Picture Perfect: 6 Photo Tips
Here at Beachcombing, we love seeing all the beautiful photos of your finds, but we can’t always use them in the magazine. Here are some tips for creating photos that are fit to print.
1. Bring your camera with you to the beach. “As found” photos tell a story of your day at the beach that your “paper towel” photo can’t.
2. Don’t resize your photo or video. When you enlarge a low-resolution photo, you don’t get more detail, just bigger pixels. Set your camera to take photos at the highest quality/largest size.
3. Check your focus. Make sure the subjects of your photos—not the background—are in focus by looking at them on a computer. Blurry photos of great finds make us sad!
4. Wait for a sunny day. Nothing brings out the colors like 100% pure sunshine!
5. Pick the right background. Think about the background in your photo as much as the subject. Move things around until you find a spot that shows off the piece, offers good lighting, and provides an interesting but not distracting backdrop to your find.
6. Try different setups. Experiment with backgrounds, lighting, and focus by taking lots of photos and then selecting the one you like best.
BONUS TIP! Horizons are...horizontal! It's not always possible to hold your camera straight in the heat of a beachcombing discovery moment. However, we straighten most images so that the horizon is straight across, so be sure to leave plenty of margin so we don't lose any of the good stuff in your photo when we crop it.
Nothing makes us sadder than a great image that is the wrong size!
- Photos should be high-resolution .jpg files at least 1800×1200 pixels and at least 1 MB file size. We can't really use anything smaller than 1 MB.
- Don't use the digital zoom feature on your camera.
- Videos should be high-resolution HORIZONTAL format at least 1920×1080 pixels, or approximately 100MB file size for 30 seconds. We can't use vertical videos for anything, except to watch for fun in between laying out magazine pages.
- Email us single photos at "actual size" in your email program. If you send them at any other setting, they will be too small.
- Pro tip: Change your camera app location settings to the most precise and accurate so you know exactly where you were when you took your photo.
- See the photo and video guidelines for more info.
This article appeared in the Beachcombing Magazine May/June 2020 issue.
2 comments
Hi, Gary! Most of the people who submit their photos filter and retouch their photos to change the photo from the original, to put watermarks on, and to create an effect (vignette, desaturated, etc.) that makes it hard for use to use them. And, we edit many of the photos ourselves to make sure they print at optimal quality on a web-fed four-color press. The original file works best, but if you have a special effect you want to add, you could always send the original and the manipulated photo. Thanks! Kirsti
So why can’t you use photos that…
- Have been filtered
- Have been retouched
Magazines and newspapers do it often. A simple dehaze in Adobe Lightroom can do good things, and Vintage filter on my old Samsung S5 phone makes the subject isolate out, or ‘pop’.
