Academic Photography Brief: put yourself in the picture
SOAS relies heavily on photographs for its printed and online presence. We use images to
tell the world what we do and the impact we have. Every department, institute and centre
has its own research pages on the website and these can be brought to life by good images.
This supports our student recruitment, profile raising and public engagement activities.
Photos with the potential to tell powerful stories are those of academic colleagues in the field
carrying out their research. This simple guide is to help you take the best photos you can,
with the equipment you have.
Top Tips
1. Take pictures in the field
2. Include images of you and your subjects and/or students either in conversation or
engaged in an activity together. A team shot of people lined up in front of a building
smiling directly at the camera doesn’t tell the story.
3. In some cases a posed shot doesn’t tell the story either. If you do want to have a
photo of one or a couple of people use a documentary approach to catch them in
action.
The detail bit
1. Take both portrait and landscape images, even if it is of the same picture. This gives
different options for use in print and online.
2. Smartphones have excellent cameras these days but make sure they are set to take
high resolution images as low resolution images cannot be used in print.
3. All images must be labelled with both subject and if portrait and featuring head shots
the names of the participants.
4. Ensure you have permissions from those included in the shot especially if you are
going to capture them verbal should be fine
What next?
Send your images and a brief description of the project to [email protected]. Include, as
far as possible:
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Names and roles of the main subjects in the pictures,
Name of the photographer
Name and department of the researcher
Date and location.
Sending your files
If your images are too big to send via email (typically 20mb for most systems) you can send
images using Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer.com, Mailbigfile.com, or any other free
FTP service which you can usually send up to 1GB, i.e. a whole folder of high res images
and then some, if you need to.
Example of photos
Dr Lucy Durán plays the jidunu (water drum) with women of Golobladji, Mali
Robtel Neajai Pailey presenting her book Gbagba to children in Liberia
Justin Watkins interview with MRTV
Paul Webley exploring language landscapes project
Hettie Elgood in British Museum with students
Lukas Nickel with terracotta warriors in China