Rising Pixels

My wife is a digital scrap-booking guru and graphic designer. She is a wizard with photo editing and writes some pretty mean prose, too.

In a recent discussion, Mary Rose brought up the observation that image editors are looking for submissions from digital cameras mostly twelve-mega-pixels and up. Some editors and publishers are demanding file sizes of 35 megs or more when not long ago, a six-mega-pixel or eight-mega-pixel file was plenty and, in fact, you can make a pretty good poster from one.

So, why would editors and publishers start demanding such huge file sizes when a calendar is often not much bigger than an 8x10 photograph? Ah, once again, my wife's brilliant insight shines brightly. "Why," she says, "to keep out all of the amateurs and photographer wanna-bes."

My wife is on design teams and actually publishes a rag in the scrap-booking industry. There have been numerous times when a person gets a new digital SLR and after a short time tries to get a position as a professional photographer. Those people do not know how to "play the game". Those people haven't "paid their dues". They just suddenly think, hey, I can be a professional photographer.

Some of those people are genuinely talented. Many are not.

Now, as an editor, I am placing myself in the shoes of many other editors. I could understand that making strict submission guidelines will effectively lock-out the rabble, the green-horn with a newly acquired digital SLR, and the photographer wanna-be. After all, there are many submissions through which to sift in any given day, and things are getting busier all the time.

I have to ask one question. Are there superb quality images now being disqualified simply because the pixel-count is "too low" when two years ago, it would have been seen as a fantastic image and perfect for that new calendar?

As pixel-counts continue to rise, the industry will probably continue to raise image submission requirements, without regard to whether it is really necessary to do so. The result, of course, will be more cameras of higher pixel-count sold. And so it goes...

---- Mickey Maguire