We love getting photos from Upper Valley readers to publish in the Valley News, whether they show a recent event, interesting bird or celebration of an accomplishment.
However, we recently published a contributed photo in these pages that was edited beyond our standards, blurring detail in the foreground and background.
Going forward, we have published these photo submission guidelines in several places on our website and wanted to share them here, too.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Photo Editor Geoff Hansen (603-727-3247, ghansen@vnews.com) and Calendar Editor Liz Sauchelli (603-727-3221, esauchelli@vnews.com) with questions — and thanks for your submissions.
Photos can be emailed to calendar@vnews.com or photo@vnews.com, or submitted via the “send a photo” submission form at www.vnews.com.
Photos should be .jpg files and should be sent as attachments (not in the body of an email or a PDF).
Photos should be high-resolution and as large as possible. In other words, the file size should be 500 KB or larger. Another way to measure this: Images should be at least 200 or 300 dpi.
If you’re not sure about file sizes, just remember: The bigger, the better.
The Valley News prohibits staging photos — in other words, faking scenes for the sake of the camera — or otherwise misleading our readers.
Posed portraits and/or photo illustrations are acceptable for our consideration if they are labeled.
But …
The Valley News practices documentary photography. If you’re sending us photos from an event, we want to see some action — and we’re more likely to run photos that show readers what was happening.
For example, sending us photos from a race? We would rather see a scene of runners along the course than of the winners holding their trophies and smiling for the camera after everything is said and done.
We’re in the business of sharing information with our readers. That means the photos we publish are only as good as the captions that accompany them. Flip through our paper and you’ll see that our staff photos have extensive caption information.
Here’s what you should include with every photo submission:
■Who: Names of people, organizations. A good rule of thumb is that if there are three or fewer people who are the central focus of a picture with clearly visible faces, we need all of their names.
■What: Name of the event.
■When (the date) and where (town and location where the event was held).
■How and why: The background and purpose of the event.
The Valley News prohibits manipulating photos — in other words, Photoshopping them — beyond basic toning and cropping.
If you’re not skilled at editing photos, don’t worry, we can take care of that. But if you do edit photos, please follow these guidelines from the National Press Photographers Association:
“Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images … in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects. … Our primary goal is the faithful and comprehensive depiction of the subject at hand.”
— Maggie Cassidy