Since many of the people viewing this gallery will be interested in photographic technique, it will be appreciated if you include some equipment details; such as the camera type, port and supplementary lens or filter details, lighting configuration and camera and lens settings. We can get some of this information out of the EXIF (if it's still in the file), but it's a lot easier if you simply tell us.

Pictures do not have to taken using equipment supplied by Cameras Underwater.

Underwater photography is the primary interest, but there is no requirement that all photographs have to be taken underwater. Good general interest photos are also welcome in moderation, especially if they are related to other photographs (dive location, resort, boat, additional scientific information, etc.).

If you want to add human interest by including a picture of yourself and a short biography, please do so.

The only claim we make upon your pictures is that we may point links to them, e.g., as an example of the results obtained using particular equipment. The copyright remains yours, and all enquiries about using the pictures will be forwarded to you.

If you would like us to crop, adjust, or resize the images for presentation, please say so. If cropping or adjustment goes against your artistic intentions, please say so.

If you are happy to edit your own images, here are some guidelines:

Advisory maximum width is 550 pixels in landscape format to fit on a normal web page. If you exceed 720 pixels significantly, your picture may have to be resized.

Advisory maximum height in portrait format is also 550 pixels. The most popular computer screen resolution is 1024 x 768, and so, although there is no practical limit on picture height, about 720 pixels is a sensible limit.

Use RGB JPEG compression at about 50% quality. Less than 40% quality is not good enough. Greater than 60% quality and the files become too large. About 40-70KB is a sensible size.

Do not use GIF or PNG format. The restricted tonal rendering is not appropriate for full-colour photographs.

The files have to work on a Unix server. Please try to use ISO9660 filenames, i.e., filenames having only the characters a-z (upper or lower case) 0-9 - (hyphen or minus) and _ (underscore). There should be no spaces in a filename, use underscore _ instead.

Copyright Issues:
I have been asked if I can prevent people from saving or copying the images appearing in the Gallery. Here are my thoughts on the subject:

As far as I am aware, the only way to stop someone copying a picture is not to send it to them. I can include a Javascript to disable the right-click / 'save picture as' function; but it won't work in all browsers, and when it does work it will only stop users who don't know how trivial it is to get around this restriction. If the image can appear on the monitor screen, it can be saved to disk - that's all there is to it.

I am inclined to the view that 550x550 pixels max. is too small to be useful for anything much besides web presentation and school homework assignments. I have also only ever had problems with product pictures, which appear from time to time on other commercial websites, and when I discover such abuses I contact the persons responsible and ask them to desist (we keep production provenance for commercial pictures to facilitate proof of origin). For other pictures, I just get courteous requests for permission to use them. I usually just ask for links or acknowledgements, and perhaps a courtesy copy if it is a book, but there's no reason why others can't ask a sensible fee. Any bona-fide commercial organisation which prints pictures without getting proper permission is taking a huge risk, and incidences of deliberate abuse are rare in my experience (accidents - misfiling of pictures with 'copyright owned by the company' material is another story however).

My recommendation: If you're worried that 550x550 max is too big to give away free for non-commercial use, go for a smaller size, say 270x270 (two-column format). I have standardised at 550 because it prints at a decent size on A4 paper at 72dpi. The print quality is very poor at that resolution, but it's good enough for a book or magazine editor to consider. Images for high-quality printing are usually submitted in 300dpi generic CMYK format, and that's probably what you will be asked for if someone really wants to use one of your pictures.

DWK August 2006.