A rule of cinema is to “show, don’t tell.” Maybe this can be revised to “Show what you can, and tell what you can’t.”

Roswell Presbyterian Church’s Middle School Youth with SonServants  and Widows Harvest to help do projects like: building wheelchair ramps and landings, scraping and painting houses, putting new roofs on homes, or landscaping and yard work.

Now there are a few things that are very difficult to write that a photo can help communicate. Emotional connections are moments where a gesture can connect people that trying to describe this would take a few pages of text.

The Suzuki teacher connects with the child in a tender instructional moment that text would struggle to communicate as effectively. Also, in this photo you can see the proud mother of the student in the background pleased with the instruction her son is getting.

A few photos of a story can help set the tone and help the writer get deeper into the content. Your audience will appreciate a story with more meat to it than one that glosses over the content.

A child is working on an art project during a Suzuki workshop. They provided this creativity time for those moments when the young students were not playing and needed to stay on campus while waiting their turn.

I thought capturing a student working on a fun craft project showed that creativity is in these students and looking for ways to come out. While music is one way the workshop was helping these students, they also provided a moment away from the music to be creative as well.

Show what you can

Detain shot of the lab project for DNA testing procedure.

Now I wanted you to first see the closeup photo here of the materials the students will be extracting the DNA from in a biology class. Notice how the photo begs the question of what is this?

Here the student is getting a measured amount of the substance that will be tested.

Notice in the second photo here of the lady in the lab there is less of a question and more of a statement that happens.  Maybe the closeup photo is a better hook and once you are into the story you use the photo showing the taking a sample by the student.

Now imagine the story on teaching DNA extraction tests without any of these photos. Which one would you even begin to read?

Physics Lab 

The professor asked the students to gather around her as she walked them through the lab experiment they were doing that day.

What is very interesting here is how this professor walked the students through each step. She even would pause to talk about how if you don’t do one thing then your results will be affected.

The professor adds a little humor in the demonstrations. Now I am shooting fairly tight, but just loose enough to show the students trying to see what she is doing and their emotional connection in the moment.

Now just hang around any class where students are doing something for the first time and you will see this next moment. They come to the teacher and ask a question. The teacher then realizes there is some missing information the student is not giving them.

Even after the professor had showed them this step, there is still more show and tell needed to be sure the concept is understood.

Now if you are a writer experienced a similar teaching moment like this physics class, then you understand how images will help clarify a moment.

If you look closely in the last photo the girl in the purple is having a small “eureka moment.”

Don’t fall into the trap of just taking photos and using them. Be sure your visuals are communicating. The best thing you can do is to show a photo to someone who doesn’t know anything about the story or the people and things in the photo. Ask them to tell you what they see when they look at the photo. Not the obvious things, but like in photo of the teacher laughing they may say I see a good teacher.

You might ask why and they would say she looks fun and the students are reacting to her positively.

 Remember to “Show what you can, and tell what you can’t.”

1. What is the story?
2. What is the purpose of the communication?
3. Who is the audience?
4. Why does the story matter?
5. When will the audience pay attention?
6. Where will the audience find the story/message?

Today’s editorial photographer needs to be more concerned with these questions than ever before. 

What has changed to make this so important? It is easier to ask what hasn’t changed and the answer to that is storytelling. 

Today when a professional gets a call to help tell a story, there is a very good chance they will be involved all the way through the process.  If you are not involved there is a very good chance you will be replaced by someone who can be involved more than just making photos.

There are a lot of stories that are quite entertaining that will not help the client achieve their goals. Too many storytellers are more wrapped up in the story rather than the purpose of what the story is to help achieve.

Today if the audience is finding the story online we now can study how long they were on the page and with video at what point did they stop watching. This is valuable information to the client and the professional communicator.

You can evaluate the effectiveness of your package with the audience.

Nonprofits can track the viewers giving to the organization. Bill Bangham the editor of Commission Stories, a tabloid sized publication for a missionary organization found out the organization had paid for research to see how effective the publication was. At first Bill was upset because they didn’t tell him this was going to take place. However, he was pleasantly surprised to hear that his readers gave more than 43 million dollars to the organization making up more than 50% of their budget. The cost to produce the tabloid was only $200,000 a year.

After seeing the numbers those who thought they could save the printing costs and putting it on line, it was clear that was the wrong thing to do with this audience. The audiences liked connecting to the organization through the tabloid size publication and were continuing to support the organization due to the story content.

For a video I posted to help understand how to use a Depth-of-field preview button the audience was 95.6% men.  What was surprising to me is I was thinking a lot of undergraduate students would watch this, but the numbers show that primarily men ages 25 – 64 were the audience and the largest segment to be those 45 – 54 years of age.

If I were trying to reach the younger crowd I missed the mark. After doing a number of videos and blog posts I am starting to see certain topics draws in audiences more than other topics.

If I continued to only produce content that is popular then I would be missing my purpose. My purpose is to help people grow in their photography. Some of the topics I write on are key to success and the least read. 

I must revisit these topics and figure a better metaphor, example or another way to hook the audience, because some of the content is the most important for those seeking to be professional photographers.

Understanding that you are responsible for more than just a small piece in the communication puzzel will help you be more valuable to the client. Asking questions that help you understand how your content will be used will help you to provide better content.

Today I am just as likely to shoot, produce and post the content of a story. When I started I just made a picture and then many other hands touched it before the audience ever did. 

The best part of being this involved is the content I produce is so much better. The reason it is better is because I am asking more of the core questions to understanding why we are producing a story for an audience.

This is how many writers are publishing their articles online–no photos. The photo on the right here is an advertisement and not part of the story.

Writing a good lead for a story frees you up to write the rest of the article. The lead announces and grabs the attention of the reader. It will help define the style of the writing to come.

If you are like many writers posting to the web you are examining the results of your articles. You are watching those page hits.

The Computer is a Clue

Here is a big clue as to why a lot of people are not reading your work. It is on the computer.

Macintosh was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. It was successful because most people prefer working with and looking at images rather than text.

A look at Church history with text

Let’s go back even further to help make the point that people are not just naturally drawn to text. The first 300 years of the Catholic Church there was no Bible. In 1041 moveable clay type was invented in China.

It wasn’t until 1440 when Johannes Gutenburg had his first workable printing press.

How did Christianity spread around the world those first 300 or even 1440 years with almost no text readily available to the masses? Not only was text limited, the masses were illiterate. There were no churches until 231 AD.

Early Christianity was primarily an urban faith, establishing itself in the city centers of the Roman Empire. Most of the people lived close together in crowded tenements. There were few secrets in such a setting. The faith spread as neighbors saw the believers’ lives close-up on a daily basis.

It was during these times of no Bibles, when Christianity spread around the world.

Even Text Heavy Newspapers Changed

Today even the Wall Street Journal leads with photos on their website.

Pick your lead photo just like you pick your lead text

A good Associated Press Photo captures the story like a good lead does with text. It is telling the story with a picture that records a moment in time. It is the fleeting moment that in an instant sums up the story. The famous Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called this the “Decisive Moment.”

A good lead is more like a good question than a statement. The statement does not necessarily make you want to read the rest of the story. The lead may be a statement, but the statement of a good lead makes the reader ask a question. They want to know more.

Here is a page on Patch.com of my community Roswell, GA. of the six photos, which are acting like leads to a story one is an advertisement. Of the five remaining I defy you to have a clue as to what the story is about based on the images alone.

I am consistently seeing writers who are in charge of their websites totally clueless to how to use visuals. Like in the example above from Patch.com images are used only because they know they need images, but they have almost nothing to help you like a lead would to get you to want to read the story.

This is a closeup of one of those stories. The photo shows the back of a room that looks like a church with pews. I guess it could also be a court room, but this is what was picked as the lead to the story on the budget.

If I were to write what one sees when they are looking at a photo, would it be a successful lead? It should be if it is going to work.

Which photo would you use?

I shot these photos for a story on Mexican coffee farmers that formed a cooperative that is helping save their farms and community.  Which would you use as a lead?

In my opinion any one of them could work.  They all introduce the topic of coffee in some way, but they all make you want to ask a question about something in the photo.

Now here are some other photos I took on the trip that are nice photos that I often will see writers use to start a story.  See if you agree.

They are all nice photos. Some are quite strong even.

Can you see why these do not even help you introduce coffee into the story? I even use these in my story, but they are not the lead photo. They do work in many ways to ask questions. You might want to know who the people are and why they are happy or what are they talking about.

You can take a look and see how I used them in the multimedia piece here: