Picture requests

I was helping out at a charity event and was told that a community newspaper would like between 1 and 5 pictures to go with an article that was going to be written.

For me, getting between 1 and 5 good pictures during a four hour event wouldn’t be much of a problem or at least I didn’t think it was going to be a challenge. The guidelines were basically people having fun at the event so that is what I based the picture selection decision on after the event. Well after the event we decided to look through all the pictures (350 of them) and pick out what we thought would be the pictures that best illustrated what the event was about. It ended up we came up with 7 pictures that we figured would work. Of course, there were a lot of pictures that I liked but figured that they wouldn’t be what the paper wanted.

Now, this is where it gets interesting for us. We put a page together so that the pictures could be shared at full resolution, because trying to email them around would mean resizing them and losing the quality we figured the newspaper would want. The pictures were then sent via a link to the web page to the lady that was writing the article, as she was the one talking with the newspaper. All of this was required by the newspaper within 48 hours of the event, so we were working under a rather tight deadline which we did meet.

The good news was meeting the deadline until two days after sending off the pictures. The newspaper gets back to us and let’s us know that they wanted pictures of people facing the camera, so that the people in the pictures would recognize themselves in the paper when they saw it. Of course, this does make some sense but it would have been great to know this prior to the event so that I could have made sure I took pictures like that to meet their requests. Well, thank goodness we took lots of pictures because we were able to go back through them again and found a few more pictures that we are hoping that the newspaper will like. What was really frustrating was not having the information about what the newspaper wanted prior to the event and then hoping that we had something to fit their requests.

What I learned from this is if someone wants pictures for a newspaper they need to ensure that types of pictures they are looking for is outlined. Being able to adjust how some of the pictures were taken would have been easy before the event but you can’t move people around after the pictures have been taken and the event is over.

I do love taking pictures are events so now to see which pictures end up being used by the paper. If none of them are used I will be extremely upset but I did learn something. Take lots of pictures and try and always ensure you have people facing the camera just in case you need that type of picture.