Content: This is what we are including (the list may well expand in due course) - Images of food, about food, and around food - and drink. Images of homes, interiors, domestic motifs, gardens, families and family life. Modern inspiring images, clean, fresh and enticing.

Quality: Our basic requirement is for 48MB 300dpi files, unsharpened. These can be scanned from transparency or generated digitally and saved as high quality jpegs (compression 10 in Photoshop), in AdobeRGB.

Digital Images: We prefer images from a digital slr with at least 6MP. Some other good quality cameras are acceptable - please check with us. Files from these cameras can be interpolated up to our required 48MB using Genuine Fractals or Photoshop CS using 'bicubic smoother' interpolation. Please retouch out any dust marks or imperfections using the clone tool in Photoshop CS and again save as high quality jpegs. Adobe Lightroom is also very useful and can be used to catalogue, keyword and make most corrections needed to digital images.

Scanned images: 645, 6x6, or 6x7 images or larger can be successfully scanned on a superior flatbed scanner - we recommend the Epson Perfection V750 Pro or the similar Epson V700. Good quality 35mm images are also acceptable but should ideally be scanned in a dedicated film scanner capable of 4000dpi or greater. The Nikon scanners are excellent. Our favourite scanner software is Vuescan by Ed Hamrick for Mac or PC. Colour management is very easy in this software and it is widely acknowledged by professionals that it produces the best scans from most scanners. Scanned images need to be carefully cleaned of dust and scratches at 100%.  This is best done using the healing tool in Adobe Photoshop - Please use Photoshop 7 or later as the colour management prior to version 7 was very confusing. 

Model and property releases: These are preferred for any images showing people or property as without them sales will be limited to some lower paying editorial uses where they may not be required. We can supply the forms as PDFs. And obviously you must own the copyright in the photographs! If you have a model or property release for an image please note this in the instructions field of the image data.

Keywords and captions:  These are crucial - enabling your images to be found!   We like Microsoft Expression (formerly iView) as a general image browser in which you can do all your cataloguing and keywording and captioning.  Make sure the data is embedded before submitting the images to us. Or if you have Lightroom (see above) you can do you your captioning and keywording there. Please ask if you have any problems with any of this  - we are happy to offer any advice and will be producing info sheets.

Other info: In addition to captions and keywords, please fill in the 'Source' field with your name, so we know who to send the money to, and also fill in the 'copyright' field, and the 'author'  field with your postal address.

Contract: Our photographers contract is based on the standard contract used in the UK and as recommended by BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries & Agencies). This will be forwarded to you on request