What’s Your Story?
Erin Reilly ·Science Photography and Videography is more than just a pretty picture. With this week's assignments to find and take photographs to use in a report and short clips to use in a video, we had a lot to cover. When I started this blog, it seemed like everything was unrelated. I couldn't see how it fit together. But as I sat down to write there was a theme that came through both the photography and the videography discussions, and that was story.
Before you use an image, take a photo or shoot a video, take a moment to think about the story you want your audience to understand. What point are you trying to make? A common mistake is to think about what we want to tell the audience. By thinking about what you want the audience to take away, you determine the intent and can critically examine your images for things that enhance or distract from that intent.
Do you want to use your photo or video to establish a location, study species or a problem? Are you trying to explain your methods? Trying to recognize people involved in the project? Provoke an emotion in your audience? There are a number of simple technical factors and compositional tricks that you can use to help get your point across more succinctly, even without having expensive cameras and editing tools.
Landscapes
Many of us picked landscape shots for our photos and videos, you can see three of them above. There are some basic composition tools for landscape shots to help you make a more interesting photo and tell your story better.
The rule of thirds: This is a common photography technique that divides your frame into 9 boxes and suggests that the most interesting places to put objects (ex: a tree or horizon line) at the lines that form the boxes. Nicole did a very good job or placing her tree and horizon lines the left and bottom third of the frame.
Pick a Winner and Loser: With most landscape shots there is an area of sky and an area below the sky. If you are following the rule of thirds with your horizon line, you end up having a winner and a loser. But are you picking the winner that tells your story or is more interesting? Chelsea picked the sky for the winner in her photo and the sky is arguably the more interesting part of the photo. But when you hear that her story is about the lack of arctic sea ice as a result of global warming, an ocean empty for miles illustrates that point better than the texture of the clouds. Alyssa is researching the impact that farming techniques has on soil carbon.
Stabilization and Panning: Videos of landscape can be a great way to quickly introduce your site and provide context but it is important for there to be movement or you might was well just use a photo. With landscapes, you are likely to be panning because your subject doesn't move. While filming if you pause for a few seconds before your start to move the camera and a few seconds after you stop moving the camera, it will help you in editing the film. If you can't use a tripod or other equipment, you can easily add a stabilizer in editing programs.
Methods and Action Shots
Fill the Frame: For showing a piece of equipment or result, one good technique you can use is to fill the frame. This means getting close to your subject and making the object of interest the focus of your image. I tried this for one of my photos, where I was trying to illustrate what a soil marker horizon looks like in the left image above. However, you should also try to make sure your image is straight!
Check the Background: Along similar lines Filling the Frame, when you do get close to something, make sure you take a second to pause and see what else is in your frame besides your subject. Jessie did a good job filling the frame in her image of an oyster harrow, but to improve the photo, if she had removed the rope hard hats and dolly in the background, it would have been a stronger image.
Leave Space for Action: Sometimes you want to capture your methodology through an action shot like Katie did in the right image above. With an action shot you want to leave space in the direction of the movement. This lets your audience imagine what happens next more easily.
Time-lapse: Often times research takes a long time to complete and is very repetitive. In these cases it would be boring to watch at full speed. This is a great time to use time-lapse to demonstrate your methodology. The nice thing about this is that you can set it and forget it! Many smart phones now have a setting to film time-lapse shots.
After our discussions this week I can already see my own pictures improving and I am excited to see how everyone else develops their skills. Now, whenever I am looking for pictures for a report or trying to take them for future reports, I already ask myself: why am I taking this photo? Hopefully that extra pause is going to result in images that communicate my point more effectively.
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Comments
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Bill Dennison 6 years ago
In discussing the use of photographs and videos in science visualization, Erin distilled everything into a simple, but profound question, which is the title of her blog: “What’s your story?”. This question is the title of a song by The Soundtrack of Our Lives, a Swedish rock band, and my version of the lyrics to this song are as follows:
What's your story?
4 April 2018
William C. DennisonWhat's your story?
What's going on in your mind?
And what's the science
That you leave in this time?What's your story?
What did you learn to do?
And what do you say
When you have folks listening to you?I got photos and you know they're all mine
On my way to find a video with a purpose to unfold
And the ideas all around you seem so strange
'Cause everything you know's about to changeData are floating
So what you fed upon?
If anybody wonders what’s turning you on
You see patterns
And I can see them tooWhen I'm looking at somebody like you
There'll be answers
And they ought to be true
'Cause you need to get it rightWith the questions that you ask
And the choices that you make
Just seem so strange
'Cause everything you see's about to changeWhat's your story?
What's going on in your mind?
And what's the science
That you leave in this time?And now we’re goin’ somewhere
So what are we gonna do?
While the world appears too small
But science plays its roleAnd the facts that you know just look so strange
Yeah, the facts that you know all fade away
But everything you know is about to change. -
Natalie Peyronnin 6 years ago
I really liked this blog and the use of examples in each trick. Great job!
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Thomas Butler 6 years ago
Good use of rhetorical questions towards the beginning, I was also very drawn to the pictures from class. I think it was a great idea to divide them into different categories. The videos were also very entertaining, especially that stop motion. I might have liked to see a little more elaboration on the techniques used in both photo and video capture. Maybe a section on light regarding exposure, white balance etc. This blog was easy to read and fun to watch. Good job.
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Nicole Basenback 6 years ago
I agree with Tom on the nice use of categories for explaining the best practices for strong photos/video, and I think that focusing on their general purpose was helpful. I like how the focus is on the "strength" of the photo and not on how it is "good vs. bad". I think this is helpful when learning a new skill, because it supports exploration and growth.
Perhaps to elaborate on your emphasis of telling stories, I would have also included thoughts on identifying the subject clearly. After class I found myself considering two questions when taking/evaluating photos: 1.) What am I actually taking a picture of? and 2.) Does it help me tell the story that I intend? I think my photo in the landscape section is a good example of this, because while the basic photo follows the rule of thirds, the tree wasn't the intended subject that my story was focusing on. So I wouldn't use this photo for my project.
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Annie Carew 6 years ago
I really like how you broke this blog up into subsections--it makes it very easy to read/follow along with. You also did a great job summarizing the "tips" for effective photographs, and the rules that we discussed. Good job!
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Rebecca Wenker 6 years ago
Nice blog Erin, I really like all of the examples you used from class and think they illustrate your point well! Going along with what Nicole said about adding the identification of the subject, I think a helpful addition for the videography section would be to provide context in addition to identifying your subject. It may be obvious what the video is showing, but if we don't know how the various frames relate to each other, how a person speaking relates to the story, etc., you may lose part of your message.
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Jessie Todd 6 years ago
I really enjoyed the way you grouped some of the pictures from class together. I think it really help get your point across. The first picture you used in your blog was a definite home for drawing in the reader and reinforcing your concept of "what do you want your audience to take away". The pick a winner pick a loser section was a nice way of explaining the rule of thirds to an audience and conveying what is important.