Another pet peeve is when pictures are submitted for the district's website, but are of un-usable quality. Our choices in that case are to tell the submitter that their pictures are no good, or spend half an hour doing magic in Photoshop to turn them into something acceptable. So, in the again impossible scenario that someone sees this before they take pictures that they might want to submit to the site,
here are some tips:
- FERPA cleared! Always, this is the top priority. Only take pictures of kids whose parents did not deny permission to take pictures. And tell us that everyone's cleared, just for our sanity.
- Set your camera to the highest resolution possible. Yes, you can fit a billion pictures on your memory card/hard drive if you set the camera to 640x480, but the higher the resolution, the better we can make the final picture look. (Our camera is set to 1600x1200 and the highest quality setting because that's as high as it will go, and we can store over 200 pictures on a cheap 512MB card.)
- Turn off the date stamp. Most of the time, we can work around it or edit it out if necessary. At best it slows us down, at worst it will make a great picture un-usable and un-fixable.
- Let us choose what to post. Give us all your pictures, then let me find the one that is the best combination of showing what's going on and making the district/you/your students look totally awesome.
- Take lots of pictures. More pictures, like higher resolution, gives us more options to choose from to make you look best. If you send us at least 20 pictures (or post them all on your site and give us a link) it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them will look good. Aim to take a variety of pictures: different distances, different angles, posed and "action" shots, flash AND no flash. If someone's posing, you can try standing and sitting, in the middle of the room and against a solid backdrop, inside and outside.
- Take good pictures. This is last, because as long as you take lots of pictures at high resolution and give us all of them, at least one of them is bound to work! If you're not sure what you're doing, you should always use the flash, always stand at least 1.5 arms-lengths away, and always take 2 pictures when people are posing for you ("whoadon'tmoveyetI'mgonnatakeonemoreokready123CHEESE"). Once you've got those ideas stuck in your head, take some time with your camera and practice taking pictures: find out how to take close-up pictures of something sitting on a table, try taking pictures of people in different lighting (classroom with no windows, classroom with windows, outside in shade, outside in sun facing the sun, outside in sun facing away from the sun, outside when it's cloudy, and any all of those with and without flash).
Edit: another important tip:
- Look at your pictures while you can still take more. After you take a handful of pictures and you're waiting for another good opportunity, click your camera over to view mode and look at the previous pictures. If you didn't capture the moment that you intended to, if they are blurry, if someone moved at the last second, if someone's hand is covering a featured item more than you thought it would, make a mental note that you need to try to capture that moment again, and then do it!
David Nielsen
Oct 7, 2008 11:43 AM
Another point: I implied this above, but please send us the original, full size picture files. It's really cool that you've got a photo program on your computer and you can crop and change colors and blur things and all, but we can do that stuff pretty well, too. We do it a lot, and usually for the purpose of posting on the web, so we've got that process down pretty good. And sometimes I end up just having to fix your 'fix', if your 'fix' isn't suitable for our purposes.