STOP PRESS update: Cameracraft issue 1, Q4 2012, will mail out on Tuesday September 11th. Subscriptions placed by the end of Sunday 9th will be included in the mailout. Subscriptions placed after this date may be mailed before September 14th if possible, but the week after that is photokina – and we will be unable to mail out between September 15th and 21st.
One year ago we took the difficult decision to end the publication of Photoworld, though Photoclubalpha continues as an active and well supported site. Thank you for visitng here to see our news posts, reviews of equipment and forum.
I’ve been missing making magazines with true editorial freedom for some time. So, a new quarterly – like Photoworld in quality, starting out with 44 pages and no advertising – is about to appear. The name is Cameracraft, harking back to the West Coast American title (written as two words) which was published in the first half of the 20th century.
Cameracraft is an international magazine. Gary Friedman in Los Angeles is our US Associate Editor with a regular feature article. We’re looking for work of international interest, we have a small open picture gallery in each issue, and we are printing portfolios in classic style as an 8-page central section on heavier silk paper.
The first issue is scheduled for mailing before September 14th and has now gone to press. We will have a subscriber card, we plan a passworded private forum, and we offer optional magazine binders (fitting three years each). We plan to develop exclusive benefits for our readers in future. The subscriber card will be issued late 2012 and sent out with Issue 2 in December, once we’ve worked out a good way to ensure the right cards go to the right people…
Please take a look at the subscription page here:
http://www.iconpublications.com/cameracraft
On this page you will find a link to a downloadable PDF application form if you are interesting in subscribing and prefer not to use the Paypal payment method. At present the 3-year, 12-issue Cordex bookshelf binder is only offered on the webpage, but the address carrier sheet for the first issue has a form on the reverse for ordering. We expect to ship the binders mid to late October.
I hope you can join me on this new journey. It started over 30 years ago, in 1980, when Minolta Camera Co. of Osaka asked us to run the Minolta Club of Great Britain and upgrade their Photoworld magazine to a high quality colour title which became known as Minolta Image. When Minolta merged with Konica, we changed the name back. After Sony took over the camera brand, they asked us to stop publishing but didn’t offer to refund thousands of club members, so of course, we kept going independently. In Summer 2011 we printed the last copy of Photoworld.
At the time, we promised our remaining readers an Alpha Annual in 2012. For many reasons that has not been possible, and a return to publishing a magazine in quarterly form for a like-minded group of readers proves a more flexible offering. We do have Alpha content, of course, but from now on we can balance this. We’ve had comments along the lines that a 44-page magazine is too slim for a quarterly. Photoworld/Image was 36 pages, and in the last year or two, only 28. I have counted the editorial pages in magazines with 76 or 84 overall and find that most only have 44 (or so) with all the rest being advertising. We think it’s good value and if the readership grows we will take it as far as the printing and postage costs allow.
Best wishes –
David Kilpatrick
Publisher and Editor, Icon Publications Ltd and Photoclubalpha
