Handling a curator's critique on my dig photo documentation

I spent 3 weeks photographing every layer at the Foster Creek site near Boise, but a visiting curator said my scale bars were too small to be useful in publications. She told me to switch to a 10cm black and white scale and shoot from straight overhead, which honestly felt picky at the time. Anyone else get similar feedback on their field photo setup, and did you change your whole process or just adapt for certain finds?

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the_oscar16d ago

The scale bar thing caught me off guard too when I got told the same thing. Small scales look fine on a phone screen, but once you blow that photo up for a report, they just vanish. Curators see a hundred field photos a month, so they know what prints well, even if it feels like nitpicking in the dirt. I switched to the 10cm bar for everything except tiny bone fragments where I drop to a 2cm one, but I always keep the big bar in the corner of the shot for reference. Straight overhead shots are a pain with a handheld camera, so I rigged a basic pole mount with a bubble level, and honestly, it made my whole catalog easier to read later.