Capturing good photos is all about timing, focus and letting kids be themselves 🙂
As our work with youth becomes ever more connected to outcomes and funding, it is important to think about how best to showcase what it is we do with kids and why it’s important. Photos are indeed worth a thousand words- if they are the right photos! Recently as we were trying to pull together information for our end of year reports, it became clear that there are some challenges to getting good photos. Here are five things that DON’T work very well:
- Photos taken at greater than 5 or 6 feet. Big group shots are needed sometimes, but most times for documentation photos you don’t want to be 10 or 15 feet away from your subjects. It becomes hard to tell what is going on and when reproduced in reports, the photos are often only about 2 inches square.
- Photos pasted onto PowerPoint slides or into a PDF with graphics and text. Once you alter the photo and put it into a program like this, we can’t extract the picture to use in a report. And again, the photo might be reproduced much smaller than the original.
- Photos with fancy filters. Instagram and your cell phone’s camera settings might look cool on Facebook, but sepia tones or “vintage look” photos are not good for corporate reports that get sent to funding agencies.
- Blurry, out of focus or distorted photos. This seems obvious, but we get a lot of these!
- Cell phone pics with less than 10 megapixel resolution. Most smart phones now are taking pretty good photos, and when emailed (not uploaded or texted) the photos maintain quality. But if you have an older phone or you know it doesn’t take great pictures, please use a regular camera.
Here are some examples of things that DO work really well, and we want to see more of!
- Close up action shots, with 4-H logos! 4-H is Learn by Doing- kids should be doing something in the photos!
- Hi-resolution .jpeg or .gif files emailed to us. For big batches, you can send to our .gmail account- 4hleaders AT gmail.com.
- Bright, clear photos where the action is featured and is obvious what is going on.
Hope this helps you all get some good photos this year. Also, share these tips with your photography club members or youth officers, so when they are in charge of getting the pictures, they can be successful.
Some of our favorite shots from the past few years:
This is great example of why we need photos in their “raw” state. This one can be cropped to draw us in closer to the boy getting a ribbon, but if part of another file, this photo would be unusable.
The aprons are a nice touch in these cooking club shots, and kids are busy doing things. And again, we can crop this one to make it really stand out when printed smaller.
Bright, clear colors, and 4-H logos. The kids are not perfectly posed, making this a great action shot.
A photo of youth taking photos! Brilliant! Bright colors and angle is nice.
Though they are not wearing 4-H gear, this is a great example of an action shot with just a few youth.
Military 4-H Pacific 