Using photography as a tool for online journalism

Photography should not be thought of as an add-on or as merely art to make your story prettier. Photography should be thought of as an important tool for journalistic storytelling. [Ed. note: Created Jan. 2018 for use in my reporting courses.]

This is one of the many amazing photos our students took as part of our Inside the Food Fight coverage at this year’s World Food Championship.

Everything has changed

Digital photography — and then smartphones — have dramatically changed news photography.

If you work in any news gathering position, you will be asked to take photos as part of your reporting. Some of these photos will be used on social media to promote your upcoming story or as placeholders until a photographer or videographer can make to the scene, but other times your photos — even if you are not a photographer per se — will be used as main art for your story or as standalone, sharable content on social media.

Therefore, you must now how to use photography effectively as a digital journalist. This guide will start you down that path by covering:

1. Photo basic
2. Captioning
3. Practicing journalistic storytelling with photos

Photo basics

Here are some of the standard rules for taking good pictures.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds provides an easily way to quickly compose aesthetically pleasing images. Its basic principle is that an image should be broken in to three even sections — both vertically and horizontally — and when composing an image you should place the main action and/or focal point of the image where the markers for the three sections cross (i.e., the blue dots in the image above).

The picture of my son (to the left) provides a great example of the rule of thirds in action. The thing that makes this photos is the concentration in his eyes. By placing his eye right on one of the points where the thirds markers cross, I am pulling the users’ focus right to the main focal point of the image.

This is about the most basic and consistent law of aesthetics. Take a second scroll through Instagram. Find a few pictures that you find visually appealing. I’ll bet all the money in my pocket that of the ones you like follow the rule of thirds.

Think about your background

Sometimes we get too focused on our subject and forget about what is going on in the background. Here are two important things to think about:

1. Is there anything coming out of my subject’s head? Make sure there is nothing in the background protruding out of your subject’s head, like a light pole or a tree. If you see something coming out of their head, just move a few inches one way or the other and that should fix it.
2. Is my subject backlit? Make sure the sun is not directly behind your subject. If it is, your subject will either be dark or your background will be blown out. To fix this, just turn your subject around and shoot the other direction.

Get close to the action

Another shot from Inside the Food Fight

When I worked as a newspaper photographer, my photo chief’s main piece of advice was: you should only need an ultra wide angle lens (20 mm) or a super telephoto lens (300 mm). His argument was that you should always be so close to the action that you need a very wide lens and if you can’t get close — because of police tape or other inconveniences — you switch to the telephoto.

This is some of the best photography advice I have ever gotten. It is also one of the most consistent problems I see in student photos. If you are shooting something, it is your job to get good, dynamic pictures. Be confident, move close to your subject and do your job to the best of your ability.

This tip is doubly important if you are shooting with your cell phone. A cell phone (generally) does not have an optical zoom lens. The only zoom it has is digital. Therefore, any zooming you are doing is reducing the quality of the image.

Tips specifically for mobile and social photography

1. Shoot simple — Phones have amazing cameras not, but they still have limitations. The best shots from phones are simple photos with a clear, single focal point. Simple images also work well on social media, where people are using small screens and scrolling past most of the content.
2. Don’t overfilter — Some people would say you shouldn’t use filters at all, but those people are silly. You want your pictures to look authentic and true to the scene as you shot it. Sometimes a camera doesn’t do that and a filter can sometimes help. With that said, you shouldn’t use filters or other effects in a way that distorts the image.
3. Be selective — Just because you can put an endless number of pictures on the Internet, doesn’t mean you should put an endless number of pictures on the Internet. Pick the few strongest images which tell the story you are trying to tell.

Captioning

For most photography shot in this class, we are going to use standard two-sentence captions. In case you don’t know how a two-sentence caption works, here we go:

1. First sentence describes what is going on in photo and is written in present tense.
2. The second sentence adds context for the photo and is written in past tense.

Here’s an example using the photo from above of my son on his bike.

Henry Geidner, 3, tests out his new bike at Safety City in Knoxville on Thursday, June 18, 2016. The miniature city, the Knoxville Police Department uses to teach bike safety, is open to the public Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

The first sentence tells us exactly what is going on in the photo. The second photo tells us why it is happening or what is going on outside the photo. Combined the two sentence provide the reader with a clear understanding of the photo.

Some additional things about captions:

1. Need names for anyone that is a “focus” of the image. [If more than three people are the focus, use a more abstract, group name]
2. Instead of age — as in the example — get the subjects year in school and major or position at the university.
3. Follow AP Style for everything.

Practicing journalistic storytelling with photos

There are millions of ways to use photos for journalistic storytelling. Most frequently, photography is used to visualize print stories. In those cases, you want to think about the photos you are using to make sure they fit with the text and amplify the story. Unfortunately, it’s hard to practice this type of photojournalism, unless you are working for one of the student publications.

An easier way to practice journalistic storytelling with photos is by creating standalone content with your photos. One example is the wildly successful Instagram account Humans of New York.

HoNY is great because it mixes a simple, striking photos with a compelling narrative via an extended caption. It is also fantastic, because it is a model you can copy and localize.

For example, University of Tennessee is a city in and of itself. Forty-thousand-some people travel on to campus every day, and they represent a broad, diverse subset of the population. One could easily use of the HoNY model to highlight the people and stories of UT.

By going out and making HoNY-style posts, you will get better at shooting portraits, talking to people, writing copy and pulling it all together. Additionally, you need no special equipment to go out and start doing it.

Another way to create standalone photo-based content is to create mini photo essays, which you can share on places like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

A mini photo essay should be comprised of at least three images and tell a full story (i.e., provide some kind of narrative). So how do you create a “full story” in three photos? It is actually a lot easier than one would think. Look at the example below.

An example of a mini photo essay.

A good story — whether a book, a movie, or, as the case may have it, a set of photos — must provide us a setting, a character and some type of cause-effect reaction. Here’s how this plays out in the photos above:

1. The first photo provides us with a setting, a character and an action. A woman is watching a video of some sort on a laptop in a house.
2. Photo 2 provides us with additional context about the action: the woman in Photo 1 is watching someone talk with President Barack Obama.
3. The third photo provides the reaction. The woman is weeping in reaction to the video.

This set of photos tells a simple, yet emotional story. Add some introductory text to the set on Facebook or Instagram and you have a compelling piece of standalone content.

Just like the HoNY exercise, you need no special equipment to start making three-photo stories. Just use your iPhone and create little stories about your family and friends. (To be clear, that is my mother (and brother) in the photoset above.)

Also, this exercise will help you get better at taking pictures, finding stories and understanding narrative. All of these skills will help you in media or media-related job.