Photography Guidelines
Before uploading a photo, please check to see if there's already one similar to it
on the site. The aim is to get a broad selection of photos of as many different beaches as
possible - we don't want a hundred identikit picture postcard images of the most popular.
If we get too many similar photos of the same beach, then they'll simply be rejected.
Ideally, we want photos that illustrate the beach - photos that will give other people an idea of what to expect if they've
never been to the beach themselves. That means primarily photos of the beach itself, plus things that you can see
on and around the beach - boats, wildlife, promenade scenes, etc.
Please be considerate of other people when taking photographs. Although a beach is a public place and you
are perfectly entitled to take photographs there, for practical reasons you should avoid taking
photographs of people without their knowledge and permission unless they merely form part of
the backdrop to an image. In particular, please follow these rules:
- Close-up shots of identifiable individuals or a group of indentifiable individuals
(eg, a family building sand castles, or a person sunbathing) must be of people
personally known to you, such as your family or friends, or those who have explicitly given their permission
to be photographed. Please do not take close-up photographs of strangers without asking first.
- Long distance shots of individuals, such as a surfer or someone in the distance walking a dog, are fine.
- Crowd scenes, such as a group watching a Punch and Judy show or an overview of sunbathers on a beach, are OK.
- Please be particularly sensitive when taking photographs of people in more extreme states of undress. Beaches
are, of course, places where people often wear little, and in some cases no, clothing, but equally people are often more inclined
to feel that their privacy has been violated if photographed in such situations. As a rule of thumb, the
fewer clothes a person is wearing the more cautious you should be about taking photographs. BritishBeaches.uk
will not publish photographs that appear to be an invasion of privacy or to have been taken with the intent
of voyeurism.
Submission Guidelines
We also ask that you make sure that your photos meet a few basic requirements for submission to the website.
- Make sure that your photo is correctly oriented, with the sky at the top! It's surprising how many we get that have to be rejected because the photo is
on its side, or even upside down.
- Don't overdo it with Photoshop. Basic tweaks to a photo (eg, getting the colour balance right) are fine, but don't use any visible effects.
- If you must include a watermark, keep it discreet. A small watermark advertising your website is OK, provided that it consists
of nothing more than a single, small line of text at the bottom of the image. Anything larger, or that obscures the main subject of the photo, will be rejected.
- Don't add any border to the photo.
- If you're submitting an old photo scanned from a print or slide, crop it so that there is no border.
- Don't submit old photos scanned from books. Apart from the risk of infringing copyright, images that are scans of anything other than a flat print will look awful.