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 (see Step 2). 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? My eye is drawn more to the action in the center of the picture than the dominant accordion player.
Here’s a crop from the same picture. Now the story is clear – it’s a celebration of the old lady – the accordion is only a detail that adds to the atmosphere.
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!
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 seated man, 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 group of Orthodox Jewish people or a happy family walking towards the camera would have been perfect.
After forty minutes, and with the 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.