Gloucestershire Bird Atlas - call for photographs

The Gloucestershire Bird Atlas Group is inviting local wildlife photographers to submit good quality bird photographs for inclusion in the county bird atlas. The book will provide a great opportunity to showcase the work of local photographers and to celebrate the birdlife of the county. We aim to include photographs of all the species for which we will be writing full species accounts, and these are listed on below. The book will cover breeding and wintering birds and will include county maps for all these species, based on the fieldwork currently being undertaken. The fieldwork continues until 2011, and we anticipate that publication will be in 2013 - but we are keen to start to build up a bank of suitable photos as soon as possible. As well as the species listed, we are of course interested in photos of county rarities.

Key points are as follows:-

General

* Photographs should be taken in Gloucestershire if possible, and photographs of county rarities should definitely be of Gloucestershire birds. · Photographs of common birds are just as important as photographs of rarities - see the list below.

* For commoner species especially, images showing "behaviour" are particularly welcome - perhaps a bird at the nest, or carrying food, or interacting with other birds.

* We are unable to offer payment for photos, but all photographers will receive full credit in the book and their name will appear alongside the photo.

Technical

* For printing, all photographs must be a minimum of 400 dots per inch (dpi) at the size at which they will be printed. We envisage that many images in the book will be the width of half a page and therefore will be (very approximately) 4 inches wide by 3 inches high, which implies an absolute minimum pixel size of 1600 by 1200 (about 2 megapixels). Pixel sizes larger than this will of course be clearer and will be capable of being printed at a larger size. To be good enough to print at full page width, or about 7 inches by 5 inches, a photo will need to be a minimum of 2800 by 2000 pixels (about 6 megapixels).

* Please do not downscale photos that are larger (in terms of pixels) than the above minimum - this will be dealt with as part of the process of preparing copy for printers.

* If you do any cropping or other manipulation of the source photos, please save the revised files in TIFF format; re-saving as JPEG causes some deterioration of the image.

Please e-mail photographs to Andy Lewis at ac.lewis@btinternet.com

Thank you!

Species for which photographs are invited: