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I had been trying to sell photographs for years—at least enough of them to offset my hobby expenses. I bombarded magazine editors with single shots of babies, pretty girls, scenes, accidents, animals and otherwise—all, I thought, cleverly captioned and a sure sale. It was like throwing so many boomerangs—they all came back to me.

I never left the house without my camera. I became an ambulance chaser. The sound of a police siren was a signal for me to drop everything and run, and a red glow in the night sky would wrench me away from a party so suddenly the guests would think I had performed a magical disappearing act.

I sold a few accident pictures to newspapers at an average price of $2 each. A lawyer bought a series of auto wreck pictures to use as court evidence. I won a few honorable mentions in photo exhibits at the county and state fairs. I kept a group of salon prints going the rounds, and once in awhile one would be hung. But my largest acquisition during those years of honest endeavor was a photo file that bulged at the seams. The money I received wouldn't pay interest on the amount I had invested in photographic paper and film.

I USED to spend hours studying and comparing those returned photos. I knew that they were as good as many that the editors published. I had a fine camera, a good enlarger, and my darkroom technique was better than the average. Well-known photographers had praised my work for composition and story-telling value.

Then why wouldn't my photos sell? Just what was I doing that was wrong, or where was my shortcoming?

The first inkling of an answer came to me one day while I was leafing through magazines in the library. As usual, I was studying each picture and comparing it with my own. And as usual, the comparison was favorable. Then why ...?

Suddenly a thought struck me. For the next two hours I leafed feverishly through more than twenty magazines. I kept track of each picture, and made up my mind in each case why the editor I had used it. Every photo in most magazines and all but a few in the others were linked in some way with an article—were used to illustrate, clarify, or explain a printed idea. The value of the picture in the magazine was to supplement, not replace, the author's printed words.

Yet for years I had been sending out pictures with a brief caption only, hoping that the picture was good enough to establish a mood, would make whoever saw it giggle, cry, laugh or grow gloomy, according to the subject matter of the print. I had been trying to make my picture tell the whole story, not supplement anything I might say.

I BEGAN to wonder if I had been wrongly interpreting the words "story-telling value" as they apply to photographs. I recalled great photographs of the past, pictures widely noted for their story-telling value, and tried to visualize just what the pictures would mean without the proper background.

I thought of that photo of six marines planting our flag atop that battle-scarred Iwo Jima hill. What would that picture have meant to me if I had not known there was a war going on—that the island was being invaded? I had been "conditioned" to appreciate the storytelling value of that picture for many months before it appeared. Without this background, it would have been just a picture of six marines planting a flag—nothing more.

I dug into my own experience. I had a picture in my files which I had titled "Late Summer." It had won honorable mention at the state fair, but had been rejected by every editor who had seen it. It was a picture of a rose, drooping slightly and with some of its petals gone. As an abstract idea to signify the end of summer it was all right. But magazines don't like abstract ideas.

I began to think about that picture. I remembered the difficulty I had had in singling it out among other roses that were still radiant and beautiful. I had had to blow up a small portion of the negative to exclude the healthy flowers.

Then suddenly I had an inspiration, and though I did not realize it at the time, my trek around the mountain had begun. I went home and made another enlargement from the negative, this time including the healthy roses along with the wilted bloom. I went to the greenhouse where I had taken the picture, showed the print to the horticulturist in charge, and asked him why that single rose had faded while the others remained brilliant and alive.

He was slightly startled at first. "When did you take this picture?" he demanded.

"Last year," I said.

A look of relief swept the man's face. "Oh! I thought maybe you'd taken it just recently. That flower was killed by a parasite that burrows into the rosebud. Last year we had a lot of them, but I hadn't noticed any this season."

The man told me about the parasite, how to recognize its presence, and how to get rid of it. I asked his permission to write up this information and send it to an editor. He agreed, and even promised to check the finished article. I sent the information along with the new picture and the older close-up picture to the editor of a garden magazine. In three weeks, I received a very nice check!

I DUG again into my files, and came up with a dozen pictures of the plant where I worked. I had titled the series "Story of Industry," and had given each photo a dramatic caption. I studied the series for some definite story that could be told about it. No soap! Smokestacks, shiny wheels, dripping oil, and men with dirty faces don't tell a coherent story of industry—not, at least, the type of story I had seen in industrial magazines.

I began mentally to take the factory apart—looking for stories within a story. I thought of the finishing department, a place where old furniture is rejuvenated and made to look like new. I made a dozen photos of the department, showing each operation in detail. I captioned each photo with a complete description of the process and the materials used. The photo story sold first time out to an industrial finishing magazine.

I was well along on my trek around the mountain now. I was learning fast. I was selling pictures and something more. I was gathering and selling information that made the pictures valuable to the magazine in which they were published. Readers could get more than an abstract idea or impression from my work. They were getting good, down-to-earth usable information.

I SOLD that short article with the two flower pictures six years ago. More than 2,000 of my pictures and some 400 articles have been published since that time. At first, the writing part of the job was hard for me. Most of my articles, when they appeared, had been completely rewritten. But I was giving the editors illustrated information that they could not afford to pass up. They were willing to correct my copy in order to pass the information on to their readers.

My writing grew gradually smoother, and as it did so, the magazines with larger circulation began accepting my work. I feel today that I have completely circumvented the mountain and am back where I started. Gathering the information and writing it up has become a second nature. I am able to concentrate more and more on the excellence of my pictures for a specific purpose.

I still send baby pictures to editors, but I make sure the picture illustrates a new way of putting on diapers, or of fastening the baby safely in his crib. In my category, pretty girls are limited to service as "props" for a flower garden, a nicely decorated room, or to recline in the lawn chair that I describe how to make in the article. Scenics are "out" except for a short travel article.

There is a market for straight "mood" shots—for pictures that tell the whole story. But it is very limited. For every "mood" shot used, editors publish a hundred that supplement printed information. I'm going to leave the "mood" photography to the more artistically-minded salon exhibitors, and to those who take more pride in an honorable mention certificate than in a check.