Your SOTM
Someone Once Told Me needs you – and your photographs
You can email mario[at]sotmario[dot]com to arrange for me to visit you. If you're out of London, then you can still get in touch but I would need to make sure there are enough people willing to pose to make a trip out to you worthwhile. Bear in mind that I have been to Bangor and Paris just to take SOTM photographs - but the numbers I got made those trips well worth their time and expense. And I did meet some lovely people and had lots of fun too, of course.
Otherwise, you can submit your own SOTM pictures here, along with a brief accompanying note. So long as they’re in good taste, they’ll be posted up on the site.
If you do, be aware that your email will be saved on to the SOTM database and you will then receive monthly updates from this site - the same applies if you submit a comment. However, your email will not be passed on elsewhere.
The better quality the image, the better it will look. If you can turn it black and white then so much the better, but colour submissions are fine (they’ll be turned into B&W).
On a technical note, they must be a minimum of 750px by 499px landscape, or 360px by 514px portrait, but they really should be bigger than that - please always take your shots in Large format. Having said that, if you're having difficulties uploading your images, then reduce them to around 2000px and try turning them to Grayscale, as that will reduce the file size greatly. Always save the files as Maximum quality.
Artistically, take a look at the pictures on the site, and get a feel for what SOTM is all about.
Firstly, and above all things, make sure the quote is legible – it’s a good idea to go over the letters twice to make them bolder, and ideally use a thick black marker pen on the largest sheet of paper you can find. Also make sure that wherever the subject is stood, their SOTM can be read.
Apart from that, just try to make the picture look interesting. Experiment with locations, angles, shutter speeds and anything else you can think of. If a person wants to be photographed in a certain place, perhaps somewhere relevant to their SOTM, then do your best to carry that out, and explain in your accompanying note.
Although a touch of Photoshop is acceptable (shading and contrast, etc) your images must essentially be a photograph of a ‘real’ composition, and that of someone who has a message displayed that is something someone once told them – not something they’ve made up themselves.
As for the background note, write a brief message using some or all of the following criteria: who told you that quote/what happened when the picture was taken/why that location/what effect did your SOTM have on you. Please always say where the picture was taken.
But – if you want to take part, and don’t have any photographic expertise or a fancy camera, just get someone to hold up a sheet of paper with their SOTM, and take the shot. The important thing is that you take part.
Send in Your SOTM
Use this form to mail in SOTM photos.
Terms and conditions
By sending in your submission and/or allowing your image to be captured you grant the Someone Once Told Me website (www.someoneoncetoldme.com) a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including storing it on Someone Once Told Me servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed, including, without limitation, published books.
If you are a photographer submitting an image of a third party i.e. a subject to be pictured in a SOTM image, then you must ensure the third party is aware of the purpose of their image being captured and that they are granting the aforementioned rights to the Someone Once Told Me website. They should also be directed by you, the photographer, to this legal notice for further clarification.
If you do not wish to grant Someone Once Told Me these rights, it is suggested that you do not submit information to this website or allow your image to be captured. Someone Once Told Me reserves the right to select, edit and arrange submissions, and to remove information from the Someone Once Told Me website at any time at its sole discretion, as well as monitor, edit and amend any message boards or other kind of communication made available on the site.
Images from this site are subject to Creative Commons licencing.
