Discussion: Photo Editing and Caption Writing
We’ll look at your “scavenger hunt” photos together, watch a tutorial on editing photos in Lightroom, discuss caption writing, and talk a bit about best practices and the ethics of photo editing in photojournalism.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bN2jqsJgbBs%3Ffeature%3Do
Why Do Photo Contest Winners Look Like Movie Posters?
When it comes time to start assembling your photo essays, I recommend publishing them on Medium so that your photos display well and you aren’t limited by the compression/memory issues on our WordPress site.
Caption writing
Just because photojournalism is a visual medium, it doesn’t mean you get to be any less thorough when it comes to names, facts, dates, etc. You need to always make sure you get the names, locations, professions, ages (if relevant) to include in your captions. The Who/What/Where/When/Why.
Washington Post guidelines:
“A caption should briefly and clearly describe in a complete sentence what is happening in the picture, including an active verb (‘someone does something’). This will allow our internal systems to take sections of the sentence and automatically create keywords. In many cases, a single sentence will suffice. A second sentence is acceptable if it adds additional information, follows the required formula and does not editorialize.”
Caption example:
BEVERLY HILLS, CA – JANUARY 11: Actress Kate Winslet holds her award at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. Winslet won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress for her role in “The Reader,” as Hollywood set aside labor strife and a recession to honor the year’s best performances. (Photo by Rich Lipski for The Washington Post)
Notice how the first sentence is in present tense, describing what is literally happening in the photo, and the following sentence is in the past tense, giving background and context.
In a photo essay, the captions play the additional role of shaping a broader narrative. So while wire photos and breaking news photos might all include similar captions because most likely they’ll only be used one at a time, your captions in a photo essay will need to follow a somewhat more narrative shape. Meaning, the first one will include a lot of the 5W’s stuff, while the additional captions might fill in the blanks some more.
For your photo essays for this class, you have a choice in how you want to structure them. You can have ALL the writing be in captions, or you can have a more traditional story with the photos interspersed, and much shorter, more literal captions. You can space the photos so they are fullscreen and appear one at a time, or you can group a few similar ones together that serve a similar narrative purpose.
In-Class Assignment:
Edit your photos from the scavenger hunt in Lightroom and publish them in a Medium post, with captions. Due by class time on Tuesday.