Bonnie Apis - Week 4 Informational Writing Photography

Photography Knowing what is a photo essay is and the different ways to create it can help a lot when we need a journal for recording our experience. “Photography is a language, and while a single photo can be incredibly powerful, what’s even more powerful is a series of photo that tells a story.” (Taggart, 2016) A photo essay use photo to tell and communicate a story. The story can be any things that happen in your family or work… Photo essay are a main point in photo journaling (Taggart, 2016). Lots of people to use photo essay to tell a story. But there are also different ways to take a photo and show the story. Here are 4 important step to take a photo for photo essay. First, the scene setter. Show the scene of your story and give the audience information about the setting of you story (Jenkins, 2012). It is important for the audience to know what story they are looking at. Second, the portrait. Show your character or the main subject of your story (Jenkins, 2012). This will be an introduction of your character. Third, capturing detail. Put down all the detail you can in the photograph that might tell the story. For example like what the person is wear or what are they holding (Jenkins, 2012). Last, capturing action. Show what the person is doing (Jenkins, 2012). This might be the most important part of the story and it tell the story through the character action.

(Landwer-Johan, n.d.)

There are also element to show the story better through the photograph. The First technique is mood. Photographer use the background and different effect to show the audience the feeling and make them felt that way (Gabriel, 2017). Like this photo above, the photographer use the black and white effect to show the mood of this photo. The background are people and a market. This give use the setting of the story. The second is ideas (Gabriel, 2017). Photographer should always try out different effect and idea to show the mood. Third, emotion. The photographer use facial expression to show the feeling of the scene. Action will also be useful to show emotion and focus of the setting on how the character look (Gabriel, 2017). Like in the example photo, the character don’t have any smile on his face, and some of the people in the background. This will be something that the photographer trying to tell us. Next, narration. This is to make the audience have more understanding on what is happening. Like showing a scene before the event happen (Gabriel, 2017). Last, the most important part of the story telling photo, the message. You always have to pick a theme for your photo essay, the message you want to tell your audience. Once you got the message you are telling, whenever you are working on the photo. Keep the message in mind. The main point of the photo essays is to communicate message and story through photo (Gabriel, 2017) Photo essay can be shown with a set of picture with or without text. If the photo essay have text. It should be a short explanation of what the story is about but the photo should be the main source for giving the feeling and story (What is a, 2019). With all of these element and technique, we can make a photo essay with what we want to tell everyone.