About The Sun

About The Sun
 
Editor: William Hatfield    
Advertising Director: Billy Kirk
 
The Walton Sun is located on the beautiful beaches of Walton County, Fla., in the panhandle of Florida.
The Sun is published every Saturday. It is a free distribution weekly with home delivery in South Walton County and the City of Destin and rack distribution throughout Walton County.
Our circulation is approximately 12,000 rack and home deliveries and an unfathomable number of online readers.
The newspaper began in May 1997.
 
Mailing address: P.O. Box 2263, Santa Rosa Beach FL 32459
Telephone: (850) 267-4555
Fax: (850) 267-0929
E-mail: News@waltonsun.com
 
PRESS RELEASES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Send to News@waltonsun.com
The Walton Sun welcomes contributions by community journalists, including photo and video submissions.
All items submitted for publication become the property of The Walton Sun and are subject to editing at our discretion.
We reserve the right to refuse publication of any item for any reason.
The author's name, telephone number and address must accompany all submissions.
Items can only be returned if a self addressed, stamped envelope attached is attached.
In submitting a item for publication, the author or photographer is attesting to the authenticity of the material and that all permissions were secured before submission. All materials must be original work and cannot contain material from other sources unless properly cited within the work itself.
All contributors grant The Walton Sun, Freedom Communications and all its subsidiaries permission to print or reprint any and all materials in any and all forms in perpetuity.
All items must be submitted at least two weeks prior to publication date.
 
PHOTOS SUBMITTED FOR PRINT PUBLICATION
Photos should be at least six inches at its smallest side and 200 dpi. Dpi stands for dots per inch. It makes up the resolution of a photo. Every picture is made up of thousands or millions of microscopic dots of color that line up to make one image. If you don't put enough dots in an inch, the photo is grainy and scratchy looking and will not reproduce nicely.
You cannot simply change the resolution to 200. The photo has to be resized to that resolution. For example, your camera may produce images at 33x22 (inches) at 72 dpi. You can resize that to an 8x6 at 200 dpi or 1600x1200 pixels, but you can't take that 33x22 and change the dpi to 200 and think you've done what you needed to do.
We can always take a larger photo and make it smaller without losing pixels, but if the photo is small to begin with and has a low resolution; it just won't reproduce in print like it does on the Web. That is why most photos on the Web cannot be used in print.
Think of it as Silly Putty. You can mash the Silly Putty into any size. You can make it small and fat or large and thin. However, if you begin to make it too large and too thin, you can start to see through it and the color is inconsistent. Same principle If your original photo is large, you can manipulate it (size it) in different ways, but if it's tiny to start out with, you can get it just so thin before it loses all its good qualities.
You need to set your camera's image setting at "fine." This will reduce the number of photos you can put on your memory card, but it will also make them print quality.
Rename your photos with something pertinent to the why you took it or the name of the person in the photograph. We work with dozens of images a week and when they all get crammed into the work flow, it is hard to know what text goes with photo 00043.jpg. If your info is about a bake sale, name your photo "bake sale."
Any photo submitted for print publication is suitable for online publication as well.
 
PHOTOS SUBMITTED FOR ONLINE PUBLICATION ONLY
Photos should be sized at 640x480 pixels.
This roughly translates to 6.5 x 8.8 inches at 72 dpi.
If you need photo editing software, there are several free ones available.
-Picasa - http://picasa.google.com - is PC based and will automatically resize your photos for the Web.
-Photoscape -http://www.photoscape.org/
-Others - can be found at downloads.com for Mac and PC.
 
SCANNING PHOTOS OR ILLUSTRATIONS
If you want to scan a photo, illustration or other document to e-mail it, the same general rules apply.
It first has to be a quality image. Xeroxed copies will not work and photos printed on a desktop printer generally will not work.
Scan it at 300 dpi at 100 percent. You will probably need to use the "custom settings" in order to get the higher resolution.
Save it at 100 percent. Do not compress the file or reduce the size. Send it as an attachment to an e-mail. Do not drop it onto a button or menu option for e-mail because many will resize it to 72 dpi so it will transmit faster.
Save it on your desktop. Create the e-mail then attach the photo by "browsing" to your desktop.
If this is Greek to you, do not despair. Call us and we will help you.
 
IN GENERAL FOR ALL PHOTOS
• Include the name of the person who took the photo. Also make sure all the information we need is included:
Who is in the photo, the date it was taken, where it was taken and why it was taken.
• If there are less than six people in the photograph, the people have to be identified by first and last name.
• If the photo is one of children, we are assuming you have obtained parental permission to send their child's photo to us for publication.
• Photos of people with their heads turned away from the camera aren't very interesting. We need to see faces.
• Fill your view finder up. In other words, get in close so that whatever you want to take a photo of fills your view finder.
• Shots of large groups will not fit in a six inch photo. Again, look through your viewfinder. If in order to get everyone in the photo they look like ants in your viewfinder that's how they will look when the photo is published. The faces will blur and be unrecognizable. Either break up the group someway and take multiple shots, or be brave enough to say, "No, we only want the most important people in this shot." If you must, you can then take additional shots of those of lesser importance.
• Generally speaking, white space is bad. White space is grass, sky, ceiling, large chunks of the photo in which there are no people or action. This goes back to "Fill your viewfinder."
• Send in only one or two of the best photos of any single event. Overwhelming us with photos does not increase your chances of having more than one photo published.
• Fuzzy photos will not be published.
• Do not embed photos in Word or text documents. We cannot always extract them.
• Photos must be sent as a separate attachment as jpg, jpeg or tiff file.
• Video and audio files are encouraged, but please, no multimedia files longer than 10 minutes.

DON'T FORGET YOU CAN ALWAYS POST YOUR VIDEO AND AUDIO TO OUR WEB SITE YOURSELF.
Just click the blue "Multimedia" button on our home page, waltonsun.com, and then click the appropriate category of submission. Follow the directions and soon the world will be seeing or hearing your news project.
We want to print and post your photos, videos, slideshows and podcasts. If you have questions or need us to walk you through some of these steps, call us and we will do our best to help you see that your information is published and looks its best.

(850) 267-4555                                     
news@waltonsun.com

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