Certainly, Bruce, we'd be delighted to share your story and pictures. Sounds like a very neat trip. In fact, if you'd care to send me the material when you have it ready, I'd like to look it over and see if there might be enough there to make a stand-alone full-length article in The Lowdown.
Everyone: Members are always welcome to write for the club publication. There's no elaborate author's guide or style manual to follow. Just use as clear language as possible to write out what you did, why you did it, where you got parts or supplies if applicable, and tell about anything and everything that caught your attention and kept up your interest in the project or journey or event you're writing about. Don't worry about formatting text in a fancy word processor. Don't even bother with double-spacing if you're submitting text electronically.
Any way of getting text to us as a file attachment to email is plenty good, or for shorter pieces, just simply write it in the body of the email; we'll handle the details of formatting during the normal magazine production process.
If you want to suggest layout ideas, or have specific captions and/or labels within photographs, it's helpful to sketch out your ideas on a copy of the applicable images--but be sure to include the original image too, or a minimally processed copy, so we can work with images containing plenty of resolution and minimal compression artifacts.
We can work with most any image formats, so don't sweat the details. But if you can follow these pointers, it will speed up the work and produce better outcomes:
* For plain line drawings and graphs, avoid JPG files during any parts of creation, scanning, or editing! For origination and editing, plain BMP files are best, and for final transmission GIF is recommended, with TIFF or PNG also good choices.
* Photographs should be submitted in JPG or PNG in the highest quality compression setting possible, with the fewest possible generations of edits and saves. Avoid GIF if possible.
* Photos don't need to be full-size as taken by your camera, but if you shrink them, keeping them at least 720 or more pixels wide will help.
* Finally, if you collect all your images into a PDF file before sending, be sure to convert or export to PDF at the highest possible quality setting.
Thanks.
John