photo by Jeff Raymond Being a visual storyteller requires you to capture a wide range of information and distill it down to the essential elements to capture an audience’s attention and inform them about a subject. Starting this profession, you learn extensively from your mistakes those first few years. One of the first things most newspaper photographers fail to do early is to get all the information necessary to write a caption. You cannot do this job like a tourist as they travel. It would help if you interacted with the people you photograph and got some basic information necessary to the story. Born with Asperger’s Syndrome and an IntrovertI am an introvert and also have Asperger’s.
It is draining for Introverts to talk to people about subjects they aren’t interested in—people with Asperger’s struggle with verbalizing their thoughts. The most challenging thing that I continue to struggle with even today is empathy. Genuine empathy is the ability to be aware of one’s feelings and thoughts. At the same time, you are aware of another person’s feelings and beliefs (or several other persons’). It means having the wherewithal to speak about this awareness. It also means mutual understanding and a sense of caring for one another. I had to learn that I had very little empathy. It took me until my 30s to start to deal with this flaw. My wiring is not to naturally observe others’ feelings; I needed to work on this skill. This is where photography became an asset. To improve my photos, I had to get better at analyzing situations and seeing those visual clues to pick up on people’s emotions. DING! DING! Eureka moments started to take place once I had training in body language. I first started studying body language in Social Work, but it was my time with Don Rutledge, my photo mentor, who taught me to see emotions. It would take years before I could take what I was learning and start to capture it with my camera.
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Journalist Questions The formula for getting the complete story on a subject starts with answering the Five Ws.
Curiously none of the answers to these questions is a simple “yes” or “no.” My first experience was shooting for the East Carolinian, the East Carolina University student paper. I remember editors looking at my photos and loving them and then saying they couldn’t use them because I didn’t have the names of the people. Quickly I learned that if I wanted to get published and paid, I had to have the Five Ws. I loved photography so much that I would do anything to keep doing it—even talk to people about subjects I wasn’t interested in at first. But, I learned through the years that everyone has a story and that by just spending some time listening and asking questions, I found out I was interested in a lot more subjects than before I started as a journalist. |
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Photo Critique Sessions I went to experts in photography to have them review my work. Each time I learned things that I could do to improve my photos. Then I would work on these recommendations and then come back to those people and ask how they did I do in implementing their suggestions. I did this for a good twenty years with Don Rutledge, and never did he not have something that I could work on to improve. So I went to the Maine Photographic Workshop, studied with Steve McCurry, and worked on other aspects of my storytelling. Over time I got my work in front of industry leaders. Each time I learned something else that, if I tweaked, would make my images better at storytelling. I remember the first time I shared my images with Tom Kennedy. At the time, he was the director of photography for National Geographic Magazine. I was terrified. He complimented me about it being solid professional work, and then he said I needed surprises. He expected to see the level of work I was doing, but to grab Tom’s attention for National Geographic Magazine, I needed to surprise him. It would take ten years to understand what he meant with that statement and where I started to shoot a unique and different photo. I learned that I grew even more when mentoring and critiquing others’ work. To teach photography means you must understand the subject at a much higher level. Teaching Photojournalism—Icing on the Cake Photojournalism taught me how to listen to subjects and better understand them, and it helped me tell their story. Then, when the subjects would contact me and thank me, I felt I was finally doing a good job. Teaching made me start to understand the audience more than I had done before. I could communicate something to an audience, but the story would fail unless the message was received and understood. When students didn’t get a concept, I had to think of another way to communicate the message. Do this often and start understanding how to do a better job. You begin to learn how to do a better job of presenting the subject in the first place. I also learned that no matter how well I do my job, sometimes those critical messages may need different stories told to reach more of your audience. Everything to make your photos better with storytelling is all the things that will improve your social skills. One of the best examples is the quote from the famous photographer Robert Capa, “If your photos are not good enough, you are not close enough.” |
