It's good to have a variety of photos of people and activities to add a human face to enhance your information - show people what they can expect if they come to your church.
Pictures of the inside of the building are useful but be careful how and where you use them - the church is more about the people than the building no matter how pretty your church building may be!
Pictures that present an image of church life are a much better way to show what goes on, they look less stuffy and formal
Take good quality photographs preferably on a decent digital camera (anything over 3 megapixels should be fine), and make sure you process them correctly for the web - if you have a budding photographer in your congregation enlist their help!
Flash photography whilst sometimes necessary comes with problems such as red eye, un-natural skin tones, odd shadows and de-saturation of colour - avoid where possible.
Keep the style and placing of your pictures consistent in your web pages.
Remember that the pictures should be relevant to the content of the page.
Try to avoid using too many photos on a single page - if you have a large selection of photographs that you would like to use then perhaps a photo gallery is a good idea. Just chose a couple to accompany your text, you can always link to the relevant gallery section at the end of your article if people want to see more pictures.
Keep file sizes to a minimum - Resize pictures in an image editor and "save for web" before you add them to your website - do not use HTML to reduce the size of your images - using HTML to make your pictures fit may look OK but will mean that the download time of the page will be longer than it needs to be. If a page takes too long to download people will get bored very quickly and more than likely give up.
If you're sending pictures to the webmaster send them as they come off the camera rather than resizing them unless your webmaster has specified a format already - it's much easier to reduce the size of an image than it is to increase it. Also check before emailing large files - if the file sizes are too big it may be better to save them to a CD rather than sending them via email.
Whilst "Mugshots" are particularly useful for a "who's who" page they should be avoided in most other places - try to use photos that tell a story or say something about what you do. If you want to take portrait style photos here are some handy tips…
Take the pictures at the same time of day where possible.
Use the same location to give consistency.
Not against a busy background - a hedge is good because it gives texture without being too distracting.
Take a few photos of the same subject just in case!
Make it fun! - Find a way to make people relax and smile while you photograph them - you don't want the world to think you're a miserable bunch!
Make sure people know what you're doing with their photos and that they're happy for you to use them on your church website.
Using photographs of children on the Internet can be a contentious issue,
Always make sure that parents are completely happy if using pictures of children.
Keep the resolution low so pictures are difficult to enlarge
Pictures which do not show the full face are best
Do not use names or personal information with photos of children - this includes the filename of the photo and the "ALT tags"!