When I'm freelancing an article for some magazine, they usually like to see a few digital images along with my article on the theme. If it's some wild pheasant I saw coming out of the bush, the article really has no impact without a few chosen digital shots! Even when I use to investigate special risk claims in my previous career, the camera was always my companion. I never leave the house without a camera. You never know when the occasion will present itself for a perfect shoot of something, that you can use to make money.
That being said, the beauty of digital images, is that they can be reduced in size and easily uploaded to the magazine editor without losing to much of its resolution, or you can insert the image with your text into a word document and email the article.
When I go to the trouble of creating a Word document for an article of some kind, I like my document to be visually attractive to the eye, so that the reader keeps reading. One way to do this is with digital images. I might write my article and half-way into the article, insert a few chosen images.
While you probably know how to do this already, here's a few tricks I'm sure you didn't know. For example, an image, although is rectangle, doesn't have to be rectangle in a document. It can be anything from rectangle, round, arrow, jigsaw etc., and here's how you do it.
Open your word processor and from the drawing toolbar, choose a shape from the Autoshapes List. Drag that shape into your document. Resize it as you wish and save it. You don't want to accidently delete it as you work. Next, right-click it and choose in the menu Format> Autoshape / Colors and Lines tab and click on the arrow beside the Fill color box. Then choose Fill Effects, Picture Tab, Select picture and select an image to use.
Next, click Insert andcheck the Lock picture aspect ratio checkbox, and disable the Rotate fill effect with shape 'checkbox', then click 'OK' twice. Voila, you now have an image in your chosen shape.
What you want to do now is, remove the outline from the shape. To do this, right click the outline and choose Format> Autoshape, Clors and Lines tab, and set the line color value to 'No Line'. If you want to wrap some text around the image or shape, click the shape, click the Text wrapping button on the picture toolbar, and then set the text wrapping to 'square' or 'tight'.
There you have it, your editor or reader will be impressed!
