Telling a story with photos

Every picture tells a story. Or, maybe not. What I do know for sure is that there is a good story behind almost every photo.

When I started off working for daily newspapers in this crazy business two decades ago, photographers and I often covered events together.

Sometimes, when I’d interview, the photographer would dance around the subject shooting photos. While answering the questions, the interviewee often wouldn’t know whether to smile for the camera or talk to me. They sometimes had a tough time concentrating on my questions.

After a couple of minutes everybody would usually relax and we’d get both good art and solid answers.

I learned early on to not get between the camera and the subject. I tried hard to not to have my image end up in the paper.

At a recent West Goshen Township meeting, the township video camera caught me sitting in the front row. Much to my chagrin, a local news station broadcast the video. Yes, the camera does sometimes add 15 pounds. For the next meeting, I sat in the second row.

No longer do I work with a photographer and instead I mostly shoot with my own cell phone. And although I’m not pictured on the front page, I do regularly get a kick out of including my red Prius in photos.

We call those posed and snazzy head shots of politicians “mug shots.” Nuff said!

We hear it all the time. With a certain photo or headline, we are trying to sell papers. Guilty as charged. Of course we are. Yes, we want you to read and view our work.

That big photo on the front page is called the centerpiece. With the exception of the story above the fold, people pick up the paper most for that photo. I spend a little bit more time composing and pointing when I know ahead of time that my photo will be placed in that spot.

Only since the 70s have newspapers featured color photographs. I remember my Uncle Tom who was in the business proudly showing me the first color photo to appear on the front page of the Wilmington News Journal. Yes, it was a little fuzzy, but color sure changed things.

And to think that my grandfather who also worked for the Daily Local News never saw a color photo in print is intriguing.

You get a bonus at our dailylocal.com website. We often include four or five photos that don’t get into the print edition.

Sports photographers may have two cameras focused at different spots. A basketball photographer sitting under the basket will focus on the near basket with one camera and with the other camera pre-focus on the net at the other end of the court. That’s a very difficult job that I don’t want. Our sports photographers at the Local, especially Pete Bannan, do a great job.

I picked up a camera before I grabbed a pen when working for the West Chester East High School newspaper, The Pegasus.

For years I worked at home in a converted bathroom darkroom. I can still joyfully recall the smell of developer, stop and fix. I bought film one hundred feet at a time and rolled my own!

Now, with digital cameras, we can almost instantly look and see if we caught the action, but in the 70s we had to wait until we developed the film and then squint at the 35 millimeter negatives.

I so enjoyed watching images gradually, magically appear on a sheet of photographic paper under the red safe light in the darkroom.

We played around with a Quaker Oats box pinhole camera. We’d stay still and leave the small

“lens” open for 30 seconds or so to expose a sheet of photographic paper. These were “positives’ rather than “negatives” and everything black was white and everything white was black. And since the “camera body” was curved, the image came out twisted. What fun that was.

Photographers catch an instant, often about 1/125 of a second.

Photographs can lie. I still have an old B&W photograph of me slalom skiing, while leaning low into the water, with water shooting high above my head. It doesn’t matter now that I fell trying the pull that one off, as for just the instant caught on film, I looked like a professional water skier.

If you can get the light right, rock stars are easy to photograph since they are always posing. The zest and joy on the faces of an elementary school chorus is wonderful.

Richard Hensley, my editor at Highlands Today, in Sebring, Florida, gave us all sage advice about taking photos for the newspaper.

Take two steps in further than you think you should and pay attention to what’s in the background, he would say.

I can’t tell you how many possibly great photos have been ruined by bad light. With the sun to the photographers back, the camera often catches a shadow of the camera and an arm — or sometimes even a shadow of the photog’s entire elongated body — in the frame. And nobody likes to see somebody squinting when a subject faces the sun.

Hensley also said that we should examine good photographs to determine just where the photographer stood.

I’ve learned to work with light the hard way, by trial and error. Never shoot into a window.

At a recent political fundraiser, we met with the candidate in a dark bar room. I told the staffer who was shooting that no one would be able to see faces in the photos since windows messed with the camera’s light meter. He ignored me. There must have been a lot of disappointed supporters who couldn’t see their own or the candidate’s face in the photos. We live and learn.

So what’s the difference between pro and amateur photographers? That’s a simple one. Professionals shoot more photos.

I once took eight photos of a beauty queen using a flash. And you guessed it, she blinked for the first seven and only then did I get my money shot on the eighth.

It’s amazing how much subjects change their expression in just a matter of a couple seconds. Smiles can disappear and then reappear in the blink of an eye.

Sometimes the story is just there to fill space. We call a photo with no story a “standalone” and many times it tells so much more than those words.

Yes, a photo is often worth a thousand words.

Say cheese!

BILL RETTEW - MEDIANEWS GROUP Every picture of a painting tells a story. Notice the shadow of the photographer and his camera.