8 ways to tell better stories with your photography

While many photographers can generate lots of nice individual pictures, creating a photo story, or a photo essay, is a lot harder.

If you think of the greatest documentary photographers, such as Henri Cartier Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Don McCullin, they cut their teeth working for picture-based magazines and while a lot of these have now (sadly) closed, thinking like a story teller can still have a positive effect on your photography.

You don’t need to be a photojournalist, either – you could make a story out of a day’s landscape or rare-bird shooting, for example.

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1 Find a strong subject 
This is really important, particularly if you are working in the documentary or travel genres. Just about everything in the world has been photographed now, but you can still find fresh angles and surprising insights.

So rather than trying to do a photo story on something very obvious and broad, e.g. ‘Paris is beautiful in the spring’ try to drill down to find new angles – a photo story on Parisian street entertainers, for example, or those creepy cemeteries… ‘A day in the life’ projects are good, as the 24 hour window forces you to focus on details and quirky stories, rather than trying to capture everything about the subject.

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2 Do background research and make contacts
Once you have come up with an idea, you need to make it happen. Returning to our Paris example, you don’t want to be wasting time trying to find the best places to go when you get there, this can all be done beforehand.

The internet is a fantastic research tool. You might even be able to make contact with a street entertainer/s online, which can make it much easier when you get there.

More importantly, you can also check what kind of images have been taken before of your subject; these can either inspire you or you might want to try something different.

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3 What to pack?
Every photo story is different and it depends on your genre, but for travel and documentary work you often need to move fast to keep with the action. So a couple of ‘fast’ zooms come in handy, as you don’t have to change lenses so often.

A 24-70mm f/2.8 is a great workhorse lens, particularly if it has vibration reduction for better results when shooting handheld, while a 70-200mm or 300mm is great for distance work and isolating details, such as faces in a crowd.

A fast 85mm lens is great for portraits, too. It might also be worth taking along a travel tripod; when photographing a major religious event, for example, a long exposure shot that blurs out people can give a great sense of movement and bustle.

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4 Get focused?
Sorry for the pun, but if you are serious about working on a photo story you need to be totally focused. Don’t try to combine it with sightseeing with your significant other – everyone will get frustrated.

Instead, put time aside to work on it, and make sure you are realistic about how long it will take. You need to be ready to hit the ground running with your gear (don’t over or under pack) and give yourself a bit of time to ‘warm up’ and get used to shooting again.

While top pros have to work under intense pressure, you can take it a bit easier if you get yourself organised.

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5 Try to follow a basic narrative
Unless you want to be arty and elliptical, a straightforward linear narrative should work well – a timeline, if you like. So think of some establishing shots that set the scene, the main body of the narrative, and then a conclusion.

Don’t forget little details, as these can say a lot – maybe our Parisian street performers have a colourful hat or box to collect the money, with an amusing placard, or maybe they bring a dog along. The devil really is in the details.

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6 Capture decisive moments and context
Returning to Cartier Bresson, he was a master of freezing special moments, and this is key skill to think about when trying to tell stories.

Be prepared to take lots of shots, look at for ‘key players’ with interesting faces, and stay on burst mode if necessary so you can be sure of freezing sudden action.

It’s also important to create a sense of place. Returning to our hypothetical project on Paris, you’d need to get over that this really was done in Paris, or it can look like the images were taken anywhere. You don’t need the Eiffel tower or baguettes in every shot, but you need a clear context.

7 Work creatively
Try different shots from different angles – up, down, sideways – rather than taking everything from eve level. When it comes to editing, make sure you apply a consistent editing style, otherwise the images won’t hang together as a visual story.

8 Get the story out there
There is no point doing a great photo essay if nobody sees it. OK, you might not get into Newsweek, but your camera club might be interested, or it could form a panel that you could enter into a competition or photo society distinction exam. Or just publish it online, on your website or blog. Use SEO properly and it could really take off…

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