Got a great Gulf Coast photo? We want to see it.
You may have noticed the site is text-forward right now. That’s on purpose — we’d rather ship clean typography than ship duds. Tourism-board “sugar white sand” stock photography would actively undo the voice we’ve been building. But we’re now ready to start filling in the visuals, and we’re doing it the same way we do the writing: real, specific, and properly attributed.
This post is the call.
What we’re looking for
The kind of photo that makes someone scrolling stop. Specifically:
- Gulf-front sunset that doesn’t look like every other gulf-front sunset
- The Perdido Pass at golden hour with boats coming in
- The Bama from above (drone — but only if flown legally; see below)
- Working charter dock at 3 p.m. — fish coming off the boats
- The interior of a real Gulf Coast restaurant before service
- Locals at the Sandbar on a Sunday (with everyone consenting)
- Hurricane sky — the lead-in or the recovery
- Winter on the Key (the locals’ version, nobody on the sand)
- Sea turtle tracks at sunrise (without disturbing the nest)
- Vintage signage, neon, vernacular architecture
Specific over generic. Real moment over staged. The thing your friend back home would actually want to see.
Who can submit
Three audiences, three deals:
- Readers with a great photo from the Key. Submit it. We credit you.
- Photographers (hobbyist or pro) who want a byline + linked credit page in exchange for non-exclusive license. Standard barter-for-byline. Two-year web rights, you keep the copyright, you can revoke specific images later.
- Venues and operators with press photos of your own place. Send your kit. We credit “Photo courtesy of [venue]” and link.
If you’re a working pro with paid-license terms, we’re open to that too — limited regional digital license is the typical structure, day rate negotiable.
What we’re never going to accept
- AI-generated images of real places. Locals would spot the wrong sand mouse in three seconds. We’ve written about this elsewhere — it’s an immediate trust failure.
- Generic stock-feel images that could be any beach
- Watermarked-corner shots
- Screenshots of someone else’s Instagram
- Anything where you don’t hold the rights or don’t have consent of identifiable people
About drones
The FL side has Class D airspace overlap from NAS Pensacola. Gulf Islands National Seashore is restricted. A lot of beautiful aerial work in this area gets flown semi-legally and we’re not going to publish that. If you submit drone work, tell us how it was flown — Part 107 credentials, LAANC authorization, hobbyist flight outside controlled zones. We will check.
What we built behind this
This post is part of an explicit infrastructure rollout:
/submit/photo/— the form, with proper licensing terms/submit/photo/terms/— plain-English terms (modeled after Go To Bermuda’s UGC terms)/credits/— every image we use, who took it, where it came from, license. Single source of truth.- A credits database in the site so attribution never gets lost across rebuilds
The first credits already on the page are public-domain sources we’re actively mining: Carol M. Highsmith’s Library of Congress archive (architectural and vernacular work, gorgeous, free), the NPS Gulf Islands media library, USFWS Perdido Key beach mouse imagery, DVIDS Blue Angels photographers (with the required DoD non-endorsement disclaimer). And Wikimedia Commons for what it’s worth.
We’ll be mining federal public domain hard. We’ll be filing for press access at Gulf Shores | Orange Beach Tourism and Visit Pensacola partner libraries. We’ll be reaching out to local pros for barter relationships. The community side — readers and venues and contest entries — is the part that needs you.
Quarterly contest, coming
We’ll run a quarterly OG Gulf Coast Photo Contest starting later this year. $250 prize per quarter (gift card to a Gulf Coast spot). Branded hashtag #PerdidoKeyOG. Winners + finalists licensed perpetually for editorial use, with prominent credit. Smithsonian and Audubon contest rules templates are the public models — we’ll be transparent about ours.
If you’d rather not wait for the contest, the submit form is open now.
— Kathy