XtremeCamera

No matter how much money you have or don’t have, no matter how good the ‘economy’ is or isn’t, and no matter where you are on the road from ‘beginner’ to ‘full-time pro’, money spent on photography should never be wasted. And this includes money spent on photography magazines. Naturally one person’s waste is another person’s vital expense (I’m talking to you my soon-to-be-swooned-over Apple iPad!), but there are some things in our industry that are universally true. For instance, is there anyone left that believes ‘megapixels’ are the defining feature in a dSLR? Only the ill-informed hang on to myths long ago debunked by the truth seekers and in the case of the megapixel myth the truth lies in the size of photosite (megapixel) rather than the number of them you can fit on the head of a pin. But I digress.

In the weeks running up to Christmas 2008 I informed those in my life that exchange gifts with me that I wanted a subscription to a photography magazine. Any photography magazine would be fine, but I asked that each of them checked with other so that there would be no overlapping of titles. As it turned out I received an even dozen subscriptions, all of which I allowed to expire last month, save for a single title. What I learned about photography magazines in 2009 could fill a book, probably a very boring book, but I was able to discern some universal truths from the experience that I would like to share with you here.

Cost and Content

All photography magazines are expensive these days. In truth, all magazines in all genres are expensive these days and if you enjoy reading them you can drop some serious coin every Tuesday at your local bookstore. Having said that, buying a subscription to a magazine is, most of the time, vastly less costly that purchasing single issues each week/month. In today’s unstable times subscriptions can be a great idea and a great way to save money.

A terrific illustration of this is Hearst’s ESQUIRE magazine. This year Esquire will raise its newsstand cover price to $4.99 an issue (11 issues a year with a double issue for June/July), which equates to $55 a year. Yet, a subscription to Esquire will run you $8 for the year. Huge savings can be found with nearly every magazine so it makes sense to stay away from the newsstand and subscribe, providing you know enough about the magazine to be somewhat sure that you will enjoy each issue.

Now, there is one huge caveat to subscriptions. My yearlong subscription experience to those twelve photography magazines, along with my other half-dozen subscriptions to non-photo magazines like Esquire (subscribing for 30 years and counting, Entertainment Weekly, my guilty pleasure, and a few others) comes into play. Out of the dozen photography titles the only magazine I felt was worth renewing from Digital Photo Pro, the magazine least worth renewing was, honestly, NUDE (more on that in a bit). The rest fall somewhere in the middle, some are junk, some of pretty decent, only one was consistently excellent.

Digital Photo Pro’s track record for the past year was 7 great issues out of 7, the only magazine on my list to deliver great issues every time. At the cost of $18 a year or $35 for 2 years you’ll save about half the cost of the newsstand price, not great but not bad either. Digital Photo Pro could certainly offer a better deal than this since there is no lack of advertisers, but considering today’s weak dollar and the excellent management of the company, it’s still a good deal. What makes it a great deal, as well as a great magazine, is the content in each issue.

Digital Photo Pro reads like, and feels like, the first year of American Photographer in the mid-1970’s. In other words, no wasted pages, no filler, no junk, and plenty of informative content as well as great photographs. Digital Photo Pro stands head over heels over every other photography magazine on the US market.

Note* since I am based in the US all the subscriptions were US based magazines. Had money not been an issue I would have loved to include some UK and Australia titles as well. The cost to have them sent to the US, as well as the weak dollar makes the cost prohibitive, which is a real shame.

In addition to the terrific content, which includes in-depth reviews, solid tutorials, balanced and informed opinion, and full bleed photographs on glossy paper, Digital Photo Pro has the best website as well. You could literally spend an entire day on their website and not scratch the surface, the content seems endless, yet the organization, design, and speed of the server makes visiting the site a real pleasure. DigitalPhotoPro.Com is one of the websites I visit each day. Strangely enough, every other website for the photography magazines are garbage. Some are so bad its bewildering, I mean have you ever seen the website for B&W? Amazingly bad.

Several of the photography magazines I was receiving during 2009 contained outdated information, lousy photograph reproductions, and bias that I could not tolerate. The worst sin a print magazine can make is to be dishonest in their so-called reviews. Most of the magazines published reviews with such zeal that they wound up reading more like reviews that a company paid for rather than an honest look at the product. Digital Photo Pro, on the other hand, never seemed to be pandering to their advertisers and they genuinely seemed to care about their readers. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen since I’ve only just received my 8th issue, but so far so good.

The Good, Badly and Downright Ugly

Magazines that I subscribed to that did a decent job in 2009 were Shutterbug, American Photo (getting thinner and thinner however), and Photo Techniques. These titles publish great original content, and plenty of it, but Shutterbug is very light in publishing photographs and way too heavy with the advertising in the back of the issues. Still, for the money they offer a decent read and you come away knowing more than you did when you opened it up.

Coming in last were Popular Photography (a toss away magazine for the most basic amateurs), Outdoor Photographer, PCPhoto, and pdn (Photo District News). Sadly, everything I read in pdn during 2009 I had read previously in other magazines and on other websites.

The Titillation Rags

Then there are the photography magazines where the content is mainly photographs and they keep the written word to a bare minimum. In this category there are 3 titles worth mentioning.

Ross Periodicals are responsible for two of the titles that fall into this category. While they are slickly produced with faithful color and B&W reproductions, neither are worth the price of admission, not even the subscription price are enticing.

The first is B&W. This magazine publishes 8 times a year and you can subscribe for $35 (saving $29 on the newsstand price). The problem with B&W, and others like it, and what makes a subscription a real risky proposition, is that each issue is simply a collection of photographs chosen by ‘whomever’, and slapped together with a minimum of words. When they publish an issue that contains photographs you like you’re likely to enjoy the issue, but when they miss they miss hard. Since we all have different tastes it’s rare that will be enjoyed by everyone. That, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with these types of magazines. Moving into 2010 and beyond B&W won’t be a contender for our hard earned money.

The other magazine by Ross is rather new. On paper it’s a good idea; if you’ve published a black and white magazine for decades and you want to come out with a new one the logical step is COLOR. And that is just what they did. The magazine is filled with color photographs and the name is simply Color, so it’s a nice fit. Everything we said above about B&W applies here as well. I am a bit fonder of Color over B&W based on the number of issues and photographs that were published that I liked. It’s a great looking magazine, color reproduction is excellent, and if they added a good amount of verbiage, offered a better price for subscriptions, this would be a magazine I would happily subscribe to.

Coming in dead last, and most controversial if you have read my overly hyperbolic, meandering gushes over the first couple of issues I saw last year. I am talking, of course, about Carrie Leigh’s NUDE. I am still disappointed in how easily I was sucked into the hype machine and if I could take it all back I would. Since I can’t, the least I can do now is be honest about it.

In order to be upfront and honest I have to cop to being involved with NUDE for several months. I was the writer of nearly every word of both the summer and fall issues of 2009. Yes, I was asked to write for NUDE and I agreed. I kept my name out of the summer issue but decided to allow it for the fall issue (a friend convinced me that it would good for my career, LOL). After waking up in the middle of the night in late November I cut all ties with NUDE. Suffice it to say that there were vast differences that I could not see myself being associated with the company a second longer. Funny thing though; the fog lifted over my brain shortly after seeing my name on the Masthead. The minute everyone could see that I a part of the magazine I wanted out.

The problems with NUDE are too numerous to hit on all of them so I’ll touch on the majors. And besides, if I wrote about all the things that bothered me, all the things that led to my sudden departure, it would seem like a hit piece and I don’t want this to sound like a hit piece. Now that I see the rag as it truly is I am literally amazed that it remains in print, but if you have the money and you like thinking that you’re looking at art instead of naked women, well, who am I to say different? I can only be true to myself, which was a struggle for a while.

In a way, though I doubt it, I am hoping the publishers of NUDE will read this piece and learn something. The “yes men” that surround the two people that publish NUDE refuse to ever say anything other than “It’s AWESOME” so perhaps a dose of truth from someone that used to be on the inside will do some good. But probably not.

NUDE is handsomely produced, expensive as hell to produce, and has zero advertising. However, as expensive it is to produce the truth is the magazine destroys itself with a minimum of handling. Strip off the shrink-wrap, thumb though it, pass it around to friends, office workers, and others and within a week or so the cover photo has been depredated to hell and back. NUDE would save themselves a lot of money and aggravation if they went the route that Ross Periodicals and produced it with a thin glossy stock, it would undoubtedly last longer as well.

You Got To Want To Be A Publisher

The publishers are guilty of being lazy beyond belief and for having contempt for its readership. Lazy because they are content to comb the webpages of Model Mayhem and DeviantArt for content, essentially returning to the well over and over, and then featuring Carrie Leigh’s work in each issue, as well as Kim Weston. Their narrow focus shows a huge disconnect with real photographers (you know, those that spend more time behind the camera than social networking). Perhaps instead of using the tagline “The Art of Women” they should replace it with “From the pages of devianart and modelmayhem…” it’s a better description of the content. There are thousands of photographers looking to get published but they are simply too lazy to establish submission guidelines and spend a little time looking for new talent, or for god sakes, at least some different talent.

Why So Hostile?

When Carrie Leigh admitted to me that she knew absolutely nothing about photography or the mechanics of photography, I should have walked away immediately. I was SO disappointed. All I could think about was the thousands of hard working photographers trying to strike out on their own, spending hundreds of hours learning their craft, and here this woman with more money than talent literally creates a career out of thin air based on nothing more than the expensive production of a quarterly magazine.

But instead of ranting in XtremeCamera that Leigh knew next to nothing about our craft, I tried like hell to spin it into a positive. It made me feel like a politician (Ugh!) and no matter how many showers I took I could never get clean. Worse still, when I saw the larger body of work Carrie Leigh has done it was easy to see that she indeed knew nothing about photography. Case in point? Look at the Winter 2010 cover shot on carrieleigh.com. Easily the worst cover shot in NUDE’s short history, but typical of Leigh’s work. It speaks volumes about what she doesn’t know about perspective (the model’s head looks twice the size proportionally speaking, then it should), let alone the characteristics of various lenses and tonal range.

Like B&W and Color, NUDE is extremely light on the written word. The two issues I wrote took no more than 4 hours per issue to write, and they always complained I wrote too much and wound up using less than a quarter of what I wrote. Now, for them it’s all about the photography, which is fine, but for me if I am looking at photographs and enjoying them I want to know about the person behind the camera. I want to know why the shot was taken, the motivations, and the technique, whatever I can learn. NUDE has no desire to do that, and if you think B&W or Color lacks in the verbiage department I assure you compared to NUDE those two are actually weighed down with the written word.

Lastly, NUDE wants to position itself as more art than a men’s magazine, but consider the facts; like Playboy NUDE features a Vargas style illustration, an interview, and attractive nude women. There has never been a nude male exhibit in the magazine, there have never been unattractive women, and every Carrie Leigh shoot has been heavy on the sexy and light on the art. NUDE is a titillation magazine disguised as a photography art magazine. That’s just the way it is.

NUDE is the most expensive of the 3, both on the newsstand ($12.95 per issue) and the subscription, $40 for 2 years (8 issues). That said, all three are expensive and make subscribing a tough call. If your budget allowed for a single subscription in this genre (more photos, less type) the best bet by far is Color. Color seems to have what B&W used to have, a hunger to publish. While you’ll still feel robbed with certain issues you should be able to find something of value in every issue. NUDE on the other hand, is a waste. You’re much better off simply signing up for a free account at deviantart and model mayhem because you’re going to see the same photographers.

Like many others I love magazines all of genres. But all magazines cost money and none of them are cheap. Considering which ones to buy, which ones to subscribe too hang on what you’re after. If you believe that you can never learn too much about photography than the way to go is definitely Digital Photo Pro or others that you may like for what it can teach you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for inspiration and your desire is to browse photographs on paper, photographs that might lead you toward something original on your own, than I recommend Color. If you want to look at attractive naked women, well, you know…

Below are the magazines I subscribed to in 2009. If you know of others I should take a look at let me know. I’ll pick one up and if I like what I see I’ll write about it.

John Manzione

Magazines:

1. B&W: Black & White Magazine
2. Color
3. Lenswork
4. Professional Photographer
5. Digital Photo Pro
6. Pdn: Photo District News
7. View Camera
8. PCPhoto
9. Popular Photography
10. American Photo
11. Outdoor Photographer
12. Photo Technique