Photos for Retire to Ajijic, what to shoot and how big
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Photos for Retire to Ajijic, what to shoot and how big
Twenty-two photographs worth taking, eight diagrams you don't have to touch, and the size rules that decide whether a shot is usable.
Photos for Retire to Ajijic
I read all ten chapters looking for places where a photograph does a job that words handle badly. Fifty-seven candidates came back. Most did not survive.
What's left is below, in three groups: the photographs worth your time, the diagrams I build so you don't have to, and a short list I'm recommending against with the reason.
One thing that shapes everything here. Most of these aren't scenery. They're objects and documents: a rooftop water tank, an ATM screen, a bank bill, a permit sticker. Those are the shots that genuinely can't be replaced by a sentence, because a reader from Denver has never seen a tinaco and cannot picture one.
The size rules, first
Print is the demanding one. Kindle needs far less. If you shoot to the print standard, everything works everywhere, so that's what these numbers are.
| What you're shooting | Minimum pixels | Comfortable |
|---|---|---|
| Any photo, long side | 2,000 px | 3,000 px or more |
| Full-page image (portrait) | 1,500 x 2,400 px | 2,400 x 3,600 px |
| Full-width image (landscape) | 2,000 x 1,335 px | 3,000 x 2,000 px |
| Document or object close-up | 3,000 px long side | as large as the camera goes |
Documents get the biggest requirement because they always end up cropped hard. You photograph a whole CFE bill, then the book uses one corner of it.
Your phone already clears all of this comfortably. A recent iPhone shoots about 4,032 x 3,024, which is roughly double the minimum. So the resolution isn't the thing that will bite you. These three are:
- Never save a photo out of Facebook or WhatsApp. Both recompress images badly. A photo that looked fine on your screen can land at 800 px and be unusable. Always go back to the original file.
- Never screenshot a photo. Same problem, worse.
- Don't crop hard in your phone and then send me the crop. Send the original and let me crop, because I can only work with the pixels you give me.
Two technical settings, once: keep your camera on JPEG or HEIC at full resolution, and if anything asks about color space, sRGB. Kindle doesn't support CMYK or transparency, so nothing exotic.
Before you shoot anything: the color decision
Your paperback is still an open decision in the metadata worksheet, and it changes the photo plan more than anything else here.
A color interior on a book this long costs dramatically more per copy to print than grayscale, which pushes your list price up or your royalty down. Most nonfiction guides like this print grayscale inside and save color for the cover.
So the honest question is: will these photos be seen in gray? If yes, shoot for contrast and shape rather than color. A photo of a bougainvillea-covered wall is gorgeous in color and mush in grayscale. A black tinaco against a bright sky reads perfectly either way.
The Kindle edition shows color regardless, so nothing is wasted. It just changes what makes a good shot.
Group 1: photographs worth taking
Priority 1 is the list I'd shoot first if you only had one afternoon.
Priority 1, the ones that carry real weight
| # | Chapter | The shot | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | A rooftop tinaco, close, showing the inlet pipe and overflow tube | The single most unfamiliar object in the whole book. No North American reader can picture one. |
| 2 | 5 | A pipa water truck filling a house cistern from the street | Shows the backup water system as a real, routine thing rather than an emergency. |
| 3 | 6 | The gasero propane truck with the hose run up to a rooftop tank | Nothing in a US or Canadian home works like this. |
| 4 | 2 | A Mexican ATM screen showing the "charge in dollars?" prompt | The reader will face this exact screen and must decline it. Costs 3 to 8 percent if they don't. |
| 5 | 5 | A CFE electric bill held in one hand, logo and peso amount visible | The book tells buyers to demand six months of these. Most have never seen one. |
| 6 | 7 | A Farmacias Similares storefront with the Consultorio sign visible next door | The consultorio is the most useful practical concept for new arrivals. A photo proves it's an ordinary everyday thing. |
| 7 | 8 | A tope on a cobblestone street, showing height and lack of paint | A genuine hazard that costs people suspension work. Hard to convey in words. |
| 8 | 3 | The Chapala INM office exterior at Calle Hidalgo 271, street number visible | Readers have to physically find this building. |
| 9 | 1 | The Wednesday tianguis, wide, morning light, stalls and shoppers | The density and social role of the market is the thing outsiders most underestimate. |
| 10 | 1 | The plaza with the San Andrés church tower, benches, ordinary activity | The civic anchor of the town, at true scale. |
| 11 | 0 | You, natural light, on a recognizable Ajijic street or a terrace over the lake | The whole book rests on you actually living there. This is the proof. |
| 12 | 7 | Estradiol gel boxes (Estreva, Sandrena) next to a US patch box | The gel-versus-patch difference is the most practically important fact for a woman on HRT moving here. |
Priority 2, take them if you're passing anyway
| # | Chapter | The shot | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13 | 1 | The Lake Chapala Society entrance with the sign visible | Readers need to recognize it on arrival. |
| 14 | 6 | A CFE meter on an exterior wall, blue and white logo visible | Everyday touchpoint, easy to miss if you don't know the look. |
| 15 | 4 | A TIP sticker on a windshield, Banjercito hologram visible | Drivers must display it and worry about getting it wrong. |
| 16 | 4 | A Menaje de Casa certificate, all personal details blurred | Demystifies the document and helps spot a real one. |
| 17 | 1 | Cobblestone paving, close, showing uneven stones and shadow | Corrects the assumption of smooth walkable sidewalks. Matters for mobility. |
| 18 | 1 | A Centro street during heavy rain, water pooling | The rainy season reality the prose understates. |
| 19 | 8 | An off-strip fonda at 2pm, full tables, comal going | Proves the tourist-strip versus local-restaurant distinction visually. |
| 20 | 6 | A Starlink dish on a typical Ajijic roof | Shows what a real line-of-sight install looks like here. |
| 21 | 5 | An ejido or propiedad comunal boundary sign on a plot | Shows buyers the visual cue to look for. |
| 22 | 4 | A free-roaming street dog in an ordinary street scene | Arriving pet owners consistently fail to picture this. |
On the ones with people in them
Numbers 9, 10 and 19 have strangers in frame. Shooting wide in a public market or plaza is normal and fine, but keep faces incidental rather than the subject, and don't photograph anyone who is clearly the subject of the shot without asking. If you want to be safe, shoot early when the market is setting up.
Group 2: diagrams, which you don't touch
Eight of the strongest candidates aren't photographs at all. They're diagrams, and I build them. Listing them so you know they're handled and don't go trying to photograph a flowchart.
| Chapter | What I'll build |
|---|---|
| 0 | "Which reader are you" routing graphic, three lanes by timeline, pointing to starting chapters |
| 2 | Three-account money flow: home bank, currency bridge, peso account |
| 2 | The four-step document sequence: certified original, apostille, translation, present |
| 3 | Visa decision flowchart: tourist permit, temporary, permanent, by reader situation |
| 3 | Temporary-to-permanent timeline across the four years, with the marriage shortcut branch |
| 5 | Labeled map of the Lakeside corridor, Chapala through Jocotepec, with the carretera |
| 7 | The three stacked healthcare systems, and how an expat moves between them |
| 8 | The fiesta year as a circle, twelve months, the major festivals marked |
The Chapter 5 corridor map is the one I need to check licensing on before building, since map data usually carries terms. I'll sort that and tell you if it becomes a real cost.
Group 3: what I'm recommending against
Five candidates came back that I think you should skip, and I'd rather say why than quietly drop them.
Inside a care home, with residents visible. Suggested twice, for the eldercare sections. Photographing residents of an assisted-living or memory-care facility means photographing people who often cannot meaningfully consent, and publishing it commercially. Not worth it, at any quality of shot. If those sections need an image, an empty common room or a garden with nobody in it does the job.
A caregiver assisting an elderly person. Same problem, plus it puts a real person's health situation in a book for sale.
A volunteer tutoring a child. Children, consent, and a photo release you don't want to be chasing.
A bank branch with a warning overlay. The suggestion was to photograph a specific named bank and mark it with a red warning graphic. That's the visual version of a named negative claim, which is a hard rail on this project for good reason. The prose can carry the caution. A photograph carrying it invites a letter.
Unredacted forms. The permit and CURP samples are good ideas, but only with every personal field genuinely blanked, not lightly blurred. Blur gets reversed. If you photograph your own documents, I'll black the fields out properly before anything ships.
The practical version
If you want one instruction rather than a list: walk from your house to the plaza on a Wednesday morning with your phone, and shoot numbers 1, 7, 9, 10, 13 and 17 on the way. That's six of the twelve priority shots in one walk, and the market ones only work on a Wednesday.
The documents (4, 5, 12, 15, 16) you can do at home any time, in daylight near a window, flat on a table, camera parallel to the surface rather than at an angle.
Send them however's easiest. I'll size, crop, convert, and place them.
Published to Annette's hub. Rebuilt from the source markdown, so edit the source and rerun rather than editing this page.