How to Tell Powerful Stories with Your Camera

We love stories. So, if you use a storytelling approach to your photography, you are more likely to create images and sequences of images that engage viewers.

There are two aspects to storytelling; the story of each image itself (and I’ve spoken about this in other podcasts), and the story that ties together a sequence of images.

A good way to approach this is to think of each stage as a chapter. If you are travelling, or going on an adventure, what are the key steps?

For day-to-day photography, you can create themes that tell the story of a place, a culture, or specific individuals. Themes might include methods of transport, shapes, and colours. Once you start, you’ll find there are many themes you can adopt.

And, the most powerful stories invoke mood and emotion. So how can you create images that add that additional layer to the experience of your story?

Find out more in today’s podcast. 

It's time for another podcast...

I will be running a 1-hour mini-workshop, an Introduction to Wildlife Photography, on the 26th March (recording available if you can't make the live event), and a short, 6-week course to help you with composition, "Seeing Differently", starting on the 13th April.

Click here to learn more.

Please remember to Like and Subscribe if you've found

Transcript

>> Graham: 0:08

Foreign storytelling is something that I've spoken about in previous podcasts, and it's also something I talk about a lot when I'm teaching photography. And in this podcast, I want to talk about it from two different angles. One is really just recapping on how storytelling works when you're taking a photograph and the power of it. And, and also to step back and look at how you can use storytelling to tell the story of what you're doing. And as this podcast, the title is Adventure and Travel Photography. In there somewhere, there is definitely room for stories. So that's what I'm going to cover in this podcast. So hopefully, that will be of use to you. Before I get started, I just wanted to remind you to like and subscribe. That makes, a big difference. And you can also always buy me a coffee. So if, you are getting something from these, that would be great. Okay. So storytelling is really important. And the reason that I think it's important and that I believe it's important is that it's, it's the way we're hardwired to take information. So if you look at the popularity of books, of movies, of tv, all of that stuff, it's all related to story in one form or another. And if you go back hundreds, even thousands of years, it's very easy to picture. Our ancestors sat around a campfire telling stories to one another. And if you approach your photography from the perspective of storytelling, what you're doing is you're tuning into the way that we like to get information. It's our favorite way of getting information. And even if you're presenting, so I'm done. Formal presentations and conferences and that sort of things, that sort of thing. And the really big tip with that is that what will often happen, if you've ever been to a, technical conference, something like that, often the energy in the room will drop. And if you're talking facts and figures, you've generally got about seven minutes more or less, and then the energy will really start to drop off in the room. And the way to get that back is to tell a story. So storytelling is really important. So first of all, and this is something I've spoken about before, so I'm not going to talk about it very much in this podcast. And that's simply how you think story. When you're taking a photograph, when you're looking through the viewfinder, when you're looking at the screen on your phone or however, whatever you're using to take the photograph and the thing to do is just think about some really simple questions like what is this story about? And it isn't, I'm not talking long stories here. These are really just short clips of story. So what is this story about? What is it about this situation that is prompting me to take a photograph? What is it I want to share with somebody else? And so that all of these questions come into your reason for taking a photograph. I think we ask those questions less often these days with digital photography. And I'm certainly it's certainly the way I work. I'll easily shoot off 3, 400 images without really thinking about it. But if you go back to the days of film and if you are one of those people who are rediscovering film photography, then you'll know that you have to get a lot more choosy about what you choose to take because you've got probably, ah, maximum of 36 photographs you can take on a roll or you might be using the shorter roll. But that is a really good discipline to get into because it makes you think about the photograph you're taking. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of storytelling is to think sequences of photographs. And I think this is particularly relevant to travel photography, to adventure photography, but it's also very relevant for just day to day photography. So it doesn't really matter what kind of photography you're doing. Start thinking about themes. Now if you are looking at travel, if you are looking at adventure, then there are obvious themes within a particular, let's say trip that present themselves. That might be preparation, it might be traveling to the venue that might get quite exciting at times, or it may involve travel. That's quite unusual. So you want to share that. There is then when you arrive, what happens and the steps of maybe completing an adventure or doing a particular form of travel in a particular area. So what is the story of that travel? Why are you there? What are you trying to achieve? What are the kind of things that you can include in that story? And then finally there's the end of the journey, maybe there's the, the journey home, whatever that might be. And within that you obviously have your regular photographs. Presumably you normally shoot color photographs, but when you are doing that, and again, as you've probably heard me say once or twice, always shoot raw, so that you can then modify the photographs in post processing. And normally what I mean by that is just to create the colors. so if you've got a beautiful sunset, often a camera won't capture that the way you see it. So you can correct that in post, looking at the composition, maybe switching from a landscape format to portrait, maybe really homing in on a detail or switch into square format. there are various things you can do, but also you can think retro, you can think black and white. So there are other styles you can begin to introduce. Excuse me. So there is definitely an interest in older digital cameras, which had much lower resolution, but with that low resolution, they produced images that had a definite look about them. And this is, certainly in some areas, ah, something that is going through a bit of a, well, a revisit, let's say. So when you are taking photographs, think about telling the story, think about what the chapters are. So the kind of things I've just spoken about, they perhaps are the chapters in your story, the preparation, the travel, all that kind of thing. And then within each chapter you can link themes. Maybe it might be just a timeline or it could be particular themes. It might be buildings, it might be animals, it might be vegetation, whatever it is, whatever you're doing. So have a think about all of, all of the different aspects. And one of the beauties of storytelling is that you can also apply it to just day to day photography. you can obviously apply it to events and it lends itself very naturally to events, say weddings, that kind of thing. So you can go through all, all of the steps involved in that process. The preparation, people arriving, ceremony, celebration, all that kind of thing. But also if you're looking day to day, if you're one of those people who just likes to get out and photograph at least once a week, then good on you. That's a great thing to do because it keeps you current, it keeps you, I think, keeps you motivated and I think is actually a very good thing to do for mental health. But going beyond that, you can set yourself themes so where you, where you live, it could be transportation as one. So how do people get around? Obviously there's, well, presumably there's cars, but there might be public transport, there might be buses, ferries, boats, all sorts of things, aircraft. So you can shoot means of travel as a theme. You can look at colors. So you could produce a series of photographs of your locality which run with a theme of a certain color. So it could be reds and where does red appear? So it could be in vehicles, it could be in clothing, it could be on buildings, it could be on signs. once you start to look, you're going to find many, many more examples of that. And that could be, the kind of small project that you can run, maybe as part of a club. And if you join the Facebook group that I have, you're very welcome to submit work there. People do so think about that. It could also be shapes or patterns. There are various other things. Black and white is a good one to go with. It could be people, it could be wildlife. So I think when you start thinking about what is around you and how you can begin to link those things together to form some sort of a story, you may well find that there are a lot more different opportunities and ways to go about it and ways to approach it than perhaps you originally thought. So storytelling as a way of approaching photography I think is very powerful. And it's powerful because photography obviously is a visual medium and when you start to work with images you can also take things a step further. What I mean by that is to start looking at a more emotional connection and a more emotional context with the image. So clearly there are times, and unfortunately we've got a lot of them at the moment, where there are human stories going on, some of them quite horrendous and stories that hopefully most of us will never ever have to experience. But they need to be recorded. Those stories need to be told. They are very important. They're an important part of our humanity, our experience as people being here in whatever communities and whatever cultures we're in. So that takes it to another level. That takes storytelling to another level. So how do you do that as a photographer? Well, some things, are just there. It's impossible when you're taking the photograph to not have some kind of emotional response to it unless you're psychopath. Hopefully I don't have too many of those listening. But also with the more day to day things we can look at how we create mood, how we create emotion in the images that we're shooting. So mood can be done. And I'm going to talk about my online courses because this is one area of it, this is a module, especially in the dslr mirrorless course, because you've got a lot more creative potential than you have in smartphones. Although frankly the way smartphones are going, that I think that gap is probably getting shorter and as new phones come out with new software and all that kind of thing, yes, you can start to close the gap. I'm big believer still and probably always will be in having a more traditional type of camera. I use DSLRs at the moment. I look at switching to mirrorless and there's a good chance I will, at some point, not too far away for various reasons. But the important thing is to come back to what you can do creatively. And you can also do this in post processing with Photoshop, Lightroom, other packages as well. So the important thing is to capture the immediate image. But then you can look at again, how does it differ when you look at it in black and white? And if you're looking at it in black and white, how does the tonal variation change? So are you going for something with high contrast? And I've spoken about black and white in the last podcast or. Yeah, the last one. So how are you going to use that tonal variation? Are you going to go to something of very high contrast, lots of whites, lots of very black blacks, and perhaps not too many grays in between? Because that can give quite a strong impact. As we've spoken about in that podcast. You can also look at grain and how you use that. So, I'm referring to the old film, term. And obviously if you are using film, there's a whole creative smorgasbord, to use a food analogy. But if you look at the type of film available, once you start experimenting with that, so getting, looking, difference in results between a slow film and a fast film and getting black and white film, color slide, cross processing, all that kind of thing you can do with film, there again you can get very different results and those images at least will have a mood to them and they might elicit certain emotions as well. So using black and white and how you work with black and white is one really good way to create a mood, a feel to the image that you are creating. Another way of doing it is to use color. So I like to play with saturation on my images. I don't generally over saturate. And I know a lot of people with wildlife photography, I've seen this in competitions. Actually a lot of, I don't, I don't know if this is true across the board, but certainly there are competitions. I've looked at the winners results and a lot of them have been very oversaturated. Like the saturation is quite high on them, so the colors have their high impact. whether they're exactly what you would see in the wild is perhaps debatable. But we work in a creative medium so again it's whatever works for you. So how you use color saturation can again deliver a very high impact, particularly if you have very bright colors. to start with with wildlife, which is what I tend to shoot, I tend to use greens as a reference. So I'll tend, if I've got grass in the photo, I will try and saturate so that the grass looks natural. And then I work on the basis that sort of, if you go from there, more or less, you're going to get a reasonably accurate, color, balance in that image. But of course you can wind that right down if you have an area or a photograph where there is not a huge color variation. But you might have one thing in the image, ideally on or around your subject, sporting your subject which does stand out, is a bright color. You can always play with just reducing saturation so that the whole image becomes almost black and white. But you have one area of color. obviously you can do that with masking and things like that. So this depends how capable you are with post processing software. And the more capable you are, the more options you have. But this is another way of using that. And in fact, an example of that that springs to mind is the movie Schindler's List, which was mostly shot in black and white. But there were definite, there were sequences there which had color highlighted. So one was I think at the beginning with a candle flame. So everything was black and white, but the candle flame wasn't. That was color. and then there was a little girl in the red coat, which is probably the more famous use of that in that particular movie. So these things all have impact and of course they have not only visual impact and possibly emotional impact, but they have an impact on the story that you're telling. So, again, one of the subplots, thinking about the, the little girl in that movie, that was definitely, one of the sort of sub stories within that movie, obviously a very upsetting one. But but it, but that's the power of it. It draws your focus hard into whatever you've chosen to highlight in that image. So obviously we can bring that back to more day to day things. But when you're thinking about themes, and I've spoken about projects in the past as well and I think projects are a great thing to do. they keep you using your photo, using your camera, which is, which is a good thing. And secondly they can challenge your creativity. And again, a big thing for me about photography is to try and keep being creative, come up with new ideas, experiment with different things. So looking at storytelling, I think this is a really great way to challenge yourself to come up with different ways of telling A story of anything that you're photographing, whether it's a story about yourself, the place you live, it might be events that are going on. So where I live, I go to the local, rugby, I like to do that. But there, if you go to a local sporting event, there are, you know, there's lots and lots of things you can do to start telling stories of those events. And if you're not doing that, and you think that might be a good idea, then have a go. there's nothing to stop you doing that. So these are really some of the key points and things, to use, and maybe, maybe different approaches you can use when you are doing your photography, particularly locally. I think, one of the things I find a lot of people do, and I was certainly guilty of this, when I wasn't doing photography professionally, when I was doing it more of a hobby, I'd kind of not use my camera until I was about to go away. And then I'd go through this whole thing about trying to remember how to work it. And luckily that I think those phases lasted very long. It tends to be, no, I was working a lot and I was traveling a lot, so I didn't have much time to use the camera. but there's also, you can switch that and then make that an opportunity to use your camera. So if you do use, or if you are traveling a lot, for example, in your, in your work, and that's preventing you from using your camera and taking photographs. And I would suggest you flip that. And these days there's less of an excuse. So I'm, I'm talking about, film days, when, when this was, my experience. But we all carry around, or most of us carry around a really powerful camera in our smartphone. So why not set yourself, tasks, things you can do while you're traveling and see what stories you can come up with. So I've shared some ideas and I, know. What ideas do you have? Has that got you thinking about how you could tell stories? What are the stories you can tell locally? How can you present them? So social media is obviously set up for that. you can do carousels of images in things like Facebook and Instagram if you want to share. Or you could do a sequence or maybe produce a sequence that in the way, Instagram, for example displays the thumbnail images. You can have a story running there and maybe run that with multiple images in a post, that kind of thing. one of the things I really like is the idea of a book. And these days you can self publish really easily. And there are some really good self publishing platforms that you can use. if you ah, have something locally that's probably a good one to go for. If not, there are many, platforms that you can use. They're based in different countries. So there's a lot of variety there. And the best ones in my opinion are the publishing, businesses that give you software, that you can download to create your own book. So Blurb is one that I've used. Blurb is one of the more expensive ones, but they are very good quality and they do have this software that you can download onto the computer and then you can decide how you want to lay out each page. again, think about the story, the chapters, what's this chapter about? You can even vary it through the book. Color, theme might be one part of it. you could do shapes. So whatever you want to do. I mean obviously this is a creative process and one of the really good things to get from it is to try new things and maybe surprise yourself. So the thing about using this software though is that it will tell you if you're making an image too large, for one thing. So it makes sure that you keep the resolution that is needed to print the image in the book, depending on the size of book. So again with all of these publishers, they give you options on the shape of the book, the size of the book, some give you hardback and softback, paperback options. You can also, once you've created your book, quite often have an ebook version of it if you want to share that way. I, do find, I've been experimenting with ebooks. So you'll find there are a few actually on the website, but I found the ebook or as far as I can. My experience so far is that ebooks are much better if you're using text. They don't work so well when you're using a lot of images. And again, if you, if you know a lot about ebooks and you know a good way to handle books with a lot of images, please let me know. But what I find is they often layer them wrong. So again, you'll have to experiment with whatever you're using. But I like the printed books and the nice thing about that is that you're I think perhaps far more likely to look at those images again, maybe share them with friends, particularly if this is an adventure trip that you've just been doing or You've been traveling somewhere. If you put those images in a book, they can bring back memories. You're more likely to look at them again, and they're not just going to sit on a hard drive and be forgotten. And I think that's the danger with a lot of. A lot of the photographs that we take. So that really covers everything that I wanted to talk about when it comes to storytelling. But so, yeah, I've touched on storytelling, which, the kind of storytelling I've spoken about before, which is thinking about the story as you're shooting the image. And I think that's really important. Anyway, if you approach your photography with a story in mind, then it's not just the sequence of photographs that you're taking, but it's also the individual images. If you apply that process to the image, it means that what is in that image will be the subject and then the rest of it will support the subject. But also stepping back from an individual image, looking at how you can create sequences that tell a story of, perhaps part, of your life, it might be somebody else's life or it might be where you live. So that is it for the podcast. Hope it has given you some food for thought. And, please like and subscribe. It really helps. And, M. I never say no to a coffee. So that. Or you can subscribe to the podcast or m make a donation, whatever. So there's different ways you can do that if you want to do that. Can't see away. Please jump on the website and you'll find, links there. Okay. Enjoy photography. I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in, the Wildlife and Adventure Photography Podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a. Like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment. And if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll, be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for, joining me and I look forward to seeing you again. Next podcast. Bye for now.