posted on January 1, 2005 in People & Places | Comments are off for this article | Print

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Digital cameras make it easy to take photos—click and within seconds you can share a precious moment with friends and family half way around the planet. But the new technology—cameras, computers, scanners, camera phones—also create new concerns. Programs designed to share photographs easily via email radically shrink the digital size of images so they are no longer publishable in a print magazine.

Holding a camera at arm’s length, as we now do, instead of steady by the eye, means many photos are out of focus or jiggly.

First thing: set your camera to take images which are at the minimum 1 mb in size. 3 mb is fine. That will allow you to print an 8×11 of the image. Unless you want to turn each photo you take into a poster, you don’t need a higher setting.

Second: for about $200 you can get a camera that does a lot of things; get to know your camera. There are settings for a variety of light scenarios, including nighttime, candle, snow. There are settings for portraits, landscapes, close-ups. Play with these—it’s digital, you can look at your various experiments on the computer and see which ones worked. And, most digital cameras allow you to take a photo the old fashioned way, through a view-finder. This really is the best way to do it; it makes you focus on the shot.

Third: to go with the points above: folks are often too excited that they’re submitting a photograph, to actually think about the photograph itself. You’re honouring a person who has served your congregation for half a century. Make sure they’re in focus. Make sure they take up at least a third of the picture frame. Think about the shot—do we really need to see the floor and the table? These two elements comprise half the frame in the majority of People and Places submissions. If the floor and the table are the subject of the story, then by all means. But, if no, walk up to the person. Don’t be afraid of them. Walk right up to them and take a photo. Also, look at what’s behind them—posters, brightly coloured walls, things hanging, etc., have a way of detracting from the subject.

Fourth: Never, ever, ever use the program that came with your camera or scanner to email a photo for publication. These programs are designed to suck the digital information out of the images—they still look great on your computer screen—so a 1 mb file is reduced to 25.3 kb. If you can help it, do not use these programs to take the photos off your camera. Learn how to treat the camera as an external device and cut-and-paste images to a folder of your choice. And when emailing—which the People and Places editor prefers because it saves a few hours each month of scanning—attach the image directly from its folder to the email; the way you would a Word document.

Fifth: The Record, like many magazines, is staffed by people who are eager, hard working and stretched thin. Don’t be afraid to follow through, to make certain your submission was received.

Lastly: Remember, all submissions, each month, go through a lottery process. To date the lottery has been relatively easy since the majority of images would look muddy and generally awful on our newsprint pages for reasons expressed above. They go straight to the website. Those remaining are picked randomly—four to six in the magazine, the rest on the website only.

Coda: Have fun! Serve God!

Want to submit a photo for People and Places? Make sure to read our handy article:
How to Submit Photos in a Digital Age.