Digital Photos in Railpace Magazine

Railpace Magazine announced in the Jan. 2005 issue they will start excepting digital submissions for publication. They also kicked off a new column dedicted to digital photography. To show what can be done with digital, they have a two page "centerfold" of a CSX empty coal train in the Fall climbing Alleghany Grade. You can almost make out bug splats on the front of the engine.

Where would we have to email our pictures to be published?

According to this months column there is more to this then sending a JPG file. The column introduces digital to Railpace. It talks about color seperation used in printing and conversion from digital. Also talks about digital photo resolution and types of digital photo file formats. Being new to digital photography I thought JPG was the only digital photo format. I learned from the column that there are other formats.
I suggest picking up a copy and reading the column on pg. 21
Next months column will go into what is neccessary for submiting a photo.

Ok thanks. I know i have this months Railpace somewhere around my house i just have to find it.

Railpace won't be accepting digital photos by email, only sent in on disc with a description over postal mail. The other type of digital file the magazine was talking about was RAW, these are uncompressed files for the pictures that can help create a better image and don't lose quality each time they are opened like a JPEG. These files are much larger than JPEGs, on my cam a JPEG is 1-2mb while a RAW file is about 14mb, so it can be an issue with memory cards filling up fast. Most digital cameras out there will give you an option on the type of file you wish to shoot.
Hope this can help

Correct info. Note that if you burn a CD with your JPG files and use that, they don't lose quality since the read-only CD files don't change.

There's some misinformation here. JPEG files (or any other type of file, for that matter) do not deteriorate in quality each time they are opened. JPEG quality does decline when the files are opened and re-saved. This is because JPEG is a compressed format that essentially throws away data in order to make a smaller file. The result is, every time you edit and re-save the file in JPEG format, more data gets discarded. RAW and TIFF are uncompressed formats and do not lose any quality when saved.

To add further to what MikeF said, any serious photo editing software will allow you to select the degree of compression when re-saving a file in JPG format. This option takes various forms depending on the software, but it tends to be a "slider" that lets you select a range, such as [largest file]...[smallest file] or [least compression]...[most compression]. It may vary with the software, but the least compression (or largest file) option should result in little or no additional compression beyond that already done by the camera when the photo was saved.

Even so, it is always a good idea to carefully save the original files from your camera and to make no changes to those files. That leaves your source safe with maximum resolution and minimum compression. Any changes you make (such as shrinking [resampling] or cropping) should be saved using save as to avoid replacing the source file. Later, if you want to make some other change to the image, re-open the original file, edit it, and save another copy. In this way, all of your edited files are just one generation from the original.