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These weekly photo prompts and emails are for mothers who want to better document their family memories and learn a thing or two about taking better photographs (yes, with just a phone). If you’d like to join in on the fun, you can join for as low as $3.33 each month and you’ll get immediate access to previous weeks!
Today we’re looking at storytelling through our photographs.
It’s easy for us to admire something or someone and snap a picture. Photograph composition is the next challenging piece of the puzzle. And the most challenging piece of taking a photograph is storytelling.
Storytelling is challenging, but it’s also the best way to document your family’s memories, to tell the story of your family’s life.
In this 365 day challenge of taking a phone picture each day, I’ve been trying to not include my kids’ faces as much as possible. I take plenty of pictures of their faces with my camera and I find that I’m creatively stretched to search for storytelling when I don’t include a person’s face.
Facial expressions tell a HUGE story. When you remove the face part of the photograph, your eyes drift around more to the rest of the scene. Whether you choose to include a face or not, here are some questions you can ask yourself in regards to storytelling.
A few questions you can ask yourself in regards to storytelling:
What about the scene do you find interesting?
What is your focus?
What is necessary in the image? What is not?
What pieces of your scene work together / compliment each other?
Is there something that doesn’t make sense?
Is there something out of the ordinary?
What parts of the scene tell us what’s happening?
This week, take a picture of a story in your life, your best what’s happening here image. You might need to wait for a certain facial reaction from the people you’re photographing. You might need to frame your picture differently so your shot includes everything you need and nothing you don’t.
Inspiring photographer — Kristine Nyborg
Kristine is one of my favorite documentary photographers for storytelling. If you’ve been around here a while, you’ve probably heard me mention her before.
Her project, The Underdog, is a beautiful story of a World Champion dog sled racer, Sigrid Ekran.
Take a peek at how she frames her story in each photograph. What is the focus of each image? What does she include in the background? What does she omit?
Your Assignment — Week 4 Prompt
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