cameras have improved by leaps and bounds, and as the image resolution has grown, so has the professional potential for digital photography.
In the old days, photos shot on film stayed on film throughout the production processes aimed at magazine or publication printing. Halftones were shot of prints, then used to make printing plates. This is an analog process, a lot like making a cassette recording of a record (remember what those are?). Now that the vast majority of the printing industry has gone digital, photos end up as digital images through some form of scanning, or as original digital shots. This is where the modern crossroads exists, whether to shoot on film and scan it to a digital file, or skip the whole analog film part and shoot directly to digital.
Film can have a very fine, tight grain, providing extremely shrp images. Of course, one has to start out with a fine grained film, no faster than 100 speed for example. Film that has a faster speed than that gets really grainy, really fast. But with a film speed of 50, you can have images that are sharper than the economical film scanners can really distinguish. That means that a good film is better than the scanners that scan it, in general, so you can get the best pictures by shooting on film and then getting it scanned on a good scanner.
Now, however, digital cameras are getting to be really good, with higher and higher resolutions. The resolutions of the newer digital cameras are getting closer to rivaling the resolution of film scanners, so the advantage of film is getting to be slimmer and slimmer. In fact, there are times that digital cameras can capture a cleaner image than film can, because a digital camera does not have 'grain' like film does. It reproduces cleaner pixels as a first generation image than a scanner does by scanning film that has grain in it.
Okay, that's the background part. Chances are that most people don't really care about the evolution of the digital insurgence into photography, but only care about how to get the best pictures they can in hopes that they can get published in our magazine. Who really cares about the non-technical aspects of photography, just spit out the details about how to choose a camera and how to set it up for getting the best photos for publication. Easy enough. Let's just cover the best way to submit photos to the magazine.
Film
As far as film goes, it is best and preferable if the film is 100 speed or faster. It's hard to get print film slower than 100 speed, but it is easy to get slide film at 65 or 50 speed. Anything faster than that, like 200 speed or 400 speed is so grainy that the shot needs to be so excellent in every other way that the grain is able to be overlooked. Generally, pictures shot on 200 speed or 400 speed are just too grainy to use because it is really hard to maintain clarity, detail and proper color balance and disttribution. If you want to shoot pictures for the magazine, try to shoot on slide film that is 50 ASA or 100 ASA at the outside.
Digital Photography
Digital cameras come in a variety of sizes and price ranges. If you really want to shoot pictures for the magazine, go no lower than a 2 mega-pixel camera, and shoot at maximum size, minimum compression. Now for some clarification. At maximum resolution, finest quality, digital cameras produce images of approximately the sizes, measured in pixel dimensions, listed below:
2 MP = 1600 x 1200
3 MP = 2048 x 1536
4 MP = 2272 x 1704
5 MP = 2560 x 1920
They also have a range of quality/resolution, and will go down as low as 640 x 480 pixels. People like the fact that they can get a gazillion images on a digital camera's memory card, and so Joe Blow may generally shoot at the lower resolution for the maximum quantity of pictures, so I will include the print sizes of that size just for giggles, and just so you will know what the magazine have been faced with many, many times in the past.
The print publishing industry has a standard for digital images used for the type of printing used for magazines and similar publications. This is NOT the same type of printing we do at home, and does not use the same technology, so don't try to draw comparisons between the two. That standard says that we have to use digital images sized to be 300 pixels per inch. Not 280, not 250, and certainly not 200. That's thew industry's standard, although it is also a rule of thumb and not an exact number for some complex digital algorithm, but rather a rounded up and easy to remember number. The real number is closer to 274 pixels per inch, but that's another story.
While it is true that there is room for fudging the digital pictures upwards in dimensional size, the 'rule of thumb' is that pictures need to be used at 300ppi, that's pixels per inch. There are only so many pixels in any given digital image, so if you stretch it bigger, the pixel count 'per inch' decreases. Follow that so far? Just so everyone can see what resolution has to do with printing size, here are a couple of figures showing how varying the resolution (ppi) also varies the dimensional or printable size. Let's start with the industry standard of 300 ppi.
Look at the printing sizes above, and it doesn't look all that great. Buying the $1,000+ 5 MP camera produces an image that is one page wide by slightly more than half a page high at its best resolution. That doesn't look all that fantastic or encouraging. Not to mention that the prices ramp up pretty steeply from each mega-pixel level to the next. You can get a 4 MP camera for substantially less than a 5 MP camera, so is it really worth it?
Check out the printing sizes when used at 200 ppi, which is the very low end that we have on occasion used successfully in the magazine. It isn't a good way to go, but it has worked out a few times, and the printers will NOT condone using such a low resolution, but they could provide no samples of the low end of usable resolutions so I went ahead and did some tests in the magazine to see what would be a low end minimum, just so we all would know and all be on the same page as far as what sort of digital images would work in the magazine.
Looks a lot better, doesn't it. It means that at 200 ppi, a 4 MP image can be used as a front cover image, and that a 5 MP image sized for a front cover would end up at 225.8 pixels per inch. In printing, the difference between 200 and 225 pixels per inch is noticeable, which is why I bought a 5 MP camera instead of a 4 MP, but y'all have to decide based on your own needs and fund allocation.
So here you have it, clear as a bell. The size of a digital image printed at the most desirable resolution, as well as stretched to its maximum allowable dimensions before it degrades past the point of acceptability.
Naturally, the quality of a digital image depends on the shot itself, as well as how it is compressed. If you set your camera for maximum compression so you get more shots on your memory card, the image will degrade. The compression causes image loss and degradation. So if you are hoping to get a shot stretched to a bigger size, don't set your camera's compression to high. Shoot as a tiff or minimum compression jpeg, or even RAW if you have the ability to convert to tiff as you download it to your computer.
And of course the magazine people have to decide whether or not an image is acceptable. It may have any number of artifacts, distortions, color banding, fringing, and so on, so just because it may look pretty good on screen or prints well on an inkjet printer doesn't mean that it will print acceptably in the magazine.
Try to frame and compose the pictures really well. Cropping reduces the image size, which means it will have to be enlarged a given amount to fill the original dimensions, say for a cover shot, so if you are shooting for a cover try to fill the image space completely, don't shoot a glider that is far away expecting to crop out 25% of the sky background. And turn off your digital zoom and only use optical zoom.
So there you have it, a complete set of specs for shooting digitally for the magazine. What you can expect from any given size image when printed in the magazine, broken down to actual pixel dimensions and presented in preferred and minimum allowable resolutions. Of course the camera and its settings are just the technical part of the equation. Composition is the other, and probably more important aspect. No matter how much you spend on a camera, digital or film, if the pictures you shoot are composed poorly or are shot in bad light, there's not a lot anyone can do to make them better!.