Photos are a great way to convey a story.
Putting your photos online will share that story, but before you take that picture, here are some things to consider courtesy of Communications Officer,
Scott P. of Knowle West Media Centre.
Consent Tips
- Ask yourself the question: do you need faces?
The big first question to ask yourself when taking photos is, do you need people’s faces?
If the photo is for a thumbnail or something to bolster a document, often faces are not needed. And when it comes to consent, if you are not using people’s faces, you are most likely fine (so if you do not see any other identifying feature).
However, showing people’s faces is helpful to evoke emotion, celebrate diversity and create impact. So, what should you do in that situation?
- When working with small numbers, ask everybody ahead of time.
To gain consent, you need explicit permission from those who are identifiable in the image. They also need to know where the image will be distributed and in what context.
For large numbers of people, this can be difficult to get explicit permission, but for small numbers, the easiest way to do this is by asking ahead of time and therefore, they also will not be disrupted when they see somebody taking photos in the corner of their eye!
- When working with large numbers of people, wait for a photo you know will be great to use.
At large events or scenarios where images will contain lots of people, getting explicit permission from everybody will be nigh on impossible. You can put up disclaimers to alert people of a photographer, but if you can identify a person in that photo, these disclaimers do not qualify for consent.
So, the best course of action is when you take photos at large events, wait for a photo you know you will be using – then seek permission from whoever is identifiable in that photo.
- Using a shallow depth of field to give a beautiful image, and limit issues with consent
If you are using a DSLR camera, try and use the lowest possible aperture setting, so that you only must try and gain consent from those in focus – meaning you can show the event is bustling, whilst not identifying many people in the photo.
If you are just using a phone, you can try and use portrait mode to create a similar effect!
In fact, you do not even need to get a photo of a person’s face, you can focus on somebody’s hands or an object in the foreground and use a shallow depth of field to still show a lively event behind it.
Quality Tips
- Is it lit?
At a minimum, make sure whatever your subject has a source of light on it, and not too heavy a source of light.
It is easy to look past this when it comes to the naked eye, but cameras are less forgiving! So, before you take your photo, just see if you can position yourself better to make sure the subject is exposed.
- Is it well lit?
Let us go one step further! What makes “good lighting”? Well, you can spend years learning that.
But, in one top tip, all you really need to do is look for depth.
That means, you are looking for darker and lighter spots throughout your image – so that it does not all just look “flat.”
- The Rule of Thirds
There are many, many theories, and ways to compose an image. But the most accessible one is to add a grid to your camera (you can do this in settings on phone cameras as well) and, hey presto! You have the rule of thirds, the image is split up into thirds.
Obviously, this rule goes further, but it suggests that whatever the subject of your image is, it should be on the edge of the inner square.
- Photos do not stop once you have taken them!
Finally, if you take the best photo ever taken, I guarantee it did not look like that as soon as they snapped it.
Photos can be cropped, the colour adjusted and much more to improve it – so why stop?