How To Tell a Story With Still Images

A photograph has the ability to convey emotion, mood, narrative, ideas and messages – all of which are important elements of story telling.

The Short Story

Stories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are long (novels or even trilogies of novels) but others are short. Thinking photographically, these short stories might be one, or maybe two, images.

Most newspaper photography fits into this category of story telling – one image that attempts to capture the essence of an accompanying written story. They don’t have the luxury of multiple frames to introduce, explore and conclude so almost always tell the story of a single event rather than a longer one.

Such shots need to have something in them that grabs the attention of a viewer. They also will usually have visual and/or narrative focal points that lead the viewer into the photo.

Short Stories photos are often shots that leave the viewer of the photograph wondering about what they are looking at – not because they don’t understand it but because they intrigue and leave people imagining what is going on behind the image and what other future images of the scene might look like. In a sense these single image stories are often just as powerful because of what they don’t include in the shot as to what they do include.

Introduce Relationship – When telling a story through a single image think about including more than one person in the shot – when you do this you introduce ‘relationship’ into a photo which will conjure up all types of thoughts in the viewers of your shots.

Also think about context – what’s going on around your subject? What’s in the background? What does the other elements of the photo say about your subject and what’s going on in their lives? Of course you don’t want to be too obvious about setting your background up – doing so could lead to cliched shots.

Multiple Image Stories

ell a story with your images is to take a series of them. In a sense what you’re doing here is a step towards shooting a movie with your shots (a movie is a sequence of many thousands of images run together to tell a story).

Series of shots used to tell a story can be anything from two or three shots arranged in a frame or collage through to hundreds of shots arranged in an album (online or printed).

Structure

1. Introduction – shots that put the rest of the images into context. These shots introduce important characters that will follow, give information about the place where the story is happening, set the tone that the story will be told in and introduce the themes that the story will meander through (see below for more on themes).

Introductory shots need to lead viewers into the body of the story. If you think about a good novel, it’s often the first few paragraphs that determine whether people will buy and read the book in full or not – the same is true with visual stories. Introductory shots should give people a reason to go deeper into the story.

So in a travel album – these shots might show the travelers packing, could include a macro shot of a map of the destination or of the tickets etc.

2. Plot – good stories are more than just empty words. They explore ideas, feelings, experiences etc on a deeper level. Plot shots will probably make up the majority of your photographic story. They show what happens but also explore themes and ideas.

So in a travel album I try to identify themes in my shots that I will revisit throughout a trip. Types of themes might include:

• Visual themes – perhaps colors or shapes that come up again and again on a trip – for example a friend recently showed me his album from a recent trip to the Greek Islands that featured quite a few shots with white buildings and blue seas – very powerful.
• Stylistic themes – repetition of photographic techniques and styles. For example on my last overseas trip I decided to include a series of macro shots of the different flora that I saw and ended up with a series of shots of flowers from a variety of different parts of the world.
• Locational themes – reoccurring photos from similar types of places. For example on a trip a few years back I decided to make ‘markets’ a theme in my shots across the trip. I sought out and photographed markets in every city and town we visited. I found it fascinating to see the similarities and differences between them.
• Relational themes – shots that focus upon a person or people over time. On a travel story this might document the moods of a person as they go through the highs and lows of travel or could document the development of a relationship between friends, lovers, siblings etc over time.

3. Conclusion – good story tellers are quite intentional about the way they end their stories. Last impressions count and it’s worth considering what lasting image/s you want to leave with the viewer of your photos.

By no means do you need to tie up your story neatly (good stories sometimes leave people feeling unsettled and wanting resolution) but do consider how you want to end.

To continue our travel story example, concluding shots could be anything from the cliched sunset shot (I think it’s been overdone personally) through to airport shots, unpacking shots, plane shots, some shots from the last meal at the destination, signs to the airport etc.

http://digital-photography-school.com/telling-stories-with-photos/

From this information, it will help me and my group for our upcoming assignment on taking 15 still images and telling a story from them.