What was the last photo that left you completely spellbound? Do you remember her? I bet that was a picture full of life, it conveyed things. It was not a simple composition of colors and shapes. There was something in that photo. If you have it handy, please look at it again. All great photography is narrative photography. The cool, impressive photos that take your speech away and leave you fascinated, they all tell you something. They all keep a story inside.
In today's article I am going to introduce you to the exciting and addictive world of telling stories through photography. I will explain the elements that you need to include in your photographic work so that it really "tells" something, and I will reveal some methods to take the viewer and lead them through the plot of your story with total comfort. Throughout the text I will also show you some practical examples where you will be able to see each of the aspects that we are commenting on.
Get comfortable and get ready because at the end of the article I am going to ask you to practice what you have learned in this article.
Let's get to the point.
THE MOST FASCINATING PART OF PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE LITTLE STORIES IT TELLS.
Unlike a movie, which lasts an hour and a half or two, a play, or a novel that takes a day or a week to read, a photo is a momentary shot. With a photo you capture what is happening in a thousandth of a second, a "still photo" and never better said. This makes storytelling seem, from the outset, not an easy task. How are you going to tell a whole story in a still, inanimate photo that doesn't move? If it's not even a series of photographs, not a sequence at least.
Precisely, what makes photography fascinating is the subtlety with which it captures us and immerses us in the emotion and in the story that it tries to convey to us. A movie may need 90 minutes, or even 15 minutes (if it's a short film) to bring you to an emotional point. A photo becomes a highly concentrated emotional shot, a micro-story told, from start to finish, in great detail, in what it takes to blink an eye.
Here are some elements you need to include in your photography to make sure it tells a story. Take good note.
ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS IN A NARRATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
For your photo to tell a story, you don't necessarily need to include all these points, but they are "setting" elements that, the more there are, the easier it will be for the viewer to perceive the story you are telling.
- A physical context: A location, the place where the photo takes place, where the little story we are telling takes place. It can be a city, a street, the living room of a house, or the inside of a flower petal if what you tell is the story of a ladybug. It should be relatively easy to deduce from your photo the nature of the place where it was taken. Not that the specific city is known, or the name of the street or anything like that. Simply that it is understood that it is a photo taken on a street, on the beach, next to a tree or inside a cafeteria. This is a physical reference that will undoubtedly help the viewer to recreate the story.
- A temporal context: Can you visually convey a reference to the moment the photograph was taken? Photographs that express a moment of the day such as sunrise, sunset, or that have some type of time reference, year, etc., usually convey a greater narrative charge than a photo in which, no matter how hard you look, you can't find any time indication. . Be sure to always include a time reference in your photo.
Care:Although you have to indicate the moment in which the photo takes place, you choose if you want to indicate it explicitly or implicitly. Not to be too implicit because not everyone is going to "feel" it, but for example a boy delivering newspapers on his bike is a clear time indication of morning. The long shadows on the ground would also indicate moments such as morning or afternoon. A wet floor is a wonderful temporal indication: a rainy day.
Complicity, at 7 in the morning - An emotional context: In your photo, make sure you have a clearly defined predominant emotion. There can be several emotions in the same photo, but one has to dominate and stay captured in the viewer's retina.
The visual direction that you have chosen for your photo has to accompany this dominant emotion. It would be difficult to reflect feelings such as fear or loneliness with a photo with warm and vivid colors, in the same way that a photo with a predominantly gray color, with a composition full of negative spaces, is difficult to tell stories of joy (impossible in photography). there is nothing, I say difficult). - A leading element: And I say "element" because it can be a person, it can be an object, landscape, animal, anything is likely to become a good protagonist of a photo, but define a protagonist with yourself. Say "the main person or thing in my photo is this or that" . Don't leave it to chance, don't shoot just to shoot, let's see what comes out.
Little trick:Humans, by nature, are more empathic with other humans than with an object. Consequently, you will find it much easier to tell stories starring a person than a baseball. This does not mean that a story cannot be told through a photo without people appearing. Not at all. But for humans, the stories that captivate and emotionally overwhelm us are those in which we see, feel, or notice other people. I don't care if there are no people in the photo, the main element can be a simple shoe, but a shoe that will tell the story of a person. The presence of people, directly or indirectly, is key in a story. The person does not necessarily have to appear in the photo, but it does have to be deduced from the context of the story.
The same is true for any other type of animated living beings. Pets are an excellent character to build a story.
When you look at the photo of this lonely bike, it's hard to avoid automatically thinking of the owner of it.
The absent owner of the bike
HOW TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER: THE SCRIPT IN NARRATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
As I said before, unlike a movie or a novel, where there is a script that advances chronologically, and which the reader or viewer consumes little by little, a photo is a micro-story told in a fraction of a second. That's not why it won't have a script. The photos have their own script too. A script that the viewer consumes in a fraction of a second too.
I eat?
In a photo you put all the elements of the story at the viewer's disposal, but you maintain full control over where the reading of the photograph has to start and where it has to end. You have an infinite number of resources and techniques that allow you to guide the viewer within the frame and transport them from one element to another, focusing their attention on an element of greater prominence, or allowing them to notice a background detail only after a few seconds. Here are just a few examples of resources that you can use to map out the path that the viewer will unconsciously follow when they see your photo:
- Light: The brightest areas within the frame will be where the viewer's gaze lands first, and then go to explore the areas with less light.
- Curves, lines and vanishing points: Within a composition, vanishing points and linear elements are a perfect way to lead the viewer in the "reading" of the photograph.
- Depth of field: Focuses and blurs are another resource that facilitates directing the gaze and attention of the person who contemplates the photo. Due to the wisdom of nature, our brain directs our gaze first towards the most focused area, and then goes through the other areas with less focus.
- The look: If you want to direct attention in a certain direction, make the subject look there. By nature, we are curious. When looking at a photograph, it is normal for us to direct our gaze towards what the subject seems to be looking at. Regarding the order, first we look at the subject's eyes, and secondly we look for what he is looking at.
A group of 4 subjects, 3 of them looking at the fourth: we automatically focus our attention on the fourth character. We assume that he is the main subject. - Natural direction: Unless the photographer provides elements that modify the trajectory of the viewer's gaze (such as the previous points), the natural thing is that we go through a photograph from bottom to top, and from left to right. Keep this in mind when assembling your composition.
THE COTTON TEST IN NARRATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY: THE TITLE
You just took a photo. You have embodied in it a magnificent story, according to you. But you're not sure if the others will be able to find it.
A little trick that you can use to make sure that you have a good narrative content in your photo is to give it a title. It seems silly, but if you are able to verbalize, through words, the little story of your photo, then you will have hit the nail on the head.
Be careful, the title cannot be a simple visual description of the photo. "Boy sitting on a chair, with a lollipop in his right hand" does not work for us as a title. We looked for a title that touches the emotion as the photo itself would. If it is impossible for us to come up with a title that is minimally deep, if all the titles we can think of are mere descriptions of what we see in the photo, there is a high probability that the photo does not contain anything deep.
PRACTICAL EXAMPLES OF GOOD NARRATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
There is nothing better than a few examples to illustrate what good narrative photography is.
YOUR TURN
The amount of words you read doesn't make you a better photographer ? but the photos you take. I want you to practice narrative photography in your next photos. Shooting with a little story in mind will open up new photographic possibilities for you. As soon as you get your first real storytelling photo, you'll realize that your other photos, lacking story or emotion, were basically soulless.
