Front cover

Inside the magazine

Over the past few weeks I was part of an exciting new project that was undertaken by an online community I am a part of, and I am proud to introduce you to the product of that project, a new photography magazine we are publishing, DMU Mag.

First, let me share with you about the community itself. I’ve been on Flickr for 2.5 years now. It is not only a great photo sharing tool, it is also the greatest online worldwide community of photographers of all skill levels and experience. Millions of people login to Flickr every day, and some of us also participate in Flickr groups that are centered around various topics of interest and themes. One of the more vibrant and active communities on Flickr is a group called DeleteMe Uncensored. The premise of the group is to play an online game where submitted photos get either rejected or saved by the community through leaving feedback based on the merits of the photo (warning – feedback can be cruel, harsh and rude at times, as some of you might have noticed from reading recent comments on my photos), but that group is much more. We talk about all kinds of other things, and we even meet in real life as we travel or locally. Most importantly, anything goes there, since as the title says, the group is uncensored. In my mind that means that everybody is equal.

Second, despite all the interaction online and in person, one thing we felt was missing was seeing each other’s work in print. We wanted to take our photography to a new level and self-publish a magazine dedicated to our community and to our photography. We found a few volunteers who dedicated their time and efforts to create a magazine, and what’s more important, DMU photographers were more than happy to submit their work for publication. This is how DMU Mag was born.

In this first issue you will find an introduction and a brief history of the DMU community. We feature several members of the community (including yours truly). We are publishing a photo essay by Thomas Hawk, founder of the DMU group and one of the administrators of the group, and we feature a collection of photographs from 20+ contributors of the magazine (five of my own photos are published in the magazine), with the theme of B&W photography in mind.

The magazine is published in Palo Alto, California by MagCloud, new service for on-demand magazine publishing under the umbrella of Hewlett Packard. I have ordered several of the magazines they publish before we settled on them, and the quality of their printing is top notch.

The price of the first issue is $13.99 and it is 72 pages long, printed in color. To see more about what’s in this first issue, please visit our web-site, www.dmumag.com.

UPDATE – Thomas Hawk blogged about this here, and Ingo Meckmann also blogged about it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.