Enough of that already...
Types of photos you can take:
- Pictures just for yourself - take 'em any way you want (in good taste, of course)
- Pictures for the kids - the kids love to have prints of themselves and of themselves with friends. Watch your time and budget, all together they'll easily want a hundred different prints each month. Even at Costco, that's over $20 and many hours of time.
- Pictures for use in Estado 29 ministries - We keep an date-sorted and tagged archive of photos that people have taken over the years (presently at 8500 pictures taking up 9 GBytes). These are regularly searched for photos used in brochures, web sites, email announcements, awards and whatever other fun purpose we can think up.
Since we are always looking for just the right photo of a particular kid, we appreciate those who donate their photos for this purpose. Please send them on a CD in their highest-resolution form, unsorted and with their original numeric name. Please label the CD with your name and the exact date(s) the photos were taken. If you are including photos from multiple months, please put each set in a separate sub-directory on the CD. We generally don't use low-resolution photos since they can't be enlarged enough for most uses.
Tips for good pictures:
The kids:
- Ask permission first. Many times a child is either shy or not in the mood.
- Look for kids who might like the personal attention that you and your camera will give them. Many of them love this attention, but will never mug for the camera to attract your attention.
- At the same time, limit your time on those who are always in front of the camera. You'll quickly learn who the little starletts are.
- If they start hamming for the camera, put the camera away for awhile. Watch for kids that are not hamming. They'll give you the best pictures.
- Know that if you're taking photos of them, they'd like (and may expect) that you'll bring them some prints on your next visit. They love this and will form a mob around you hoping you'll have pictures of them.
- Pictures of kids can't be posed or scripted. The picture just sort of takes itself. Practice lets you get more of these. The picture of Cristina and Lupita at right is one of my favorites. They were quietly sitting at the Vivero and I was walking by, not really paying attention to them. Lupita called to me to take their picture, so I smiled, took just one picture of them and continued on.
The picture:
- Hold the camera at the eye-level of your subject. Don't aim the camera down at a kid because then their head is tilted back looking up at you and the background is mostly the ground around the child. Kneel down to their height.
- Watch the background. An uncluttered or out-of-focus background is best. Kids tend to pose right against the nearest wall or car. With a smile, ask them to take a step away from the background (so their shadow doesn't cast a sharp outline around their head) or direct them to a better background. With a digital camera you can take a couple pictures of them against their first choice of background and then move them to a better spot.
- See a couple of exceptions to the rules at right. Ugly backgrounds, camera aimed down at the kids, etc.; but whatever, the pictures aren't bad:
- Watch the tops of heads. They should be included in the photograph with the bottom of the head. Leave room around the edges for cropping. It's real hard to add the part of a picture that was missed when the button was pushed.
- Take multiple photos of the exact same subject. Many times a great picture is ruined by being out of focus, or an eye-blink or someone looking away, etc. Simply taking several shots of any scene helps ensure that one of them will be good.
- Simple format. Large group photos are rarely needed. Close-in photos of one to four people are most appealing and most often used.
The camera:
- Use a digital camera if you want to share photos inexpensively. Thousands of photos at Estado 29 have been taken on film but most are stuck in binders and boxes and rarely ever seen. Digital photos can be collected and sorted and cross-indexed... they are the ones that get used.
- Invest in a bigger memory card for your camera. High-quality photos are around 1M byte each. Most cameras come with just a 32M card which will only hold 32 photos. With a 256M byte card, you can take 256 pictures before downloading them. The card is reusable, of course, and cheaper than the equivalent ten rolls of film and processing.
Camera settings:
If you'd like to share your pictures for our archive, please use the following suggestions:
- Use the maximum resolution your camera supports. At low resolution, in group photos faces turn into flesh-colored dots. At high resolution, you can see individual smiles in the same group. We often want to use just a portion of your picture, but if it's short on pixels, we have to find another photo :( .
- Use the minimum compression. Compression is how cameras cram as many bytes as possible into as little space as possible. Compression changes those smiling faces into flesh-colored blobs.
- High-quality photos will each be at least 1M byte.
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Set the time and date in your camera so that it is recorded in the
picture file (but absolutely not printed in the corner of the picture
please :) All digital cameras can do this. This helps with
sorting photos into time order so that a slide-show doesn't jump around
too much.- Set the photographer's name in your camera, if supported. That helps keep track of who took which photos. Many cameras don't support this though.
Ask for help if you aren't sure how to get these settings.