Please use the following guidelines to help keep the gallery looking great. As always, with each of the examples, we will be willing to bend the rules a bit if the images are exceptionally rare or unusual.
Good Quality
Please ensure that your images are in focus, well-lit (not too light or too dark) and that they are clear, so that the subject is easily identifiable.
No Advertising
You are allowed to include a small, short and discreet copyright or name to your images, but please do not add corporate names, web names or web domains
The Main Subject
Please ensure that the subject of your photograph adequately fills the frame and is preferably a lot larger than this buzzard.
Image Sizes
Ideally, images should be at least 800x600, but we may accept smaller photos if they are of rare subjects or unusual circumstances.
Editing
Images may be enhanced to make them clearer, but not modified to add or take anything away. Please avoid over-editing images with too much sharpen, contrast, brightening etc. If jagged edges or speckles appear in the image (like those in the green area below) then it has probably been sharpened too much.
Similar Images
Please only upload 2 or 3 images of the same subject, and only if they're quite distinctly different, rare or showing unusual behaviour. For example, the following 3 images are virtually identical and so only 1 should be uploaded to the gallery.
Big or Artistic Borders
Please do not add borders or artwork to your images.
No Pets Allowed
This is a picture of my dog 'Honey'. Unfortunately, she's not part of British wildlife so she can't go in the gallery
Please don't post photographs of your pets...and remember they're not just for Christmas
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File Compression
Please try to compress your files so that they are small (under 250k, and preferably less), but not so much that it starts to noticeably affect the quality of the pic. Compressing jpegs to a level of 7 or 8 (70-80%) should do the trick. In the following images, the 75% compression has an almost indistinguishable level of detail to the 100%, but it has a considerably smaller filesize. However, the 50% is only marginally smaller than the 75% and yet it is heavily pixelated and a lot lower quality.
Wild About Britain is very fortunate to have some great gallery editors who are all volunteers and do the very difficult job of moderating hundreds of photos each week.
The quality check is probably the hardest part of the job as it requires the gallery eds to assess images based on a variety of criteria, from focus and lighting to over-editing and image compression. The eds also need to consider if the subject is rare and, if so, whether they should make special concessions for the quality of the photo.
Naturally, it's a subjective process that will sometimes result in one gallery editor considering an image to be OK, while another might not agree. In these cases, the images are usually put in a storage area where we can take a second look at them and decide whether to include them in the gallery or not.
Unfortunately, with hundreds of pics being uploaded each week, it isn't really feasible to give comment on individual photos, so we've put together the above info to help give some idea of the quality that is required. If images don't make it into the gallery then it is most probably because of one of the above reasons.
Essentially, gallery editing is a long and difficult process and this is evident from the many gallery editors who are often found beavering away on the site during the small hours. As volunteers, it takes considerable dedication and they're doing an incredible job of making sure that the gallery is well organised with great photos of lots of species from all over the UK. Please help to make their life as easy as possible by uploading good quality images that are labelled and categorised properly.
Thanks
Stu
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