Posts Tagged "photo-journalism"

I take a LOT of pictures

Posted by Steve Long on Aug 30, 2010 in Philosophy, Photography | Comments Off

But very few would I call good. I mean I have a pretty high keeper rate, especially when I use my Nikon D700. It’s an amazing piece of equipment. Almost 95% of the pictures I take with that camera are correctly exposed and in focus. No, when I mean good, I don’t mean technically good. I mean artistically good.

Most of the pictures I take are memory enhancers. I forget stuff easily. There’s always something new pushing out the old stuff in my brain. I take a lot of pictures just to help me remember what the scene looked like, who was there, what we did. I want the pictures to be in focus and well composed and exposed, but I know I’m not creating art. I know I’m just recording a memory.

I guess what I do is kind of like personal photo-journalism. I studied journalism a little bit in school. I was my high school yearbook editor. Who, what, where, when and why. The five W’s of journalism. The “why” is always the hard part of a journalist’s job. The first four are objective, simple facts. The “why” is subjective. It requires some analysis.

Photos do a great job of telling the first four W’s. You can look at a picture and instantly see who is in it. You can recognize in the scene where it is, the time of day. If you look in the EXIF information you can see all the facts and figures of when and how the camera was set up. Facts are easy to see.

But why? How do you see why? Why comes from the motivation of the individuals involved. You can see expressions on faces that can give you some clue if they aren’t posed and static. See some interaction, some look passes between two faces. It is the un-posed, un-guarded moments that tell the story of why.

Posing is okay sometimes. I need and want a record of a group of individuals, fake smiles and all. But posed pictures have no why. Everybody has a fixed expression, the why is hidden behind a mask. It’s enough sometimes to just get 4 w’s. But I really want to capture the fifth. That’s why I take so many pictures. People are good at hiding the fifth w.

Playing cards

Posted by Steve Long on Jul 20, 2010 in Photography | Comments Off

I like to take a photo-journalistic approach to photographing my family. I’m not really into a lot of posing. I’d rather just capture the moment without interfering. Photographed with a Nikon N80, 50 1.8 lens and Kodak Tri-x 400 film.

Dad gloating

Waiting for the next card

See the rest of the gallery here.