WINDHOEK. When I posted ”the best photo I was able to dig up from our project archives”  the other day (see below), a friend replied with a ton of great tips on getting better indoor shots - check it out. NGO workshops like these are so common - bland conference rooms, tedious staff-meeting vibes, stuck in stackable chairs talking about doing things, miles away from things getting done - that our USAID donors in Vietnam had a general boycott: DO NOT SEND US MORE PHOTOS OF MEETINGS WE DO NOT WANT TO LOOK AT THEM EVER OUR EYES. But still, NGOs want to take pictures of our meetings. We’re proud of them. For lots of our managers and office staff, that’s all the job ever is.

I’ve learned a few tricks to make workshops come off better: Throw open curtains, get up in people’s faces. But what do you do when the organizations you’re working with capture a moment you like, if only the lighting were a bit more professional? Below is the shot I had, above is how I’ve used it to open a section in our report. The sneaky communications guy says: Converting listless photos to monochrome or duotone like this - whether they’re from an indoor meeting, or the day was grey, or there was ugly trash cluttering them up, or anything - almost always makes them look sort of like … that’s exactly how you wanted them.