Dear photographers of OBC Image,
This is Ho-Fai Cheung from Hong Kong Birdwatching Society. In short I like to use your photos on OBC image for publishing a book for charitable purpose (all profit goes to charity). In return, I will send you a complimentary copy for each photo used in the book.
If you agree to this, there is no need to send your photographs (I can download from OBC image). Send a reply email to give me your address (so that I can send the complimentary copy).
I realized that many emails are probably not active. So please help to spread the word to your photography friends.
Here are information on me and the book that we are going to produce.
I am Ho-Fai Cheung (Honorary member, former Chairmen of Hong Kong Birdwatcahing Society, website
http://www.hkbws.org.hk/web/eng/index_eng.htm). HKBWS is a partner of Birdlife International, and is actively promoting bird watching in mainland China.
"A Field Guide to the Birds of China" by Mackinnon et al has been around for over 10 years. It is very popular among birdwatchers in China, but the Authors do not intend to publish a revised edition. The aim of the current publication is to revised bird identification and bird watching information in China. The plan is to publish a series of 20 booklets on birds of China. The first 4 booklets will be (1) Pheasants, (2) Ducks, (3) Egrets and Seabirds, and (4) Hawks and Falcons. Our writing plan is very ambitious. We will include recent distribution map, calls, description of all subspecies, and suggested watching sites. 8-10 photos will be selected for each species, and that is why we need your help. It will be bilingual, Chinese and English side by side. It is a huge job, and for that I took an early retirement. The whole editorial team including me work as volunteers (no paid other than complimentary copy).
I can assure you that this production will be very high quality, and will be on sale at low price to recover the printing cost (US$8.2 per booklet, size 12 x 18 cm and about 300 pages, about 500 photos). After cost recovery, free electronic copy will be available on the web. We will continue to sell if people still want a printed copy, and profit will go to Bird Watching Societies in China. If OBC is willing to help the sale, they can share the profit too.
The only thing that may disappoint you is that most of the prints will be quite small (about 5 x 5 cm) since the size of each booklets is only about 12 x 18 cm (about 300 pages). For each species there will be one larger photo. We choose to do this because this can cut down the printing cost, and use less paper. The book will fit into a pocket quite comfortable.
Please email me if there is any question. Thank you for your attention.
HF Cheung
Note to web master: I have sent the above message to photographers of OBC Image through email to request to use their photos. This post will help me prove what I said on email. I hope I am allowed to leave this post here for a while. Thank you.
[
Last edited by HFCheung at 23/09/2014 15:35 ]
