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How to Make a Photo Essay: 5 Tips for Impactful Results

19 Jun

The post How to Make a Photo Essay: 5 Tips for Impactful Results appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Christina N Dickson.

Want to tell meaningful stories with your photos? That’s what a photo essay is all about: conveying concepts and narratives through a series of carefully chosen images.

While telling a story with photos can be a daunting task, there are several easy tips and techniques you can use in your photo essays to create striking, stunning, eye-opening results.

And that’s what I’m going to share in this article: five photo essay tips that you can immediately apply to your photography. You’ll leave as a better photo essayist than when you arrived!

Let’s get started.

What is a photo essay?

A photo essay is a collection of images placed in a specific order to convey certain emotions, specific concepts, or a progression of events.

In other words:

The photo essay tells stories just like a normal piece of writing, except with images instead of words. (Here, I’m using the term “story” loosely; as mentioned above, photo essays can encapsulate emotions or concepts in addition to traditional, time-based narratives.)

Plenty of world-class photojournalists use photo essays, including Lauren Greenfield, James Nachtwey, and Joachim Ladefoged. But the photo essay format isn’t exclusive to professionals, and photo essays don’t need to cover dramatic events such as wars, natural disasters, and social issues. Whether you are a complete beginner, a hobbyist, or a professional, the photo essay is a great way to bring your images to life, tell relevant stories about your own surroundings, and touch your family, friends, and coworkers.

So without further ado, let’s look at five easy tips to take your photo essays to the next level, starting with:

1. Find a topic you care about

Every good photo essay should start with an idea.

Otherwise, you’ll be shooting without a purpose – and while such an approach may eventually lead to an interesting series of photos, it’s far, far easier to begin with a topic and only then take out your camera.

As I emphasized above, a photo essay can be about anything. You don’t need to fixate on “classic” photo essay themes, such as war and poverty. Instead, you might focus on local issues that matter to you (think of problems plaguing your community). You can also think about interesting stories worth telling, even if they don’t have an activism angle.

For instance, is there an area undergoing major development? Try documenting the work from start to finish. Is there a particular park or nature area you love? Create a series of images that communicate its beauty.

One key item to remember:

Photo essays are most powerful when you, as the photographer, care about the subject. Whether you choose to document something major and public, like an environmental crisis, or whether you choose to document something small and intimate, like the first month of a newborn in the family, make sure you focus on a topic that matters to you.

Otherwise, you’ll struggle to finish the essay – and even if you do successfully complete it, viewers will likely notice your lack of passion.

2. Do your research

The best photo essays involve some real work. Don’t just walk around and shoot with abandon; instead, try to understand your subject.

That way, you can capture a more authentic series of photos.

For instance, if you document a newborn’s first month, spend time with the family. Discover who the parents are, what culture they are from, and their parenting philosophy.

If you cover the process of a school’s drama production, talk with the teachers, actors, and stagehands; investigate the general interest of the student body; find out how the school is financing the production and keeping costs down.

If you photograph a birthday party, check out the theme, the decorations they plan on using, what the birthday kid hopes to get for their gifts.

If you’re passionate about your topic, the research should come easy. You should enjoy learning the backstory.

And then, when it comes time to actually shoot, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of the topic. You’ll know the key players in the story, the key ideas, and the key locations. You’ll be able to hone in on what matters and block out the flashy distractions.

Make sense?

3. Find the right angle

Once you’ve done your research, you’ll know your topic inside and out.

At which point you’ll need to ask yourself:

What is the real, authentic story I want to tell?

Every story has a hundred different angles and perspectives. And trying to share the story from every perspective is a recipe for failure.

Instead, pick a single angle and focus on it. If you’re documenting a local issue, do you want to focus on how it affects children? The physical area? The economy? If you’re documenting a newborn’s first month, do you want to focus on the interaction between the newborn and the parents? The growth of the newborn? The newborn’s emotions?

As you’ll find out during your research, even stories that seem to be completely one-sided have plenty of hidden perspectives to draw on.

So think about your story carefully. In general, I recommend you approach it from the angle you’re most passionate about (consider the previous tip!), but you’re always free to explore different perspectives.

4. Convey emotion

Not all photo essays must convey emotion. But the most powerful ones do.

After all, think of the stories that you know and love. Your favorite books, movies, and TV shows. Do they touch you on an emotional level?

Don’t get me wrong: Every photo essay shouldn’t cover a sappy, heartstring-tugging tale. You can always focus on conveying other emotions: anger, joy, fear, hurt, excitement.

(Of course, if your story is sappy and heartstring-tugging, that’s fine, too – just don’t force it!)

How do you convey emotions, though? There’s no one set way, but you can include photos of meaningful scenes – human interactions generally work well here! – or you can simply show emotion on the faces of your photographic subjects. Really, the best way to communicate emotions through your photos is to feel the emotions yourself; they’ll bleed over into your work for a unique result.

5. Plan your shots

Once you’ve done the research and determined the angle and emotions you’d like to convey, I recommend you sit down, take out a pen and paper, and plan your photo essay.

Should you extensively visualize each photo? Should you walk through the venue, imagining possible compositions?

Honestly, that’s up to you, and it’ll depend on how you like to work. I do recommend that beginners start out by creating a “shot list” for the essay. Here, you should describe the main subject, the narrative purpose of the image, plus any lighting or composition notes. Once you become more experienced, you can be looser in your planning, though I still recommend you at least think about the different shots you want to capture.

You can start by planning 10 shots. Each one should emphasize a different concept or emotion, but make sure to keep a consistent thread running through every composition; after all, the end goal is to create a powerful series of images that tell a story.

One final tip:

While you should stick to your plan pretty closely, at least at first, don’t ignore the potential for spontaneity. If you see a possible shot, take it! You can later evaluate whether it’s a worthwhile addition to your essay.

Photo essay tips: final words

Now that you’ve finished this article, you know all about what photo essays are, and – hopefully! – how to create a beautiful essay of your own.

Just remember: storytelling takes practice, but you don’t have to be an incredible writer to pull off a powerful photo essay. All you need is a bit of photographic technique, some creativity, and a lot of heart.

Once you start to tell stories with your photos, your portfolio will never be the same!

Now over to you:

Do you have any tips for doing photo essays? Do you have any essays you’re proud of? Share them in the comments below!

The post How to Make a Photo Essay: 5 Tips for Impactful Results appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Christina N Dickson.

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How to Use Scene Elements to Create Impactful Panoramas

13 May

The post How to Use Scene Elements to Create Impactful Panoramas appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

Close your eyes and let me take you to a scene that you have experienced before. You are standing in front of a wonderful vista. It is huge – a sunset, a mountain range, a canyon, a cityscape – and you are blown away by the grandeur of it. After admiring it for a bit you pull out your cell phone or camera to take an image. But alas, your phone cannot capture the image because it extends far out of your field of view. “Not to worry,” you think to yourself as you flip your device into panorama mode to create impactful panoramas.

A few seconds later and your newly stitched image captures the whole scene with one problem: all the things you loved about the scene have been reduced to tiny pixels making it hard to appreciate how beautiful it was out there. In my opinion, you’ve fallen victim to the “panorama trap.”

Paradoxically, wider is not always better for capturing a large vista!

Panorama, How-to, Foreground, Photography, Lessons, Northern Lights, Mountains, Cannery

This panoramic image illustrates the “Panorama Trap.” I wanted to photograph the mountains, but there is nothing compelling to draw me into the image or tell the story of that place (it happens to be the Denali Highway).

You can up your panorama photography game by carefully thinking about elements of the shot before making it. For instance, integrating close foreground elements using hyperfocal distance or switching to a longer lens can give you a more interesting shot. We’ll go through that and more in this article!

Why panoramas?

In order to capture a more interesting shot, it is useful to think about why you are using a particular technique. For instance, you might think of black and white photography for shadows and contrast, macro techniques for tiny things (although that’s a rule to be broken), and side-lighting for portrait photography. Each of these techniques or photography genres is meant to maximize the benefit and impact of the elements in the image.

So, why panoramic? Because you want to maximize and impress the viewer with grand-scale elements in the image which you cannot capture in one image alone. Using the mantra of “making a shot” and not “taking a shot” is good to keep in mind for panoramas. To make a more compelling panorama, envision what you want to accomplish and how you want the image to feel or influence your viewer before pressing the shutter button.

Some scenes are just too big for one image! This snow-covered landscape caught my attention during an afternoon of skiing. I like the framing of the trees on the left, but to my eye, this image still gets caught firmly in the panorama trap because it lacks compelling elements in the foreground.

Techniques

Integrate Close Foreground Elements using Hyperfocal Distance

Foreground elements are critical pieces to incorporate into your image to grab the viewer. Foreground elements help tell a story, give the image context, and make it more interesting to look at. Since many panoramas get taken with a mid-length (e.g., 50 mm) to ultra-wide lenses (e.g., 12mm), you must walk close enough to foreground elements to give them a presence in the image. You can maximize the impact of a foreground element by using a photography technique called hyperfocal distance.

This image was made during a recent trip to Hawaii and shot on a Nikon D810 with a 24mm Sigma Art f/1.4. The Mamane Tree in the foreground was a compelling silhouette. I am only about 10 feet from it, but HFD enabled me to keep the foreground and Milky Way sharp.

Hyperfocal distance (HFD) is not a “hyper-difficult” subject. By definition, it is the closest thing your lens can focus on while keeping the horizon at infinity. HFD is influenced by your lens focal length, by your camera’s sensor size, and by your aperture. As a rule of thumb, wider lenses have a shorter HFD than longer lenses, and the larger your sensor is, the shorter the HFD is. Creating a smaller aperture (e.g., f/16 instead of f/2.8) will also decrease the HFD.

Depending on your system and camera settings you may be able to have foreground elements 2.0 feet (0.6m) away and have all elements beyond that in focus! There are many resources to learn HFD from and to calculate it for your camera system. I recommend starting with this article to learn more. As you use HFD more, you will begin to have an intuitive sense of how far objects have to be from your camera to be in focus.

This image incorporates HFD to frame the image. The closest spruce is about 8 feet in front of me. I made the image with a Nikon D810 and a 12mm, ultra-wide lens

Hopefully, you have made the connection of why HFD will help you integrate interesting foreground elements into your panoramic image. Here’s how you can achieve intriguing panoramas in three generic steps:

find a compelling scene,
locate an interesting foreground element, and
walk to the HFD in front of the foreground element and begin shooting.

I recommend stopping your lens down to f/8, so it is at its sharpest and shooting with a panning tripod head to keep your horizon straight and level. It will make the stitch and final image cleaner. However, don’t be overwhelmed – these techniques take time and patience.

This image was made on an Olympus OMD Em5 with a 12mm lens adapted with a Metabones speed booster. The foreground silhouette tree was about 8 feet away. I got as close as HFD would allow to make it impactful in the image.

This image is not utilizing HFD, but I had to consciously know how close to stand to these spruces to give them impact in the image. I intentionally balanced their silhouette against the glow of the Northern Lights.

Now that you have learned briefly about HFD, I’m going to tell you to keep in mind that rules are made to be broken! The foreground of your image may be far more important to the telling of that story than the horizon. Having an in-focus foreground element and out-of-focus background is okay too.

The image below has many compelling elements. However, my goal was to bring you into the winter scene by ensuring the hoar-frost-covered Black Spruce in the foreground was tack-sharp.

Rules are made to be broken! In this image, I knew my background and stars were going to be out of focus. That did not matter to me because they were only accents to the foreground trees and their beauty.

Use long lenses to bring the scene to you

You may be thinking to yourself “I can’t always get closer to my subject, so what then?” Not to worry – you can make compelling panoramic images by using long lenses to bring the landscape closer to you. When using a long lens of 150mm or more, it is critical that you use a tripod with a panning head. Use a cable release to remove shake in the lens and shoot at a large aperture (e.g., f/20) to get sharp elements.

This image of Denali was made with an Olympus OMD Em5ii at 100mm. I isolated the mountain and its foothills to create a panorama full of layers, colors, and textures.

You can use a telephoto lens to isolate and photograph your favorite part of a scene. Above, I used one to isolate Denali, and below, I used it to isolate a cannery against the large mountains of the Juneau Range.

The steps for making a panoramic image with a telephoto lens are similar to using HFD. You need to:

Identify a scene,
identify which part of the scene to isolate with the telephoto, and
shoot the scene with the telephoto and cable release.

I made this image from a boat and shot it at 330mm to isolate the cannery. The effect of “compression” from the telephoto lens made the mountains feel very close to the cannery. In reality, they are over 18 miles (350km) away!

Practice makes perfect

Experimenting with HFD and long lenses is going to result in some images that you “could have done better on.” Expect to learn from your mistakes!

I’ll share an image that illustrates when my HFD distance estimating was off. I did not achieve a sharp foreground and background. However, I like how the sharp part of the image draws your eyes through the snow-covered trees. So, this image is not a total flop.

As I always say, “pixels are cheap.”

I hope you make tons of pixels while experimenting with panoramic images!

Even images that are not perfect can have qualities you like! The air glow on this night was spectacular and I like how the distant spruces are in focus drawing your eye through the tunnel of snow-covered trees.

The post How to Use Scene Elements to Create Impactful Panoramas appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

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Impactful: 12 Examples Of Crash Test Dummy Art

27 Mar

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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That’s gotta Hertz! These dozen examples of crash test dummy art & graffiti display a curious reverence for our impactful anthropomorphic analogs.

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Crash Test, an art installation by Jamie Willis, is located in Hindmarsh Square, a pleasant urban green space in Adelaide, Australia. The piece consists of five bronze statues displaying black & white vector icons and mounted on posts. The statues’ heads are all tilted to one side as if, say, they were dangling from an invisible hangman’s noose… and that’s no coincidence.

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According to Willis, the statues were inspired by a faded photo of a female Holocaust victim who had been hung from a lamppost. “Crash test dummies stand in for people in horrific situations,” explains Willis. “These figures seem to act out the crashes in human history, the colossal mistakes and the times we smashed into each other. The blandness of these unobtrusive, hovering dummies acts as a foil for the quiet, deafening violence their hanging implies.” Enjoy your picnic lunches, Adelaideans.

Driving School of Hard Knocks

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Flickr user duluoz cats captured this slightly (ya think?) sketchy vehicle inspection center in Woodstock, NY on February 25th of 2007. “I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road…” blame it on some billion-year-old carbon clogging up the carburetor.

Samcheongdong Style

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A modern mashup of Michelangelo’s Pietà featuring crash test dummies? Yes please! You’ll find this unlikely artwork on a rooftop in Seoul, Korea’s Samcheongdong neighborhood. As archetypical Pietà sculptures depict a sorrowful Virgin Mary cradling the body of her deceased Son, employing crash test dummies in place of the Madonna and Child isn’t really such a stretch.

Belgian Combo

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What is “NAWAS”, and why does that name appear on dozens of trains, walls and other outdoor infrastructure throughout the Low Countries? Call it the calling card of one of Belgium’s most noteworthy (or notorious, depending on one’s POV) graffiti crews. The otherwise anonymous artists don’t often depict crash test dummies in their graphics but when they do, it’s on the side of an SNCB train. Kudos to Flickr user New Fast Atomic Daffodil for the above image taken in June of 2014.

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