Photograph a specimen for identification

1. Clean the specimen dry with a soft brush. Do not wet it yet; you will take one wet photo at the end if the matrix is dark.

2. Set the scene: a plain mid-grey or white background (a sheet of card), daylight from a window or one lamp bounced off white card, no flash. Put the printed scale bar beside the specimen in the same plane. Put the accession number on a slip in the frame if it has one.

3. Photo one: the whole specimen from directly above, filling two-thirds of the frame, camera perpendicular to the surface. Tap to focus on the specimen, hold the phone still against something, and take three; keep the sharpest.

4. Photos two to four: the other informative faces — underside, side profile, and any broken edge that shows internal structure (chambers, bone texture, shell layers). For a tooth: labial, lingual, profile and the root. For a trilobite: dorsal, and the cephalon and pygidium close.

5. Photo five: a detail at the closest focus your phone manages, of the feature that identifies it — ornament, suture line, growth lines, cell structure — with raking light from one side at a low angle so the relief shows.

6. If the matrix is dark shale or the fossil is low contrast, wet the surface with water (not oil) and take photo one again; label it as wetted when you post it.

7. Do not edit beyond cropping and a straight exposure correction. Filters and sharpening add texture that is not there. Resize to about 2,000 pixels on the long side for a forum; keep the originals in the record.

8. Write the caption before you post: greatest dimension in millimetres, locality to county with the formation if known and “unknown” if not, and what you already think it is. Stratum's Ask the forum action assembles this from the record.

Sources

Cite this article

Stratum Study. "Photograph a specimen for identification" (How-to). Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16. https://stratum.black/study/how-to/photograph-a-specimen-for-identification. Accessed 2026-09-20.

BibTeX · CSL-JSON

@misc{stratum-photograph-a-specimen-for-identification,
  title        = {Photograph a specimen for identification},
  author       = {{Stratum Study}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/study/how-to/photograph-a-specimen-for-identification}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {How-to article, Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16; sources: stratum. Accessed 2026-09-20.}
}

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