Preparing your Site photographs for upload
From Mindat
To upload photographs to mindat.org you need to be a registered user of the site.
- Site photographs are photographs taken in the field at a collecting locality. They can include photographs of outcrops, quarries, headframes, mine dumps, underground workings, etc. If you are dealing with a photograph of a boulder in situ or outcrops illustrating some geological feature, you should include the photographs here, rather than as a mineral specimen. You can also include historical photographs, maps, etc. if you have the permission of the copyright holder.
- Underground photographs. If you are taking photographs underground, you should be sure to have permission if this is on a guided trip (flash photography can temporarily blind someone and you are in a relatively dangerous environment) and inform others around you before using a flash. You should never go underground if you are not experienced in this type of exploration and you should have the permission of the landowner.
Taking good-quality photographs It's important to make sure any photographs you take are of a good quality. While you do not need to be an expert photographer there are certain things you must make sure of:
- Subject brightness/colour balance are correct. Some photos are too dark/too bright or the colours are wrong. If there is a dark area in the photograph, you can use an image processing technique such as flash fill to increase the contrast in this area. You may need to take several photos at different settings on your camera, or alternatively use image-processing software such as Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com), Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) or Paint Shop Pro (http://www.paintshoppro.com) to adjust your photo after taking (but beware of over-processing - do the minimum needed to correct the photo).
- Resize your image to a sensible size. The suggested size in pixels for photos on mindat.org is with a horizontal width of between 500 and 800 pixels. Any more than this is discouraged. The 'standard' size on many digital cameras is 640x480 which in most cases is sufficient. You may prefer to take a larger photo and crop out the area more suitable to a smaller size. Use a jpeg format file for your photograph (.jpg file type).
