My ideal magazine
I like to read* magazines. I especially like to read about photography, nature and outdoors activities and I like it best when all three are combined. When I moved to Sweden, I started reading the Swedish Foto magazine. It didn’t take me long to get fed up – I thought that the quality of pictures was horrible and the other content in the mag didn’t exactly inspire me either. So I started subscribing to Camera Natura which definitely had the quality I wanted, but it also had longwinded interviews that wore me out after a while.
Every time I had a chance, I would buy English photography mags like Practical Photography and Photography Monthly (they are not available in Ljusdal) and I was happy with those, although it seemed to gnaw me that a lot of pages were wasted on gear reviews that were irrelevant to me, I mean I’m not loyal to Canon just for the sake of being loyal, it’s just that I’ve invested a lot of money in the system so I only have a passing interest at best for other manufacturers’ products. Then I found out about EOS Magazine and thought that it would be just the ticket – a photography magazine dedicated to Canon! But I really don’t need articles that explain what the different letters and symbols mean in the mode dial (yes they really do write about that) so I dropped EOS Magazine and subscribed to Photography Monthly instead. I’ve been relatively happy with PM but it is a British mag with content that reflects the country, so I’m starting to get a bit frustrated with all those wonderful locations they write about – I’d loved it 9 years ago, but now I live in Sweden so the Top 100 Greatest Landscape Locations in Britain are pretty much lost on me. And it’s not just that, but as a strict nature photographer it doesn’t work for me to have the mag filled with specials on sports and portrait photography and everything in between.
While my search for a good photography magazine has been going on, I’ve also tried other mags. I subscribed to Outside but got tired with those translated articles about locations and activities that had no relevance to me, so I swapped it for Utemagasinet. The location reports are close to home, but I have a limited interest in different outdoor activities so mostly I just skip those canoeing and ice skating specials and wait for the hiking and cross-country skiing articles, and there’s not enough of them to keep me subscribing to the mag.
So now I’m running out magazines, but thank goodness for blogs! Blogs seem to offer me the content I want, although I’m still old-fashioned enough to prefer printed material. So if some of the blog content could be transferred on paper, then the ideal magazine would be something of a cross between Photography Monthly and Utemagasinet. It’s all about nature and the location – I’m interested in the stories behind the pictures, kinda the way I write my own blog. My writing is mostly a lot about nothing so it won’t hold up to any closer scrutiny, but this country is full of capable photographer/writers who could easily fill out a mag after mag with wonderful stories. I don’t need longwinded interviews of the photographer to find out who they are – I’d rather find out who the photographer is through the pictures they take and stories they write themselves. Just like the blogs where you can read a photographer tell a story about their latest photo trip with the pictures they took, and some technical information related to get an insight on how it was created. For example, a photographer goes for a week long hike, how do they solve the issue of dragging photo gear with them, and how do they tackle the weather conditions? Or it could be a photographer in search of a rare flower or animal, do they find what they’re looking for and did they get the picture? This ideal mag should also contain equipment reviews, but not test chart pictures and pixel peeping because the Internet is already full of those. What really matters is how the equipment performs on the field; how do different photographers experience the gear? And then you could top up this mag with some tips for technique and help columns where experienced photographers can give advice to newbies, and provide constructive critique to readers’ photos (like most photo mags do already).
See what I meant about writing a lot about nothing? I just managed to use 800 words for what really amounts to “I haven’t found any magazine that I like but I do enjoy reading blogs”.
Don’t even get me started on photography forums…
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* Since I like to read, this podcasting craze hasn’t caught on me yet. I rarely watch anything at YouTube. I also skip the videos that many sites now post instead of written articles. You’ve got to read and write, people, or in 10 years we’ll just be a big bunch of illiterates!
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