Fund Raising Photography Tips

Written 25/10/15

Until this month I was doing the production end of Cavernoma Alliance UK's monthly e-mailshots to members turning the raw text and photos into a well crafted HTML email and I was getting frustrated by the poor quality of the photos I was getting. This left me spending time struggling to rescue them as best I could using gimp but there's really a limit to what you can do with poor photos.

So I wrote this a while ago which was included in the last few e-mailshots and I'm now posting it here because it occurs to me that it may be of use to any charity whose supporters do fund raising events.

Anyway, here it is. Feel free to use as you see fit.

Fund Raising Photography Tips

Good photographs of your fund raising can help us generate publicity, interest and more donations. They can also give other members and fundraisers ideas for their own events. Here are some hints and tips on how to get the best photographs:

  • Decide how you might take good photographs of your fund raising as part of your event planning, not as an after-thought at the event. Who will take the photographs and where and when will they be taken?
  • Ideally use a proper camera, not a mobile phone.
  • Generally speaking the higher the pixel count, the larger the photo and better quality.
  • When taking photographs use the fill-in flash facility (most cameras will work this out for you, including phone cameras).
  • Remember do not take photographs into the sun. Ideally the sun should be on the photographer's back, but it doesn't need to be directly behind.
  • When you send your photos to us, please make sure your mail software doesn't try to "helpfully" make the photos smaller to save bandwidth.

To be honest it's the first bullet point that's the key one. It was very clear from many of the photos I was seeing that this was the last thing on people's minds not the first. So someone would simply whip out their phone and take a few snaps (and I used that word deliberately).

Paul

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