Overview
Submitting Photographs
Publication Photo Use
Tips for Non-Professionals

Overview

Photographs play a powerful role in NAEYC publications. Each photo must be technically excellent and convey an important message about the care and education of children from infancy through age 8. Young Children and Teaching Young Children use color photographs only; our other publications feature color and black-and-white images. To see the types of photos used, photographers can review past issues of Young Children and Teaching Young Children as well as recent books, brochures, posters, and NAEYC’s websites.

Young Children is the Association’s peer-reviewed, practitioner-oriented journal. It features engaging articles about the early childhood profession’s best practices. Teaching Young Children, NAEYC’s magazine for preschool educators, provides practical, research-based, developmentally appropriate tips and strategies teachers can put to use immediately in their classrooms. NAEYC also publishes an extensive line of books, posters, brochures, and other resources. NAEYC’s digital content department oversees the NAEYC website, NAEYC’s For Families website, and other digital programs.

Submitting Photographs

Format: NAEYC accepts high-resolution images on CDs, DVDs, or flash drives in JPEG, TIF, EPS, or other standard formats. Digital submissions will not be returned to the photographer. If you have not submitted images to NAEYC before, please keep your submission to fewer than 100 photos.

Model releases: Photographers must have and keep model releases for all recognizable people in each photo (signed by all the adults who appear in the photo and by the parents or legal guardians of all the children photographed). Photographers must provide a sample copy of their model release.

Photo license:  Photographers must sign a Photograph License Agreement. This agreement verifies that you own the photos and that you have the proper model releases for everyone appearing in the photos. It allows NAEYC to use your photos in print and digital formats, and it verifies that we will pay you. An agreement must be completed and submitted to NAEYC every time you submit photos.

Publication Photo Use

Credit: The photographer is credited and retains copyright for each photo published. By submitting photos to NAEYC, photographers assign to NAEYC the right to use the photos in current and subsequent printings of the publication in which they appear, whether in print or digital format. Payment for photos published in the journal, magazine, or books includes any subsequent use, including online and digital use.

Published work: When photos are published in Young Children or Teaching Young Children, photographers receive a copy of the issue featuring their work. For other publications, photographers receive tearsheets of the pages on which their photos appear. NAEYC will forward to photographers requests from other publications to use their photos. Submitting copyrighted images to NAEYC does not preclude photographers from publishing the same images elsewhere.

Please email NAEYC’s editorial office for further information: editorial@naeyc.org.

Tips for Non-Professionals

• Use a 5 megapixel digital camera or better and use the highest quality setting when you shoot.
• Use natural light. Raise shades or open curtains as necessary.
• Try to be unobtrusive and allow the children and adults to forget that you are there.
• Take photos at the children’s level.
• Catch the children and adults in action, not posing.
• Focus on the people in the foreground.
• Take many photos but expect only a few to be just right.
• Clothing should not have any logos, cartoons or video characters, inappropriate sayings, or designs that date a photo.