THE ART OF STORYTELLING THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY
Telling a story is what photography is all about. I feel like a lot of us have been fooled into thinking that taking beautiful pictures was the focus of this profession. I love taking pretty pictures as much as the next photographer, but I was quickly noticing that every picture I took began to look familiar to the last. I began to see similarities in all of my wedding galleries, and had to sit down and think of why this was the case. At first I made the excuse that the galleries looked similar because weddings are similar in their structure and flow. “Of course the galleries all look the same!!”
I lived with that misconception for a bit, but slowly came to the realization that the reason all of my galleries looked similar was really because I was injecting way too much of myself and my thought process into my wedding days. I wasn’t letting the wedding play out, but was instead trying to control it. I thought control was a good thing because it allowed me to get the pictures that I thought were necessary to fill a gallery. It wasn’t until I let go of controlling all of the various moments, when I began to see magic unfold before my eyes. Emotional moments, surprising actions, fun twists, chaotic mistakes… all of this began to play out in front of my lens and I began to see the importance of a wedding photographer. I was there to document everything in a way that felt true to the day, an honest representation of my couple’s story. It was at that point when I began to fall in love with photography on a level that I didn’t know existed.
Storytelling also works wonderfully for portrait sessions, engagement sessions, couples sessions, and family sessions. Still get those poses you’ve placed into your mental toolbox, but focus mostly on movement and action. This will bring in so much variety into the shots you capture. Even if you tell every subject to act out the exact same storyline, each subject will interpret it differently and the story will play out in a noticeable different way. Plus the subjects will move and interact in different ways, walking differently, running differently, hugging differently. At this point you are capturing the actual subject and their normal body posture and movement. This will play a huge role in how the subjects view themselves in your pictures. They will not question the reality of the moments that were captured.
PREVIEW THE LESSON
In this lesson you will learn:
- Planning and scouting out shooting locations.
- How I use the environment to build a story of movements and emotion into my couples interactions.
- How to take light and environmental lines into consideration when building your scene.
- Using a mixture of storytelling with directed posing.
- Using props to help sell the natural interactions.
My goal for this lesson is for you to see that fluid action can be so much more enjoyable to both shoot and view, versus precisely posed photographs. Posing should never be completely tossed out of your workflow, but instead of using it as a primary tool for direction use it as filler between the moments.
