Send in Your Photos and Reports
updated 8-31-2010

We would like the Photo Album to be where members can see what others have been doing, and a good place for new and prospective members to see some of our trips and activities. We welcome members sharing their photographs and reports about trips they participate in.

Tips for Really Good Photographs:
With the advent of digital photography many of the problems of taking good photographs have been eliminated. Rarely do you have to consider focusing, exposure is automatic, you can take many digital photos without considering the cost of film, you have face detection, red eye removal, every camera has a zoom lens, automatic color balance, and many other features. No longer do you have to wait for the film to be developed and photo printed. You can view your photo in the camera and take another shot if required. So why do many photos still look amateurish? Engineers may have solved many of the technical aspects of photography but not the artistic aspects. When this author started photography, taking a single 120 Ektachrome slide photograph cost 25 cents, or $1.60 in present day dollars. This expense resulted in one great benefit. Every shot counted. You composed carefully, focused carefully, checked exposure with a separate meter, and then took the photo. Many times with a tripod. You developed a sense for a good photograph. It appears that the simplicity of digital photography has not required present day photographers to develop that sense.

An example of a simple mistake when taking photos is timing and framing. Here are two photos of the same subject. In one the photographer did not wait until the riders were ready, and the photographer was thinking of the people in the shot, not the overall photo, so he aimed for the faces. In the second the subjects are looking at the photographer and the photo is framed. Always think of the photo as a framed picture.

Click either for larger image

To summarize in a single sentence. For a really good photograph you should pre-establish where there might be a good photograph, get in the right place at the right time, and carefully (or sometimes quickly) compose it. Here are two good links to help develop that skill. Study the web sites and see if they help your photography.

Trip Reports Wanted:
If you have any trip reports or stories that you would like to share with the membership, send them in. You do not need to formally format the reports with any photographs that might be included. Just send in the text and photographs as separate items. We will format the report with the photographs. We really would like to hear from members.

Front Page Banner Photo Sets Wanted:
We would like to give the opportunity to members of the AMC and other groups to display their best original photographs and original art work on the front page of the Narragansett Chapter web site. This will give our website a little freshness and give a free gallery for artists to show their talent. All the entries should be related to the outdoors or AMC related activities. All entries should have some artistic design or related quality that makes them a good candidate. The first set of excellent mountaineering and climbing photographs has been submitted by Brian Phillips. This article explains the procedure.

Stock Photos Wanted:
The webmaster needs a general assortment of stock photos of Club related activities to use in various places on our website. One example photos used in the online Gazette to make the newsletter a little more lively. If you have any photos of bike rides, paddles or hikes, or even social events, that you wish to donate to the stock photos that the webmaster has accumulated, please send them to the webmaster. These photos will in almost all cases be reduced to thumbnail size as seen in the online Gazette, so keep that in mind when you pick your subject matter. Also include information about the photo, such as what trip and date it was taken on.

Subject Guidelines:
In the case of photographs for the website, a few guidelines are offered. In order to make the event photos attractive, we would like photos that tell a simple story. The photos should have context with the event.A single photograph of a person not known to the general audience has no bearing on the event. Also a photo that singles out a person may not be appreciated being posted. The background in a photo tells much about the activity, as much as the subject matter itself. Several photos of this kind gives the viewer a better impression of the trip or activity.

When you take photos, horizontal photos are preferred to vertical photos. If it is a great artistic photo that frames better vertically, that's OK, but for all the rest, the horizontal photo works best on web pages. The reason..when you view the photo album and click from one photo to the next, a vertical photo requires you to scroll down to see the completed photo each time a new page comes up. This makes for a lot of unnecessary mouse work. That is why you will see almost all of my (webmaster) photos in the 640x480 pixel horizontal format.

Group Photos:
If the photographer only takes one or two photos of an event, a group shot is also welcome for the photo album. If you can stage the photo in context with the event, do so. Nice examples would be on a mountain ridge with mountains in the background. Or ocean side, but with a little of the shoreline or waves in the background. If hiking in the woods and some feature of the hike is available, eg. an old growth tree, include that in the group photo. And of course photos are best when shooting with the Sun at your back.

If you have a group photo where faces might be too small to be seen in a reduced photo, send the full size photo, I will make a dual page like done on this group photo.

Send the Best:
If you take a large selection of photos of an event, cull out the worst of the selection. If you have several of one scene, just send the best photo, not all of them. Do not send blurry photos or ones that are obviously badly over or under exposed. To ensure compatibility, file extensions should be either jpg (preferred) or png.

Recommended Size Photos:
Note that the files from your digital camera may be huge, from 500 kB to 5 mB. This size image is way too large to use on our web site. They are way too large to display on a normal size monitor screen. A typical 6 megapixel digital camera will produce, at the highest jpeg resolution, a 2.5 megabyte photo. The ideal photos should be at least 640x480 pixels and about 50 -150 kB is size. Larger is OK, and that way I can crop the photos if necessary. When they get over 500 kB each, I would like them reduced in size. I will not accept images that are less than 640x480 pixel in size. Whatever size they are, they will be reduced to 640x480 pixels for use on the chapter website.

E-Mailing Photos:
If you are going to email your photos to the webmaster, try to reduce the the size of the photos before sending them. Contact the webmaster that you have photos, and since you will not be able to attach photos to the form, I will send you a reply with a proper email address. If you email your photos in a zipped format, note that my ISP does not allow attached files greater than 20 megabytes. If you have large photos and do not know how to reduce the digital images, or do not have the software, there are many free programs on the Internet that are easy to use. Here are my recommendations. Keep on reading for more solutions.

How to Send in Large Photos:
If your photos are too large to email to the webmaster or you do not have the means or time to reduce the size of photos, there are two alternatives. One alternative for images taken directly from a digital camera, is to copy them to a CD (referred to as burning), and mail the CD to the webmaster at the below address. Do not worry about fancy packaging.. I use 9"x12" manila mailing envelopes folded twice over the CD with two regular stamps. I can also scan negatives, slides and printed photos (up to 8"x10") for you, if that is what you have. Please include a self addressed return envelope if you want me to send them back, or we can arrange for the negatives, slides, or print photos to be returned in person at some activity.

FTP uploading:
Another option for transmitting large photos is to 'ftp' the photos to our “photobin” directory. This is my preferred way of handling photos going on the web site. This method works best if you have broadband (ie. cable, DSL, or fiber) internet access. “Photobin” is a temporary directory/folder that will be used to hold photos that are pending installation on the web site. This directory/folder can also be used to upload large text files or stories for inclusion on the web site. You can even 'ftp' whole folders to the the Photobin. Contact the webmaster for the username and password if you want to use this method of contributing photos to our site. I still have to download the photos from the “photobin” directory to edit them and integrate them into the web site. So if you have megabytes of photos, try to resize them, or cull them, so that I do not have to deal with more than 60 megabytes or so. If you do not know how to use an 'ftp' program, I have included directions on how to use several free ftp programs, depending on how computer literate you are. The most popular free ftp program is FileZilla. There are versions for Windows, Apple and Linux operating systems. Another less complicated program is DeluxeFTP, and a "so simple it's stupid" program is WhizFTP. Both are for Windows computers only. Another method using the IE6 or 8 browser is similar to WhizFTP. If you have a Apple Mac you might want to try Classic FTP for Mac for OS X version 10.5 or newer. Take your pick, or try all. If you have problems, contact the webmaster.

Social Photo Web Sites:
Some members have photos that they have uploaded to one or more of the social photo sharing web sites. This includes flickr, photobucket, kodakgallery, snapfish, picasa, yahoo, webshots, various blogs, and many... many more. My feelings on having members uploading photos to their sites, and then asking me to pick a bunch for the Chapter web site are, ...it is not going to happen. If the photographer has the time, and takes the effort to upload photos to their photo sharing site, and also wants to share their photos with the Chapter, they should donate a little time to help the webmaster, and upload them to the Chapter web site or email them to me. Some photo sites allow bulk or batch (ie zip) downloads. For that I will make an exception, because I don't have to pick and download photos one by one. I can easily batch download them to the photobin site.

I want to control how photos go on our site to preserve the presentation style, conformity, uniformity, and navigability that has been set up for our web site. I will not link our web site to someone's social photo sharing site for trip photos.

Exceptions to this are YouTube videos which can be easily linked to our site. I have looked at several options for putting video on our site, and technically this seems to be the easiest way to handle short videos. An example on how they will be handled is seen on the sea kayaking page. So if anyone wants to start experimenting with video clips, let me know.

Send to:
Michael Krabach
747 Nate Whipple Hwy
Cumberland, RI, 02864-3354.