The single most important secret of photography is:

Good Pictures tell good stories: Great pictures tell great stories.

As soon as you stop taking pictures and start telling stories with your camera, your photography will burst into life.

Snaps are only interesting to family and friends: For a picture to be interesting to the rest of the world it must tell a story.

 

How to Tell A Story

Take a look at this Visual Awareness exercise (more examples here). It’s OK, but it won’t hold your attention for long. The angle and perspective draw your eye into the picture but you soon lose interest because there’s no story here.

By simply including a glass of wine in the shot you now have a story – a wine cellar tasting – and the picture becomes much more interesting. Your eye is drawn to a strong focal point, the glass of wine, and then scans the surrounding details of bottles and perspective.

Pictures that Tell Stories capture our imagination – we feel involved – they draw us in. In other words they’re interesting.

 

Getting Straight to the point

There seems to be a story in this next picture, but what is it? The accordion player dominates the shot but somehow my eye is drawn more to the action in the centre of the picture.

Here’s a crop from the same picture. Now the story is clearly about the old lady and she is the focal point of the picture – the accordion is only a detail that adds to the atmosphere. All the photographer had to do is to zoom and crop for the story to emerge.

Think of photography as a branch of the entertainment business and yourself as a film director – creating an image that keeps an audience interested for longer than it took to snap it is the art of Good Photography!

 

Spotting a story

Here are two pictures taken moments apart with my mobile phone camera. One tells a story, the other doesn’t. I spotted the story-telling opportunity and was lucky enough to pull out my mobile phone, start up the camera, and take a couple of shots.

The phone camera has a wide angle lens and it would have been impossible to get close enough to the cat to compose the shot in camera. So I took the shot quickly and cropped it afterwards to compose for the story.

 

Frustration is good for you

It is very rare that good pictures occur just by chance in front of you and that all you have to do is to be quick enough to snap them.

I spotted this story-telling opportunity in the departure lounge of Ben Gurion airport: The silhouette of a solitary man in the left half of the picture suggested alienation and loneliness. To complete the story all I needed something in the right half suggesting happiness and fulfilment …

I pre-focussed my smartphone camera, composed the shot and waited. A happy family group, or a pair of young lovers, or a group of Orthodox Jewish people walking out of the shot to the right would have been perfect….

After forty minutes, and with the phone battery running out, no one suitable had passed by. I gave up and snapped this memento.

You win some, you loose some, but the possibility to take a Good Picture cannot be passed up easily and at least I gave it my best shot.

Frustration is good, it means that you are now thinking like a photographer, trying your best to tell a story, and not just snapping away.

 

Choose your next B.A.S.I.C step to taking good pictures:

Backgrounds, Awareness, Story, Imagination, Critique