Submit photos here

Guidelines for taking and submitting the best photos

We are very excited about your involvement in our project and it’s important to understand a few things before engaging.

Submission of photos in a .jpeg format is ideal, though we can accept .png format as well.
It is not necessary to send us large image sizes, if your photos are large please resize them before you send them (between 3-7mb per photo is fine).
Photos taken with mobile phones or touchpad devices must be quite clear in order to be submitted. Digi-binning or digi-scoping (using a mobile device in combination with optics) can be an effective way to photograph some species.
The best way to ensure photos can be used is to make sure that the focus is on the bird’s bill/talons and fish.
A second photo can sometimes be useful to identify the prey in some observations, but if you submit multiple photos from a single observation please let us know which photos go together! We don’t want to double-count some observations!
Be mindful of any modifications you make to the images before sending them in. Lightening or darkening images, cropping and sharpening are all fine so long as the quality of the image doesn’t suffer and the appearance of the bird or fish doesn’t change with modification.
Only submit photos that are in color.
The most ideal photographs are those from the head-on perspective in which your picture is the front of the bird’s beak. This allows for visual inspection of both the head and tail of the fish in their bills.

Pictures that we can use:

We can use pictures of varying quality for our diet studies – there’s no need to be a professional! That said, we do need to be able to identify the prey type in the bird’s possession. Here are some examples of pictures that we have received and satisfy our project expectations:

Photo credit (left to right, top to bottom): Seabird Oceanography Lab, Tim Kuhn, Roy Lowe, Molly Sultany, Roy Lowe, Roy Lowe, and Seabird Oceanography Lab

Pictures that we can not use:

We’re not saying your pictures aren’t beautiful, we promise, but there are some photos that we just can’t use for this project! While photos certainly don’t have to be professional-quality by any means, we do need photos to be reasonably clear, focused, and very lightly edited (if at all!). The following are examples of pictures that we would not be able to use:

Seabird Oceanography Lab researchers took the following *not* so useful photos: an out-of-focus Tufted Puffin, an overexposed Common Murre, an overedited Common Loon with its prey facing the wrong direction, and a too distant Brown Pelican.

Ethical wildlife photography guidelines

It is important that a certain level of care is taken when capturing wildlife photography. It should be a priority to minimize disturbance of both the birds you are capturing and any other wildlife that might be using the shoreline, estuary, etc.

Be aware of the habitat you are photographing – how far is a disturbance free distance?
The well being of other wildlife – that you are not photographing – should not be sacrificed in order to capture pictures.
Most bird colonies/nesting sites along the Oregon coast are on dangerous terrain and climbing or entering that terrain should be avoided all together. On that note, be aware of state or federal land guidelines when photographing at national wildlife refuges or state parks.

Thank you for your contributions to Birds with Fish!