New titles for Icon photomagazines

At Icon Publications Ltd we have relaunched the Minolta Image magazine
which we have produced (originally not under our company name) since
1981 - it is now KONICA MINOLTA PHOTOWORLD, reverting to its original
1970s name plus the new company. This was relaunched with a
Spring/Summer edition in May.

In late June, we publish the first 'f2' magazine - the subhead for the
title is 'Freelance+Digital' which replaces our magazine of the last
five years, Freelance Photographer, bringing in the content of the
recent 'Master Digital Photographer' magazine. The association we
produced this for felt it had become too commercial, and was being aimed
too much at non-member subscribers. 'f2' will manage something we first
tried to do in 1996 - alienating far too many readers who were not ready
- and cover the world of digital and conventional photography for print,
exhibition, direct sale, stock agency, competitions and other typical
solo, am/pro shared interests.

Colin Dixon will continue to write our Darkroom/Fine Art section, and in
the first issue, he examines his workflow for producing sets of
exhibition and reproduction prints from negs - something he needs to do
in quantity when preparing an exhibition with press packs.

Both magazines are a market (not incredibly well-paid, but paid
nevertheless) for technical articles; a possible showcase for portfolio
work (generally not paid for f2, paid for Photoworld); and will have
websites shortly with forum facilities. I would be interested in modern
rather than purely retro darkroom articles, and in darkroom work from
new generation photographers.

These are not available through newsagents, and we maintain the position
we have since the mid-1990s of near zero print wastage (compared to 30
per cent of all UK printed magazine consigned to landfill currently, due
to the sale or return news sale system). They remain subscription only
and the circulations are relatively small. We are the only specialist
photo magazine publisher in Scotland.

The website for them at the moment remains:
http://www.freelancephotographer.co.uk/

This has brief details, a Paypal subscription system with UK, Europe and
World options, and an archive of downloadable pdf files of articles from
the predecessor titles.

David Kilpatrick FBIPP AMPA
Publisher
Kelso, Scotland