The blog of photographer Kim Ayres

Finding The Story – and Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres - Episode 17

As is so often the case, it was Maggie who identified the missing piece I was struggling to find.

"The problem was you didn't have a main photo," she said.

I was aware of waffling on a bit during last night's podcast. It took ages before I started showing any photos, and then there was an endless trail of one after the other (well, nine actually, but that's still a lot more than one).

I'd been quite looking forward to talking about the first Moniaive Comic Festival photo shoot – there had been so much going on, so many different elements.

But I probably didn't need to try to talk about all of them.

I failed to do the thing I'm always telling people to do in the Critique section of the podcasts, which is, "find the story."

There is always far more going on than you can possibly capture, so you need to find a particular thread and focus on it. Everything else then becomes a backdrop and support to that narrative.

Once you identify this, all other decisions of composition, lighting, inclusion and exclusion, become much easier to make. And this is true for all storytelling – whether it's photography, writing or film making.

More often than not, I've been taking a key photo to talk about, and then if there were any others, they came in as a support to the main offering. But at the Moniaive Comic Festival shoot I had several photos, all of which seemed to hold equal value. However, to anyone else they would have just been variations along the same theme.

Add in an extra layer of tiredness and I just wasn't as focused as I would have liked. But the problem of a live broadcast is you can't wait until you're in a better state, or keep re-recording it until you're happy to put it out there.

17 episodes in, and I still have plenty to learn...

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0:00 - What's coming up
1:50 - Introduction to Moniaive Comic Festival
07:07 - Introduction to the Manga style photo shoot at the Moniaive Comic Festival
12:14 - Behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot
20:37 - Using Gradient Map option to create different post-production effects in Photoshop
25:37 - Critique of images submitted to the Facebook Group, "Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres"
1:25:22 - Coming up next week



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Also consider subscribing to my YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/kimayres – to help me build the numbers.

And, or course, if you would like to submit a photo for feedback, or just ask a photography related question, then do join my Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres Facebook group and I will put it into the following podcast:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/240842990388815/



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