Have you ever been in a Turkish... publication?

A couple of my Flickr photos of the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas were chosen by LightWorld to be included in their most recent issue (#2, August-September 2006).  I am very excited about this, as it's the first time I've had any of my photographs published in a magazine.  Sure, most of the magazine is in Turkish, so it really isn't something I can read and understand, but the photos and layout were very cool.

This is the first time I've heard of any printed magazine using photos found on a public shared photo site like Flickr.  I hope that this is a new trend and that other magazines start picking up on this.  It seems to be something that would benefit both the magazines and any up-and-coming amateur photographers that they select.  The magazine gets to use some nice photographs for free, and the photographers get some publicity and bragging rights.  The only people that may lose out on this would be the average professional photographers who normally got paid for their photographs.


If any other amateur photographers out there are looking to get their photos published in magazines like LightWorld, here are my suggestions:

1. Put your photos up on Flickr, Yahoo Photos, or one of the other BIG photo sharing sites out there.  I personally love Flickr, but the Yahoo site is currently more feature-rich.  Flickr is owned by Yahoo now, though, so I would guess that many of the features will be shared across both sites soon.  I used to be a big supported of publishing photos on my own Web site, even using my own hand-rolled photo gallery.  While that worked great for sharing my photos with friends and family, there was almost no chance of someone from a magazine stumbling upon my site.  Sure, a Google image search might have worked, but it would have also returned a bunch of useless images and stock photography.  Searches done on the big photo sharing sites should return a much more refined and useful result set.
   
2. Add tags to all of your good photos.  They can't find what you don't tag.  In my case, both of these photos were tagged with Las Vegas, Bellagio, and fountain, so they were very easy for LightWorld to find.
3. Don't worry as much about the title or description of the photos.  The tags are the most important part.  The title and description can always be added later.  In my case, I have over 3000 photos on Flickr.  I'd be surprised if more than 100 of them have a descriptive title or description.  All of the good ones have tags, though. ;-)
   

That's it.  While there are a ton of other options to add your photos to other categories or shared photo groups, I don't think magazine editors are going to use those tools to find photos.  So, stick to my three simple steps and you should have as good of a chance as I did in being published.

If you do happen to have a photo published, let me know, will ya? ;-)