In 2005 I bought a book by John Shaw called, The Business of Nature Photography.  I was in the early stage of starting my photography business, so looking for some help.

In John's book he covered having articles published in photo magazines.  It outlined how to set up a query letter to send to a magazine editor.  I copied exactly how John described the setup of a query letter and sent it off to the editor (Rob Sheppard) of my favorite photo magazine, Outdoor Photographer.

I named the title of the article, described what it was about, and how it would benefit the magazine's readers.

It only took a few weeks when I got a letter in the mail from Rob saying they might be interested but not at this time.  I took that as a nice way of saying, sorry not interested.

A few months went by, and I got another letter, this time from the associate editor saying they needed the article for the June 2006 issue, I was in shock, they wanted my article!

Now, a little background on my education.  Through my 12 years of school, I did just enough to pass each grade, and in my English classes I was lucky to pull Ds.  If I ever got a C in a class my parents were very proud of me, lol. It wasn't that I couldn't have done better, just didn't care to do better, basically a slacker, so happy when school finally ended.

If you have followed my blog over 18 years you know I am not a good writer, I know nothing about nouns, verbs, or any of the other parts of proper sentence structure.

I have just been accepted to write an article for a major photo magazine and I have no idea what I'm doing, if only the editor knew.

I knew what I wanted to say in the article but now I had to put it into words.  I felt I could pull it off mainly because my wife was a teacher, and I knew she would help me set up the article.  

I wrote the article (all excited) and turned it over to my wife to read. She looked at it and said, you don't have any paragraphs, which I responded with, what's a paragraph?

Hard to believe that I would agree to write an article for Outdoor Photographer Magazine when I have never ever written an article in my life, but I thought I can do this!

My wife helped me, and I sent off the article with images to the associate editor and waited for a reply.  I had not heard anything for a few weeks and got nervous that maybe they didn't think it was good enough to publish.  So, I sent an email off and asked if everything was alright, and they replied everything looked fine. 

What a relief!!

I don't remember the title I came up with, but they changed it to "Variation on a Theme" which was about shooting leaf images in many different ways. They also made some changes in the opening paragraph, which was fine with me, it made me sound more intelligent. 

You can imagine how excited I was when that issue showed up in my mailbox.  I called every single person I knew to let them know I was a publish nature photographer.

That first success gave me confidence to send off more articles to other magazines and was fortunate to have many more articles published.

It's been a few years since I've had any new articles published, as I don't really like writing, so gave up on that part of my business, but it was fun while it lasted.

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