for those that gave good advice, thank you, I think I will just enter
in a photo contest...
Kelly, I viewed your originals on pbase. You may not want to hear this, but I wouldn't recommend entering them in a photo contest. As you know, what makes these photos notable is the CONTENT -- not the PHOTOGRAPHY. You were out with kicking-around equipment, saw something amazing, and worked with what you had to grab some shots and record the moment.
The moment is notable; your effort is notable; the photos, AS PHOTOS, are not really. Photo contest judges won't care about how lousy your shooting conditions are and how skilled or fortunate you were to walk away with anything at all. They won't be impressed with how well you maximized a lens that didn't have enough reach for the subject. They'll be comparing your images based on the kind of criteria that riddell (I think) pointed out -- sharpness, composition, clarity of the subject -- and the better competition in photo contests will blow your images away in THOSE categories. Unless you find a very specialized, vertical-interest photo contest that would value your unique subject matter over any photographic criteria, which is possible but would take some research.
The trick here is to figure out what venues measure submissions in a manner that's most favorable to what you have. Ornithology-related journals are not a bad idea. Given the smallish subject, you might have a better chance at screen display than print. Online journals? Google some likely terms, such as
"bald eagle"
"trumpeter swan"
predatory migratory birds
... and you'll find a handful of possibilities -- scientific journals, government studies, library collections. Probably not a lot of revenue-generating prospects, but you never know.
Another possible venue is one of your local television stations or a local newspaper's online edition. You have a subject of local interest in these photos. Not all of them pay for reader/viewer submissions, but one of them might.
The trouble is, these aren't amazing photos; they're average photos of an amazing subject. Sorry to say that, but you know it too. That's not a criticism of you; your shooting conditions weren't a big help, and I think you did a good job under those conditions. But advertisers and magazines really don't care how difficult the shooting conditions were or give you "sympathy points" for not being able to afford better gear; they care about getting an image that's usable for their purpose, which means it needs to meet fairly stringent criteria for sharpness and resolution among other things. So you'd need to find an outlet that values your amazing subject and doesn't care that the photos themselves are average.
People have made plenty of money (or at least generated plenty of revenue) from average or even mediocre photos of historic events; e.g., the WTC attack, the Iwo Jima flag-raising, the Kennedy assassination. You have an event that has less mass interest, but the market may be out there. If you research your subject thoroughly and target the key players in that vertical interest, you might have a shot at a decent sale.
I do agree with the others who recommended removing your images from pbase, for the same reasons they stated: Exclusivity and potential copyright infringement. And registering your images with the Library of Congress would indeed make it easier for you to demonstrate ownership if you were ever to take action on a copyright infringement case.
Edit: You might maximize the potential of this image series by compositing the interesting parts of all the photos together (e.g., a sequence in a grid). That way it would be one image that has the impact of all 6-7 of them combined, and the size of the subject (relative to the frame) wouldn't detract as much.
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